Linux and natural selection

Nancy Harrison vulpia at sonic.net
Wed Dec 5 11:27:30 PST 2001


>Here's a rather longish article but with some interesting (and often
>humorous) commentary by the folks on the Linux kernel mailing list:
>
>http://kerneltrap.org/article.php?sid=398
>
>It starts off slow but gets real juicy toward the middle.
>...Maybe it's just resonating with me right now because i recently re-read
>Dawkins' The_Selfish_Gene.
>
>-t

Thanks Troy for the link. LInus mentions "hundreds of years" instead of
thousands or millions for evolution to produce new species, but in fact
it's much faster than that if you consider "catastrophic selection".
Since evolution works on populations, not individuals or species, consider
a devastating local disaster, like a forest fire, wiping out populations
of annual flowers of diverse genetic makeup - many different colors, for
example. Only the purple ones survive, by sheer dumb luck.
   Next year, you've got just purples, which attract different sets
of pollinators, begin to backcross, and you can have a new species in
hardly any time at all. This example has actually been documented for
the genus Clarkia.
  Now, as to operating systems, let's look at what happens when the
asteroid hits.  Everything is gone EXCEPT cockroaches and rodents.
And bacteria, of course. Cockroaches don't change much, but rodents
do - I prefer to think of Linux as a rodent, not a cockroach!
  As for bacteria, the great generalists, we know  who fits that
category - where else do viruses invade? - NH

-Nancy Harrison
http://www.sonic.net/~vulpia/index.html
Milo Baker Chapter California Native Plant Society
http://www.sonic.net/~vulpia/cnps/mbaker.html




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