Science advances in fits and starts, and it sometimes takes a detour onto a dead-end road. Bacteria represent one of those roads. Studying bacteria gave us a sense that we could easily figure out biology, that there was a direct connection between genes and behavior, and that life was simple. Granted, there was no other way to get started, but the study of bacteria slowed down our understanding of higher organisms in many ways. From the ‘one gene, one enzyme’ hypothesis to the thought that living systems can be reduced to a binary decision tree, many things about bacteria misled us and prevented science from seeing that the majority of the information in the genomes of higher organisms is in the non-coding DNA.