Evolution: Has Human Culture Replaced Biology?:

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the planet. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change.

Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study

I find many of the assumptions of the new biology based on technological thinking. If humans will guide the next stage of evolution, we’re screwed, because right now we lack the proper ethical and moral responsibility to do so. How can we survive by killing off the biosphere? This is absurd, and exactly the direction we are heading if we maintain the current course. Green technology is not the solution; wisdom and a sense of the sacred is.

Furthermore, there are alternative views of evolution that have a quite different outlook. For example, Kropotkin challenged Darwin’s assumption that fitting means competition. Fitting really means cooperation and finding how you *fit* into a niche. It’s true that some species compete for territory (such as humans), but even that kind of competition involves a lot of cooperation with the environment (for example, wolves don’t overkill).

BTW, are we really that evolved, even though we engage in human sacrifice and hunt other humans in the name of abstract principles like God, Democracy and Freedom? All the while searching for ways to leave the planet while turning our oceans into an acidified sewer?

Anyhow, perhaps the human break with evolution is in the violation of the natural laws that made us a sustainable species for hundreds of thousands of years. When we moved from the neolithic into what Mumford calls the “megamachine”–organized human labor to make us into parts of a machine–we stopped harmonizing and cooperating with nature and began to dominate it (and women simultaneously). So obviously I disagree with Dyson’s technological fantasy of nature. In fact I find it dangerous and unethical. I hope we can put the breaks on before it’s too late.