Daily Archives: 25/10/2011

Regarding the paper I linked to in my last post, I just want briefly to emphasize an implicit conclusion from it that may not have been obvious. If you remember, the difference in architecture of E. coli compared to the Linux operating system was taken by the authors as evidence of the difference in “the design principles of the two systems” (sic). Human developers aim at cost-effectiveness and top-down design, whereas bacteria take a bottom-up approach suited to random mutation and natural selection: