We don’t know who these whales are. But it’s not unreasonable to guess that they were individuals or entities seeking to buy influence, rather than looking for a good investment. Could some of the whales be effective proxies for the Chinese government? Could China have, in effect, bought itself lower tariffs by enriching Trump personally? To be clear, I have no evidence that this happened. But in making this conjecture, isn’t this a plausible explanation?

And this flexibility is a large part of what allows for multicellularity. Different cell types (e.g. neurons, liver cells) within the same organism are defined not by different genomes, which are the same in all cells, but by different patterns of gene expression. These patterns can be staggeringly complex, but at a very basic level they are just regulatory genes processing information (e.g., sensing that lactose is present) and controlling the timing and amount of protein-coding genes (or other regulatory genes!) in response.

At a high level, the main difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic DNA is that the latter has way more “software.” What is “software” in a genome? As a very crude analogy: genes which code directly for proteins can be thought of as hardware, and genes which regulate what those protein-coding genes do can be thought of as software.15