Fysikern och matematikern Freeman Dyson skriver en excellent sammanfattad text om hur den darwinistiska evolutionen har övertagits av en kulturell evolution som är tusentals gånger snabbare. Den evolution har sedan bara ett par decennier resulterat i ett möte mellan de båda som kommer att leda till en post-Darwinistisk era, där arter inte längre existerar som meningsfullt koncept.
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 now, in the last 30 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.
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