Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"
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...

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.