Showing posts with label darwinian selection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label darwinian selection. Show all posts

17 December 2007

Linus Says It's In Our DNA

Simon Willison has picked up a nice quotation from Linus he made a few years back, but what really interests me are some other things he said in the same post:

think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. "sheer luck".

Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest")
- massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")

In other words, the open source methodology is hard-wired into us - right down at the level of DNA.

13 December 2007

Darwinian Selection, Where Are You?

As I've pointed out many times, Darwinian selection lies at the heart of much of openness's success. So this is really, really bad news:

Imagine if we threw money at record labels, in the hopes that they'd publish better music. What do you think would happen?

Unfortunately, that's exactly what the Fed's doing with the financial system. But throwing liquidity into a rotten system is just giving the virus new stuff to infect, consume, and decay.

Oh dear.