When I was in middle school I first learned the basic idea of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and my instantaneous first idea was that we should assign a unique prime number to each attribute that a biological entity can have, and then multiplying together the prime factors for all the characteristics would give the unique integer ID for that biological entity. So if having a limb is “7” then some creature with…
It is a neat idea!
This is very close to how Godel numbering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering) works, to give every possible mathematical formula in a fixed language its own unique number.