Freeman Dyson On Open Source Biology

kripkenstein sends us an article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books, in which the eminent physicist and big thinker takes on the possible end to the Darwinian era of speciation that has endured 3 billion years on this planet. He discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many in this community will find familiar: "[We can speculate about] a golden age... 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... Evolution could be rapid... 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... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... 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... 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."

Comments

Just great

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that penis-enlargement spam is bad now, just imagine when how bad it will be once "open source biology" takes off

Finally!

[Colin Smith]

the possible end to the Darwinian era Finally the Intelligent Designers will be right.

As Long As...

[flight_master]

This "Freeman" fellow doesn't inspire Gordon Freeman-like expirements, we should be ok.

Re:Deep deep flaws in the analogy

[rachit]

1. Sex IS sharing. It's the ultimate cross-fertilization (literally). Unfortunately, its not that easy to get women to share their source. And when they go completely open-source, you don't want to use the software anyway, probably viruses lurking in there somewhere.