Greg BearDarwin's RadioMonika says:
A mass grave in Georgia poses many questions to a group of scientists brought in to investigate: The dead first thought to be a sensational archaeological find actually died only a few years ago and not from natural causes. There are men, women and children. It looks as if a whole village was wiped out. Even more shocking is the fact that all the women were pregnant when they died. At the same time the mummified remains of a Neanderthal man and woman are found in the Alps carrying a newborn that shows confusingly "modern" traits. The two finds at first do not seem related, but the emergence of a new form of influenza affecting only pregnant women puts biologist Kaye Lang on the track of a retrovirus that existed for millions of years in human DNA and now was activated in a mysterious way. The future of mankind seems threatened, or is there a mechanism of speciation at work? Has evolution come to an end with the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens? Man hasn’t changed morphologically in the last 100 000 years, even if it took us a while to start building cities and explore space. Greg Bear invents a new mankind in DARWIN’S RADIO, one that just like us emerges by an evolutionary leap in a - geologically speaking - relatively short span of time. This view on evolution differs from the Darwinian theory of gradual evolution and was presented for the first time in the seventies by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. They called their theory Punctuated Equilibrium and it says mainly that evolution does not happen in small changes over a long period of time but rapidly in isolated populations. Applied to mankind this theory gives an author fascinating opportunities to speculate about our future. Greg Bear wrote a novel that’s hard to put down. The open ending at first is unsatisfactory but the author already announced that he would write a sequel. Del Rey, 1999
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Last changes: 17-03-03 Copyright 2000 Christina Gross & Monika Hübner |
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