Dyson talks a load of spheres

His analysis of Woese's recent paper on the obsolescence of reductionist science. Dyson says,

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization."

In other words, Darwinian natural selection was an interlude and has sown the seeds of its own undoing. Fascinating idea but doesn't it all sound a bit arrogant, almost crowing? The current age always has a high opinion of itself; are we really having so much impact that natural selection has ceased to have an effect anywhere? (Ask a bacterium.) Plus, I reckon cultural evolution has only been running "a thousand times faster" (whatever that means) for a few decades now and so, while we don't know the degree of inertia in the system, I'd like to see some evidence that cultural evolution has taken over so thoroughly. Cf theories of genetic takeover which were apparently total but this totality was illusory.