In Freeman Dyson's Biotech Utopia, Say Goodbye to Darwinian Evolution

Futurist extraordinaire Freeman Dyson bets that within fifty years, biotechnology will suffuse everyday life just as computer technology does now.

It's not a new vision, but Dyson sketches it well, moving from the everyday (DIY genetic engineering for pigeon fanciers and schoolchildren) to green industrial:

Green technology could replace most of our existing chemical industries and a large part of our mining and manufacturing industries.
Genetically engineered earthworms could extract common metals such as aluminum and titanium from clay, and genetically engineered seaweed could extract magnesium or gold from seawater. Green technology could also achieve more extensive recycling of waste products and worn-out machines, with great benefit to the environment. An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy. New species of termite could be engineered to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses, and new species of tree could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose.

How humanity gets to there from here -- where, outside of agriculture, a handful of medicines and a scattering of expensive reproductive technologies, biotechnology hasn't amounted to a whole lot -- is a tricky matter, though.

Dyson notes that "genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations." Quite right. But there's other obstacles to biotech than popularity: there's also the matter of understanding living systems well enough for the kids to mess with them.

The reductionist physics and the reductionist molecular biology of the twentieth century will continue to be important in the twenty-first century, but they will not be dominant. [...] The reductionist physics and the reductionist molecular biology of the twentieth century will continue to be important in the twenty-first century, but they will not be dominant.

Dyson couches his vision in an irksome bit of biohistorical justification: until about three billion years ago, horizontal gene transfer was the rule rather than the exception; then Darwinian evolution took over, with its stark lines and brutal competition; and now, thanks to human-engineered gene swapping and the primacy of culture rather, that's coming to an end.

We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and 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.

Um, sure. "As it was in the beginning...." But the rest of Dyson's dream is appealing and engaging enough to forgive him this bit of quasi-religious mysticism. After all, what good futurist isn't a mystic, too?

Related Wired coverage: fellow uber-futurist Stewart Brand interviews Freeman Dyson.

Our Biotech Future [New York Review of Books]

Image: Denitsa Nikolava Petrova*