11.11.05
The Future of Evolution
Freeman Dyson on The Future of Evolution:
Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is
over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene
transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago when a single species, Homo Sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change.
I don’t accept this view at all, although it is roughly right for the wrong reason. Dyson is a smart fellow, but like too many smart physicists his radio starts sqawking when he changes stations to evolution. Cultural evolution didn’t just happen after natural selection produced man, that is a fallacy that I explore in my eonic model with the question, ‘when did history start and evolution stop?’ If you reflect on this ‘absurd’ question you realize that history and evolution overlap. The emergence of man required far more than natural selection.
I have just put a lot of material online on this topic, and this is the subject of Descent of Man Revisited
Also check out History and Evolution, and subsequent pages linked, e.g. ‘Man Makes Himself’.
The fallacy of the Darwinian view of cultural evolution will become apparent.
Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural evolution which we call globalization. And now, in the last thirty years, Homo Sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.