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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (41392)	4/2/1999 11:23:00 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

breeding is not Darwinian There are many similarities, Darwin devoted whole chapters of The Origin of Species to the breeding of pidgeons, and did a pretty good job of it when you consider that he was not familiar with the work of Gregor Mendel or such mechanisms as DNA. It all results from the fact that a pidgeon who doesn't lay eggs, either because it was eaten by a hawk, or a breeder took the eggs away, won't be represented in the next generation while those that do, will be. Programs ... Godlike, not Darwinian Computer programs have a similarity in that functions and characteristics which are useful to the end user are kept while those that are not are eliminated from the next release. In a certain sense I, as the programmer, am just a mechanism for introducing modifications which are selected in or out of the program by a much larger community. This is more obvious when working on the really big, multimillion line programs where no one person knows how it all fits together. (Linux is a great example). I suggest this is one of those punctuation points that is there is a concept to grasp which may have to be done as a leap if you are to understand what I am saying. There is a level in which I play the role of creator and definer, there is another level where I play the part of a mechanism of mutation for the entity which is the program. TP