Has Freeman Dyson become an evolution denier?
Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his "New Biology" article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.
But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.
— Our Biotech Future, By Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
Has he sold out for an admittedly very fetching simile?
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Nope, he's just stating the obvious:
The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
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. 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 which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving 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 other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.
This is, dare I say it, exactly what the ancient Anasazi appear to have done: they invented a social idea and used it to suddenly become more social in a new way that amounted to an evolutionary leap.
This kind of big picture is what Internet and IT security needs to incorporate. Pretending we're still in the old Bill Gates standalone PC or IBM mainframe days when physical isolation or passwords or higher walls around the building would do any good is merely going to lead to the extinction of those companies that don't get it. Their employees will end up working for companies that do get it, in an example of horizontal communal gene transfer such as Freeman Dyson describes.
-jsq
Funny! I remember in 1994 or so, MSFT used this kind of marketing against IBM -- we would explain how IBM mainframe architecture was all about "central top-down command-and-control", while Windows for Workgroups was "peer to peer", grassroots, and ad hoc. That philosophy is why we packaged free TCP/IP client way before anyone asked for it. Of course, you could argue that some things have changed since then.
I would note that the ideas here aren't new. The tension between competition and cooperation is the oldest story of mankind. It underlies every ancient myth and religion, and more modern things like socialism (cult of cooperation) or capitalism (cult of liberty). The stories biologists tell us today, from which we draw moral lessons until a new story comes along, are not so different from the stories the Greeklings learned about "demiurge" and "aeons" 2,000 years ago.
Posted by: Joshua Allen [msft] | July 27, 2007 at 02:11 PM