Re: Coding style - a non-issue

Jonathan Abbey
2001-12-03T08:48:37Z

brandon wrote:
|
| *finally* someone who doesn't believe in evolution of the human race.
| As a side note, i've heard some people say that a bolt of lightning
| triggered some proteins to start growing into single celled organisms
| and then into what we now call today human beings. I take offense
| that I came from a single celled organism. I believe the more complex
| an object or system is the less randomness can be added in order to
| arrive at the current/final version. I think we all agree the human
| body is the most complex object in the universe so how can we say that
| our existence was an accident?

Again, a complete misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is itself
a design process.. it is simply a design process that admits to an
literally unthinkable amount of complexity. No individual or team of
individuals, no matter how intelligent, could sit down and create from
scratch the Linux kernel as it exists today. There are tons and tons
of design elements in the code that emerged from trial and error, and
from interactions between the hardware to be supported, the user level
code to run on it, and the temporal exigencies of the kernel code
itself. The fact that humans applied thought to all (well, at least
to some) of the changes made doesn't mean that the overarching dynamic
isn't an evolutionary one.

Taking offense at evolution having produced us from simpler organisms
is like taking offense at the rain, or the sun setting at night. We
can now look at life and actually read the code, and see how much is
held in common and how much varies between different organisms, just
as surely as we can with all of the linux kernels over the last ten
years. Both systems have lots of characteristics in common, and for
perfect reasons.

Linus is right.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Abbey jonabbey@arlut.utexas.edu
Applied Research Laboratories The University of Texas at Austin
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2