October 23, 2009

Linus on Evolution

Here is a great rant from Linus Torvalds back in 2002 on biological and software evolution.
... from a thread on LKML, summarized here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11


You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what - it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car.

It's you. And me.

And 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")

I'm deadly serious: we humans have _never_ been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking.

Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.

And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.



Linus

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The African lungfish has way more source code than humans, which goes some way to show that complexity isn't always the answer!