The evolution of evolution

**In this Salon interview, the renowned physicist Freeman Dyson sketches the three stages of evolution. In the first, genes skipped from cell to cell and evolution was very fast. In the second, the resulting creatures kept the genes to themselves and established species, slowing evolution down. Once humans came along, gene transfer is once again going on, deliberately, and this means evolution will speed up again. He believes this speedup will spur technological progress, especially in biology, that will help us to avert some of the looming problems of our time.

NOTE: This is a small part of an interview in which Dyson also condemns the new atheism. By his own admission he has been wrong before (he advised Crick to do something other than study DNA). I believe he is wrong about atheism, but I agree with most of everything else in this interview.

You write that cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. What do you mean?

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This is an idea that I borrowed from Carl Woese, who is a very famous biologist. The idea is that you can divide the history of life into three periods. First, the early period where all genes were freely exchanged between different cells, so that the living world consisted of primitive cells and genes, which are really the same thing as viruses, traveling around exchanged from cell to cell. That's what we call horizontal gene transfer. Evolution was then collective. Anything useful that was invented by one cell could be shared wit h all the others, so evolution went very fast.

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Sometime about half a billion years later, things changed because the creatures started to become selfish and refused to share their genes with their neighbors. They kept the genes for themselves, and that's what we call the invention of species. A species is a collection of creatures that does not breed outside the species. As soon as life became divided up into species, evolution became Darwinian. It was then competition between species. Each invention only benefited the species that invented it. Everybody else had to compete separately. Evolution then went much slower for a couple of billion years. That's what I call the Darwinian interlude.

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Now, since humans came along, that has changed again. Now we're back in an epoch when genes c an be horizontally transferred. We learned how to move genes around from one creature to another. That's what we call gene splicing. So humans can easily take genes from one animal, put them into a virus or a bacterium and multiply them into a large population, and then put them back into another creature. You can very easily spread desirable qualities from one species to another. That's now the new era of what I call open-source genetics, an analogy to open-source software in the computer business. It means that genes are shared between species. Species in the end will fade out. They will become merged. I think that's a hopeful future, but it's also going to be dangerous, of course. And all sorts of unintended consequences will no doubt come to plague us. But it seems to be happening anyway.