[bobdsmith]

Now that is some major hand waving. You're going to have to get much more specific and detailed to generate a convincing argument. How does this work specifically inside the brain of a large animal?

I don't have to know how it specifically works, I just have to point out that your assumption that every single neuron's properties must be stored seperately is flawed.

The growth of organisms is iterative - that is why so many shells and plant leaves in nature have fractal designs. The precise position of each cell in the organism is not stored as in some array of coordinates - instead each cell follows a set of rules according to it's type. You only need one copy of the rules somewhere. Ie all neurons, like other cells in the body, are using the same set of rules.

For example take this tree:

It wasn't generated by storing the precise coordinates and length of every single branch. Instead there is a small algorithm which each branch uses to grow sub-branches. Those simple rules are all that are needed and can be stored in a few hundred bytes. A non-random tree containing trillions of branches can be stored in just 100 bytes.

[defenderSD]

That's a good post on the fractal geometry of trees. But here's the next question: how is this information encoded in DNA and how does the tree use the DNA information to grow using this fractal design? This is where it gets very tricky scientifically. I took a good class in molecular biology and these are not simple processes by which information in DNA is utilized.