Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
dark room. If the lightbulb dies at this moment, no one
is stranded in the dark. But if the lightbulb burns out
when someone is in the middle of the room, that human
invariably trips over the coffee table, falls and splits its
head wide open. Naturally, the lightbulbs that evolve into
a synergistic relationship with their human hosts survive
the best.
Q:
Butwhydon'tlightbulbsliveforever?Wouldn'tthatmake
life even better for their hosts?
A:
Evolution can't function without new generations. Some-
thing must die in order for progress to occur.
Q:
Copying machines always break down tenminutes before
the crucial presentation. I've almost lost two jobs when a
copier quit on me. They certainly weren't protecting their
host organism, were they?
A:
Evolution is a tricky balance. An organism can be too suc-
cessful and consume all of its habitat. Imagine a perfect
copying machine that did one billion flawless copies in a
second. Wonderful, right? Not for the copying machine.
Everything would be copied. It would have no purpose
and the humans would quickly replace it with something
more fun like a refrigerator filled with beer.
Q:
Speaking of beer, why do some of those pop-tops break off
without opening the can? By the end of a fishing trip, my
cooler is filled with unopenable cans with no pop-tops.
A:
You're answering your own question, aren't you?
Q:
Why isn't beer entering into a synergistic relationship with
the human? I'm certainly game.
A:
In this case, the beer and the human are competing for
the same ecological niche. If two humans drink beer, they
often go off and create another human, not another beer.
Q:
What if people set up another batch of hops and malt
when they got drunk? Would those pull tabs start coop-
erating?
A:
Evolution is hard to predict. Small changes in the equa-
tion can often change the entire outcome. I think that
the beer pull tops would soon become harder to pull off.
Why? Because organisms often evolve reproductive re-
straint to avoid catastrophic competition. Your scenario
could quickly lead to a flood of beer.
Q:
There's nothing I can do about the pull tabs? Aren't evolu-
tionary scientists good for anything?
A:
Evolution is tricky. If scientists were able to answer all of
