OurBiotechFuture

Our Biotech Future

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

Outro texto interessante, mas dessa vez a respeito da influência que a biologia pode ocasionar no "open source": "Biotech wants to be free," James Love.

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