Courtesy of Benny Peiser's CCNet, I came across this tantalizing thought piece by Freeman Dyson in the March issue of Technology Review. Building on Carl Woese's postulate that before there was "Darwinian" evolution, i.e., genetic evolution driven by the intense competition for survival among noninterbreeding species, there was "horizontal gene transfer". As Dyson explains:

horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not 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. ...The whole community advanc[ed] in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. 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 separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became another species. And so it went on, until all life was divided into species.

.
Over the following billion years, the products of Darwinian evolution took over the world, but now Darwinian evolution is over, and horizontal gene transfer will be back -- thanks to biotechnology. It was brought to an end, he explains, about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since then, he says:

cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is ... 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.

He goes on to add that in the post-Darwinian era:

biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

Although I am a big fan of technology, including biotechnology, I must admit to queasiness about "biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds..." Isn't that giving matches or razors to a child?