This assumes the insert doesn't result in negative fitness (could very well be, if the insert kills a gene).

If the information is the history of human civilization, that may very well end up being information of great "negative fitness"! (We shall see...) Actually, from what I understand, there are huge swathes of every creature's genetic code made up of "useless" information. Some of these areas are apparently extremely old and do not change very often...as I remember Hillis (the guy who started "Thinking Machines" and is currently working on the Decamillineal clock) identified such an area in the cockroaches DNA and had the info inserted there. (Our own DNA has apparently a lot of junk also, as well as fragments of various encounters we've had over the aeons...there are apparently significant chunks of various viruses' DNA in there and other stuff...)

Also, a fitness-neutral insert is likely to be lost, or severely garbled. I hope very much he used a really good redundant encoding.

Although some things in a cockroach change pretty often (here in New York we are breeding a variety of extremely manueverable cockroaches....), the DNA of the cockroach I think is extremely stable overall (aren't they like 100s of millions of years old?) _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail