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Freeman Dyson On Open Source Biology
kripkenstein sends us an article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books, in which the eminent physicist and big thinker takes on the possible end to the Darwinian era of speciation that has endured 3 billion years on this planet. He discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many in this community will find familiar: "[We can speculate about] a golden age... when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information... Evolution could be rapid... But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when... the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
Quote from the linked article: "That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share."
Bill Gates is one of the most disliked people on earth for his refusal to finish his products, and his reliance on adversarial business tactics.
See Microsoft Memories. See Another Bill Gates Meets Satan story.
Several years ago, a short piece in The Atlantic Monthly, a respected U.S. magazine, compared Bill Gates to Satan. I'm guessing Satan found that quite annoying.
A rich person can give a lot of money to charity to try to give people a better impression of himself. With Bill Gates, that isn't working.