http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/stephen-hawking-the-planet-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html
 Although It has taken homo sapiens
several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information
in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the
rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in
his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.
"By
contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in
the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred
billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this
information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so,
the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not
billions, higher than with DNA."
This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of
evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from
random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half
billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to
exchange information." But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge
that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and
particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred. "I think it is legitimate to
take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as
well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.
In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what
Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal
record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA,
has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and
other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown
enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the
internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being
applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too
narrow a view. We are more than just our genes." The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less. 
Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process
this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of
hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In
the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book
written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you
about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By
which time, many more books would have been written."
But we are
now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed
evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. "At
first," he continues "these changes will be confined to the repair of
genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These
are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and
correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled
by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find
them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure
that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both
intelligence, and instincts like aggression." If the human race
manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of
self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize
other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with
intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components,
rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based
life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life. Casey Kazan
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