Wirt writes:

>[Bill Gates was v]ery bright -- and immature to the point that he was
>occasionally petulant.

So? What's wrong with that?

-- Bruce

PS. Wirt also wrote:

>I was wildly impressed that Bill understood that so clearly because that was
>precisely the message that I had been driving home in the few previous weeks
>in the evolutionary biology class.

At the (very great) risk of being put in my place in no uncertain terms,
I'll wander over to Wirt's territory and point out that the evolutionary
biology class may now be a poor exmaple. In last week's issue of the
journal _Science_, Richard Kerr describes an article in _Paleobiology_
which shows that better-adapted species don't usually drive out their
predecessors quickly -- even in direct competition with them -- unless
some catastrophic event intervenes. The researchers studied an event that
happened about 150 million years ago: a new species of a coral-like
animal, Bryazoa, arose with the ability to grow faster and change faster
than its 300 million year-old predecessor. Yet both species coexisted
quite well until 65 million years ago, when the impact-induced mass
extinction (the one that likely killed off the dinosaurs) cause a sudden
decline in numbers that the newer species recovered from more quickly.
Only then did the older species start a slow decline. A short summary of
Kerr's report may be found at
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/288/5465/414>.

Wirt and Gavin may be right (and I share their opinion of the economists'
recommendation), but evolutionary biology doesn't necessarily prove their
case.

- B

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