Free Tomorrowland by Steven Kotler

of 2010 in
Nature Review Genetics
, an international team of biologists argue that the interplay between genes and culture (with culture including things like economics and technology) has profoundly shaped evolution, especially when it comes to the speed of the process. “Gene-culture dynamics are typically faster, stronger, and operate over a broader range of conditions than conventional evolutionary dynamics,” writes lead author Kevin Leland, a biologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution [sometimes called dual inheritance theory] could be the dominant mode of human evolution.”
    In a very real sense, the process Leland calls gene-culture evolution and Fogel dubbed techno-physio evolution are just examples of punctuated equilibrium by a different name, with culture rather than catastrophe providing the new niches. The main difference is in frequency. Naturally occurring geologic events are historically rare occurrences. Technological progress, meanwhile, is ever-accelerating.
    This is no small detail. In recent years, researchers have found that the same exponential growth rates underpinning computing (Moore’s Law, for example) show up in all information-based technologies. Thus fields with a huge potential to drive techno-physio evolution — artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biology, robotics, networks, sensors, etc. — are now advancing along exponential growth curves. Consider genomic sequencing, long touted as the “essential tool” needed to move medicine from standardized and reactive to personalized and preventative. In 1990, when the Human Genome Project was first announced, the cost of this tool was budgeted at $3 billion — about as far from personalized medicine as one can get. But by 2001, costs were down to $300 million. By 2010, they were below $5,000. In 2012, the $1,000 barrier had fallen. Within ten years, at the current rate of decline, a fully sequenced human genome will price out at less than $10. If standardized and reactive medicine managed to double human life span in a century, just imagine how far personalized and preventative medicine might extend that total.
    Fogel’s work documents how an increase in control over our external environment impacts our biology. But the fields that are now growing exponentially are cutting out the middleman, allowing us to take direct control over our internal environment. “Exponentially growing technology changes the evolutionary discussion,” says molecular geneticist and Autodesk distinguished researcher Andrew Hessel, “because, if you follow those patterns out, you very quickly see that this is the century we take control over our genome. Just look at the technologies surrounding reproduction: fetal testing, genetic screening, pregnancy monitoring, genetic counseling. When I was a child, Down syndrome was a real problem. Today, roughly 90 percent of all fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted. Play these patterns forward and we aren’t long from the day when we’re engineering our children: choosing skin color, eye color, personality traits. How long after that until parents are saying: ‘I bought you the best brain money can buy — now why don’t you use it?’ ”
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    Of course, this massive acceleration of natural selection raises additional questions — like how much does it take to create an entirely new species? Dartmouth neuroscientist Richard Granger, who works on brain evolution, doesn’t think it will take much.
    “Think about dogs,” he says. “Used to be they all looked like wolves. Now they don’t. In just a few thousand years of messing around with their genes, humans have created canine breeds that are completely physically incompatible — a Great Dane and a Chihuahua could not produce offspring without help. How much longer until they’re genomically incompatible? There’s nothing surprising here. When you start messing around