On 05-Aug-06, at 1:45 PM, Ashish Gulhati wrote:
My point is not that biological evolution has ceased in humans, but
that cultural / memetic evolution is more relevant to the survival of
human individuals (and cultures) than is anything biological.
Freeman Dyson expresses much the same view in a TR article from last
year:
Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.
The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 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 driving force of change. 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
interdependence that we call globalization.
And:
Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general
public, will
give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a
new art
form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new
creations will be
masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and
diversity to our fauna
and flora.
Full article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=14236&ch=biotech
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