Messages in this thread | | | From | Daniel Phillips <> | Subject | Re: Coding style - a non-issue | Date | Sun, 2 Dec 2001 19:41:26 +0100 |
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On December 2, 2001 09:12 pm, Ingo Molnar wrote: > On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Rik van Riel wrote: > > Also, natural selection tends to favour the best return/effort ratio, > > not the best end result. [...] > > there is no 'effort' involved in evolution. Nature does not select along > the path we went. It's exactly this property why it took 5 billion years > to get here, while Linux took just 10 years to be built from grounds up. > The fact is that bacteria took pretty random paths for 2 billion years to > get to the next level. That's alot of 'effort'.
One fact that is often missed by armchair evolutionists is that evolution is not random. It's controlled by a mechanism (most obviously: gene shuffling) and the mechanism *itself* evolves. That is why evolution speeds up over time. There's a random element, yes, but it's not the principle element.
The fact that Linux has evolved from nothing to what it is in a mere 10 years - 30 if you count the 20 years of Unix that came before it - is due entirely to the fact that Nature has evolved a very efficient mechanism (us) to guide Linux's evolution.
> So *once* we have something that is better, it does not matter how long it > took to get there.
Sure, once you are better than the other guy you're going to eat his lunch. But time does matter: a critter that fails to get its evolutionary tail in gear before somebody eats its lunch isn't going to get a second chance.
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