The Darwinian Interlude
I want to take your attention to great physicist Freeman Dyson's thought provoking recent article in MIT's innovation magazine Technology Review.
He is presenting ideas of biologist Carl Woese on evolution. He is conjecturing an era before the Darwinian evolution where the primordial life forms do not have species but all the organisms share the genes they have and evolve together. Once in a while, an organism cease to share become a species. Gene becomes selfish though it was not all the way back. Claim is this way of evolution is much efficient and be able to form complex cell mechanisms faster.
Dyson takes the idea from here and speculate that as the genetic engineering advances we will be able to move genes freely between species so the boundaries will get blurred. Evolution will not be based on competition for food and land, therefore the end of Darwinian evolution. It is just an interlude.
I think the idea of sharing instead of compete for faster evolution might have very interesting social analogs. What happens when every patent is freely shared? Does physics advance faster than technology? Is competition the best motivation? Can sharing be better not only in social but also in economical aspects? Is Creative Commons the future of intellectual property?
Coming back to evolution, I am attending a course on statistical physics in biology. I am learning a lot but still desperate about state of the art. I would love to calculate how much mean time we need for a complex organ like eye to evolve from the first multicellular organisms. But it seems this is almost impossible right now. I am certainly disappointed.
He is presenting ideas of biologist Carl Woese on evolution. He is conjecturing an era before the Darwinian evolution where the primordial life forms do not have species but all the organisms share the genes they have and evolve together. Once in a while, an organism cease to share become a species. Gene becomes selfish though it was not all the way back. Claim is this way of evolution is much efficient and be able to form complex cell mechanisms faster.
Dyson takes the idea from here and speculate that as the genetic engineering advances we will be able to move genes freely between species so the boundaries will get blurred. Evolution will not be based on competition for food and land, therefore the end of Darwinian evolution. It is just an interlude.
I think the idea of sharing instead of compete for faster evolution might have very interesting social analogs. What happens when every patent is freely shared? Does physics advance faster than technology? Is competition the best motivation? Can sharing be better not only in social but also in economical aspects? Is Creative Commons the future of intellectual property?
Coming back to evolution, I am attending a course on statistical physics in biology. I am learning a lot but still desperate about state of the art. I would love to calculate how much mean time we need for a complex organ like eye to evolve from the first multicellular organisms. But it seems this is almost impossible right now. I am certainly disappointed.
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