Dion's random ramblings

Monday, February 04, 2008

So, what computer do you think evolutionary biologist (aka 'The God delusion') Richard Dawkins uses?


Richard Dawkins' MacBook Pro!
Originally uploaded by hellochris.

Blogged from Flickr:

Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist, spoke this week at the University of Hawaii at Manoa!

Professor Dawkins had some problems setting up his presentation on the projector....which afforded me a look at the messy desktop of a scientific super-genius!

Here's what I have ascertained:

(1) Dock is always visible, on left side of screen!
(2) No special background image for the desktop!
(3) Installed OmniPage Pro for the Mac!
(4) Downloaded Installer for Windows Media Player
(5) Professor Dawkins is a Mac user, but then, we knew that!

Comments:

hellochris Pro User says:

From the lecture, Richard Dawkins' reply to a question on the potential that computers may one day replace humans:

"...You have a new hardware device such as the mouse which opens up new software possibilities. As soon as you've got a mouse you can redesign the whole of your software to use resizable windows and pull down menus and all of the things that we now find indispensable. And I suppose once that software advance occurs, that then that triggers a new possibility for hardware advances, which would have never had occured without the software advance being made in the first place.

And so one can imagine an escalating...'arms race' is not quite the right word...co-evolution of software and hardware in the computer world to parallel that in the biological world that I speculated might have fed the blowing up like a balloon of the human brain. And I think what your asking for is some kind of co-evolution - a third wave co-evolution - between biology and silicon technology, including software.

And yes, I mean, I think we're seeing something of it. One can interpret the internet as a sort of beginning of that. One can imagine, in a science fiction mode, a future in which us soft, squishy biological things become pretty redundant and a silicon form of life takes over. Even perhaps, in a far distant future, looks back on the dawn of history and speculates that once upon a time, before the world of silicon, that there might have been some other kind of life, that was perhaps based on carbon. Who knows what happened in those far off, dawn ages?"
Posted 12 months ago.

sennmen says:

Richard Dawkins in an article on Apple: www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1131129,00.html

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