I thought Linus had a good point. True, the forces involved in biological evolution are usually a lot dumber than your average programmer, but it's still a fair analogy to compare the lack of overall direction in the open source world to the lack of overall direction in the biological world.
Great, he's allowing the schedule to slip and blaming humanity. Just because we ran version 0.9 "neandertal" for a few ten's of thousands of years before upgrading to version 1.0 "cro magnon" about 30-50K years ago... Guess the 3.0 kernel's going to be delivered about the time of ST:TNG?