[philipfweiss]

The rationale I remember learning was:

Think about your blood vessels. They run, and branch, and then branch again, in an intricate pattern. Your DNA has to encode for this, but our DNA holds a finite amount of information.

So does it seem more likely that your DNA holds bit of information for every branch of every blood vessel? Or instead, does it just encode the information of “blood vessel branches half way into a new blood vessel, recursively”. The fractal can be encoded with fewer bits, as the instructions to make the original vessel can be repeated at the split point.

It’s kind of like… you don’t store information of all humans in your lineage. Rather, you store information for one human, as well as information for how to make copies.