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Did they actually refer explicitly to "natural selection"? Because while natural selection has indeed produced some impressive results, it did so over billions
by rcthompson 10y ago
Did they actually refer explicitly to "natural selection"? Because while natural selection has indeed produced some impressive results, it did so over billions of years, and not terribly efficiently, so I wouldn't generally consider it a model to be emulated, unless Google is really optimistic about how long the company is going to be around.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoYes, they used that exact term, invoking Darwin at the same time. And I agree with you about the time frame. I've been reading "The Vital Question"[1] of late and it has been the first book in a while where I've had several "oh that makes so much sense!" moments. And one of the tenets is that Darwin was correct in the small, and wrong in the large understandings of evolution. Something that jumped out to me while reading it, is that information extraction drives our technology systems like energy drives biological systems. Read the book and then sit back and analyze Twitter as a multi-cellular organism with information as energy and individuals as cells. A sort of Datasaurus. Fun stuff. [1] "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" -- http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/0393088812 http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Compl... based on the recommendation tweeted by Gates and comments here, I read it through cover to cover while camping, and now going through a second reading to pick up what I overlooked the first time.