My friend just dealt with an oursourced project. Yes, outsourced as in sending it to a place that charges a lot less money than, say, developers who actually know what they're doing.

One of their deliverables was a program that compressed an XML string into a gzip file. Should be a minor thing, right? The C#/.NET 2 code is less than 10 lines. Well, their first delivery produced files that contained the text "System.Byte[]". This was not accepted and they vowed to look into it in more as they were sure the code was correct.

Their next files were a bit larger and supposedly were really correct this time. But still, no zip program could read the data. Well, a quick look at the beginning of the file shows the bytes EF BB BF -- the UTF-8 BOM. The rest of the file was ASCII digits. Yes, they wrote the bytestream out as a UTF-8 interpretation.

If we define evolution as "the non-random survival of randomly mutating replicators", we can define their approach as "the non-random acceptance of randomly mutating programs."