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you mean this one?

Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree

humorous bits of code and comments from linus torvalds' 1991 kernel (version 0.01):

Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree

that's right. in mesopotamia or sumeria. the first guy who took a couple of sticks and bound them together in such a way that he was able to plow his field and his neighbors' fields all in one day - his was the last generation (at least, of sumerians) to be influenced exclusively by natural selection.

ever since, evolution has been tempered by scientific advancement.

why? food surplus. when you have a better way to plow your fields, you can take some extra time to work out how to store food, to build better houses against the elements, lord your power over your neighbors, build better weapons, and find all kinds of new ways to kill your starving enemies.

our species is certainly still evolving, which is to say changing genetically, but not by natural selection alone. natural selection would tend towards people who are better at surviving famines and the elements, resistant to diseases and all the other natural forces that tend to kill people before they can reproduce.

there's no direction to our evolution now, as there was when our species was young, and intelligence was the most important - but not the only - selective factor. then, it was important to be able to recognize danger, potential food, potential shelter, etc. those people got to reproduce, because they survived long enough to and could supply their offspring with food.

today, everyone gets to reproduce, even the people i would argue shouldn't be allowed to - because they can't provide for their own children to the age where they can reproduce. these are people who give up their children to adoption, have them taken away by social services for just that reason, or rely exclusively upon handouts from others to get by. the intelligence test for survival these days is in finding the generous people (or filling out the government forms) to hit up for money.

in fact, our most intelligent and genetically viable people are the same ones who tend not to have children, or who have only the one or two they know they can sustain. careers and full-time obligations make it possible to provide for more children, but also make it very difficult to actually raise them. such in the irony of modern evolutionary forces.

and then there are those people who nature and selection have denied children. infertile couples, sterile men and women who have children despite nature and the lot they were given at birth, because they can afford to pay a doctor to pump them full of drugs and inject their artificially fertilized eggs. natural selection denies them a chance to reproduce, but technology smacks nature in the face with a petri dish full of zygotes.

so, it's not toward a more intelligent species that we're still evolving, but toward a more technologically dependent, more socially dependent species. it may be, eventually, that here in the "west" we can't reproduce without technology's assistance. it's getting to that point - partly because people see it as their right and privelege to reproduce if they can afford to (which it is, to some extent) - mostly because of the modern technology we already rely on, which is the very thing making them infertile or allowing them to survive longer than nature would have, but with the inability to reproduce.

i wonder how much longer it will be that we in the west, dependent as we are on technology even to get erections (yes, viagra, too, is to blame) won't be able to reproduce with the indigenous peoples, like those in australia, africa and south america, who have had no contact with the technodependent west. we are on our way to becoming a new human species, if that is the eventual outcome. don't tell me evolution is finished, just say nature's done with us what she will, and we are guiding our own evolution - for good or for ill.

quite a ramble, but it's how i feel, and have felt for a long time. we stopped really evolving as soon as we could feed those of us that would otherwise have starved.

more on evolution (moron evolution).

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try here

i proposed this more than a year ago on mentalhygiene

well, something like this. more violence on the internet==less violence in reality, more porn in school==less violence in school. it's a similar tack, anyway.