And who's to say that we have or have not evolved higher IQs? 20,000 years ago, Neanderthals weren't exactly sitting down to take baseline tests that would enable a comparison to current-man's intelligence. In 20,000 years, however, future-man will be able to run through today's IQ test and see if the average of his contemporaries is higher than that of current-man. (That is, if the differences between the culture expressed on our IQ test and his aren't so great as to make our tests meaningless to him. They're supposed to be culturally neutral, but that's nothing more than a guess about how people think in today's world, let alone 20,000 years from now.)

One thing we do know is that people choose mates likely to produce successful offspring. Think about all the factors that people consider attractive and therefore lead to mating: beauty, strength, intelligence, charm, wealth, power, courage, etc. Wealth and power are interesting because they're not necessarily inherited traits, but they provide evidence of someone who used whatever traits they had to become successful -- therefore they are likely to be good providers for their offspring.

Evolution isn't just about a single mutation. It's about the acceptance of mixing of that mutation back into the culture. People have to repeatedly demonstrate that they choose mates based on that trait for us to call it a success factor. In other words, you haven't seen it because you aren't old enough. (If you want, you can study history to try to figure out if the ancients were as smart as we are now, but that will probably yield nothing more than a debate.)

If higher IQs yield more successful people, they will eventually produce a population with higher IQs. Just don't look for results overnight. Set a reasonable timeframe.

I fall into the category of "write simple methods that are easily proven with automated unit tests." When it comes to patterns, if I see one, they tell me "because you did it this way, it means X to performance, Y to maintainability, and Z to correctness."

I care a lot more about design principles than about design patterns. Give me simple and clear code first. When it follows a pattern, I'll understand the consequences quicker. If it's close to a pattern, I'll stop and think about the differences. Why did you do this? What does this change solve? Your design doesn't have to follow a published pattern, but it has to have a valid purpose.

Here you go. As if banning everything the authoritarians DON'T want you to eat isn't fundamentally the same as forcing you to eat specific things.

I'm a little late responding, but aspartame breaks down in a warm environment into other substances, one of them being formaldehyde. That's the only one I'm really concerned about at the moment; I'm actually not totally buying into the other claim that artificial sweeteners actually make you fatter by messing with your metabolism.

That's almost the exact definition of what a pattern is supposed to be. It should be an obvious name, so we can all talk about the same basic concept with a common shared language. They aren't magic beans you drop in code. they are concepts.

After you grok the concepts they contain, then they become magic beans that you can drop into your code. See the difference?

Still playing the race card, eh?

I guess there are now 102 uses for a dead cat.

It's a comp sci paper that is looking for connected nodes in a network, and they're using copies of data sets of social networks as their starting point. They aren't monitoring networks looking for "who is exerting influence over them", they're looking for nodes that are well connected to other nodes, presuming those represent the most valuable people to convince.

Now, could those "friends and families" in the network data actually be there as part of a botnet controller and its zombie minions? Sure, why not? But each one of those would be a single node in the set of nodes as having the right connections. Doesn't mean that marketing to the botherder or the botnet is going to get you much business, but if you were looking for someone who has influence, it would identify the botherder and not the bots themselves.

And just look how big an idiot he is!

;)