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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."
He also denies human induced global warming.
That's no surprise at all, because all honest scientists are honour-bound to adhere to the scientific method, which has an extremely strict M.O.. That M.O. prevents them from making handwaving interpretations and supporting what SEEMS to be the right answer, but is in fact not yet substantiated by current GCMs. Short-term predictions mean nothing when they're just ripples on a widely varying curve.
As soon as the GCMs actually start predicting (accurately) the very pronounced 100ky cycles of climate change over the last million years or so, and also explain accurately how the coldest epocs in the history of the planet happened to coincide with CO2 levels many dozens of times greater than the current ones, that's when honest scientists like Dyson will be able to express agreement with the mass hysteria. But not before.
Honest science isn't about being popular.
Y'all should go read the original material by Woese (& Goldenfeld) before making asinie statements about science you clearly don't understand. Though, a large part of that is because Dyson's explanations of the stuff really aren't that good; or more accurately, they aren't very deep, and these are complex issues that require a deep reading to understand. The couple paragraphs Dyson presents are a reasonably good summary, but if you're not inclined to take what he says at face value there's no depth there to convince you.
The "New Biology" article by Woese is brilliant and a much, much better exploration of the nature of evolution and the origins of life.