From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <6e35c06204082212062d4e7269@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 12:06:52 -0700 From: Jack Johnson To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] datakit In-Reply-To: <87a5ef2af843f330c13c687bc089d34d@vitanuova.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <87a5ef2af843f330c13c687bc089d34d@vitanuova.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: d81edc60-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:07:46 +0100, rog@vitanuova.com wrote: > > Nature doesn't like waste > > actually, nature doesn't particularly care about waste. > a quote from somewhere i read recently > > nature is _effective_, not necessarily _efficient_. Actually, to be slightly more accurate, it doesn't particularly care about anything, being both indifferent and effective. It does effectively maximize efficiency *if* doing so either helps the DNA/host/community/species (pick your theorist) replicate better than its peers, or if the waste in some way hinders its replication. There is actually nothing preventing a natural process from increasing "waste" so long as it effectively promotes the replication of at least one subset of the ecosphere. There might be rebound effects or population crashes, sure, but if it works, it works. The flip side of waste is that life is adept at filling every available ecological niche, so one organism's garbage is another's treasure, be it fecal matter, banana peel or shed shell. Early human middens made great gardens, for this very reason, and possibly became the first efforts at farming -- throw all your garbage here and just wait until harvest. If corn is more fruitful in a midden, and middens are more plentiful when humans are more fruitful, and humans are more fruitful when corn is plentiful, then what incentive is there for the humans to curb their waste? (Effectively, disease, either from a midden too large to sustain the balance of its hosts or from a human or corn population too dense -- or homogenous -- to effectively fight the disease, but even the disease is a population). -Jack The beauty of self-replicating systems is that their competition doesn't.