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by Jarno Virtanen.
Original Post: Dinosaurs vs. mammals
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This must be the silliest gripe I have, and has got nothing to do with
Python, but here it goes. Once a few months I return to Clay Shirky's
writing In
Praise of Evolvable Systems and meditate its truth. But
this minor flaw, which is just an analogy and not there to support the
central argument, sticks out to my consciousness and makes it hard for
me to just calmly digest the wisdom beneath the text. It's this little
passage: "It's dinosaurs vs. mammals, and the mammals win every time."
You see, dinosaurs did not lose to mammals,
OK? They just got unlucky.
First, they already showed their superiority by dominating the life on
earth for around 100 million years.
Second, the reason they vanished is most likely a hit by a large
meteorite. Had it not crashed to Earth, dinosaurs might just have had
dominated the life for the next whopping 65 million years.
There is no general "inevitability" that made dinosaurs
vanish from Earth, just a pure accident. (That is: mammals wouldn't
"win every time".)
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