> I hate that phrase, it rarely pans out with anything that makes any sense. That's just the evolutionary loop of contrarian views. Of course the large majorit

> I hate that phrase, it rarely pans out with anything that makes any sense. That's just the evolutionary loop of contrarian views. Of course the large majority will be crap, because that's why the mainstream views are dominant. But sometimes, even if short of an infosec revolution in immunology, which was clearly a rhetorical stretch on my part, some contrarian view will make people think in a different way or challenge them to defend mainstream views and really think really hard about why those views are what they are. It seems by the bulk and quality of the responses that I have achieved such an effect, so the whole exercise was not so non-sensical. > And even there, the reason why we have a placenta and are mammals is likely because some organism was infected by a retrovirus and learned to form syncytia and learned a knew trick from a virus. Evolution can take a seeming "fault" like that and turn it into a strength on the long-term. I think this is the crux of the argument right here. Evolution is satisfied and will even favor a certain number of informational security compromises if it induces variability that has (even a small chance of) improving long term fitness. But the perspective I was approaching the problem was short term host security - the thing we, as rational members of a given species living in the present day care about, because we know full well that the vast majority of compromised individuals will not survive. So we are likely to make a different short term tradeoff, even if it hurts the long term fitness of the species. Modern medicine and social security systems already do that to a large degree. More generally, the perspective I wanted to present was that of intelligent design versus evolutionary fitness, that a blind watchmaker might leave gaping design holes for a malevolent rational attacker. I think there is ample evidence that evolution by natural selection is not all powerful and all knowing against rationality (at least if we don't consider rationality just another facet of evolution).