[Thanks for Jay DeFrank for passing this on.]

Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, has a new article in Technology Review arguing that Darwinian evolution has ended and been replaced by “cultural evolution.”

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.

Talk about opening a can of worms. I’m not sure what to do with this, exactly – I’m not a Darwiniam evolution expert, but it strikes me that Dyson is defining Darwinian evolution – perhaps for a less obvious purpose – in pretty narrow terms. At a generalized level, I’m not sure I’m seeing the new thing he describes as being incompatible with Darwin. But I’m willing to be educated by those who are experts in Darwinian evolution.

In short, Dyson sounds more like a man who’s trying to start an argument than settle one. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….