If you delve into the news (especially science news) you’re just bound to run into some pretty frightening ideas, be they predictions or developments. In discussing the nature of open source software versus closed source, Jaron Lanier mentions an interesting metaphor with regard to genetics. Lanier cites a Freeman Dyson piece in which Dyson describes the early stages of evolution as “open source”—in the sense that genes moved freely between species as tradable bits of code. That alone was news to me, but after I thought about it, it wasn’t such a strange idea that our concept of Darwinian evolution—namely the natural selection of genes in organisms—doesn’t necessarily occur at the beginning stages of the development of life. Read more…