Hawking explains how biological evolution began very slowly through natural selection of random mutations. What he calls the “Darwinian phase” of evolution took approximately 3.5 billion years of slow and steady progress.
Next (now) we have entered into a phase of what Hawking calls “external transmission,” meaning we are not directed by the DNA inside of us but rather by the information outside of us. Language and particularly the recording of the written word beginning some 10,000 years ago, has allowed human progress to grow by leaps and bounds. Maybe too quickly for our own good.
Where this intelligence is dangerous is that we still have the same primitive instincts and aggressive impulses as we did in caveman days, only now we are cavemen with nuclear weapons and the scientific advancements to create genetically engineered viruses. “There is no time,” he says, “to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured.”
