Freeman Dyson has a thought provoking essay in the New York Review of Books, about the Future of Biology. It’s second section, citing the work of biologist Carl Woese, predicts a return to the pre-Darwinian era of horizontal gene transfer and widespread human hacking of species.

Here’s a constructed citation from the Slashdot summary:

“[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.”