Darwin's Radio, review

1/25/07  Review of Darwin’s Radio

Mark,

Darwin’s Radio has been quite enjoyable. It took me about 150 pages to start reading every word, until that point I skimmed, to get to the meat, as the subplots were pale compared to frozen Neanderthals and the whisper of evolution in action.

So far there has been a fair play about God, design, emergent properties out of whole systems (isomorphic of a Gaia idea in microcosm, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts), ghosts in the machine, the species level as the machine etc, and that plays well, as how could brainless, purposeless evolution and survival be made compelling in a thriller? (They survive, so what? 90% of those that survived are extinct, hardly successful.) We want there to be some intent, some tie-in with spirituality and religion, with our peculiar religious stories, some way to tie this to our hopes of not being lost in a meaningless universe, meaningless in the sense of no larger purpose, no creator, no goal, no God, no heaven, no reincarnation, no souls surviving death (although farts could be the cries of the souls of the damned), no nothing but eating and fucking and procreating and control of resources, so that the next brood can do it all over again. That can seem so fucking pointless from a philosophical stance….. And so here, Evolution takes the place of a deity and makes a correction for mankind’s poor behavior. In Darwin’s Radio, Evolution is the whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, the genes and segments of DNA are the radio frequencies, perhaps triggered by stress hormones from overcrowding, crowd diseases etc and then the genome tunes in, turns on and creates a new animal.

I liked the anthropology amateur with his own museum, pretty cool, wax copies of all the hominids, who I guess they call hominins now. I see also the real addressing, in the book, of political bullshit in science and academia and how people have to fight for their views, against others who are fighting for theirs, as in, for example the whole Out Of Africa versus Multi-regional evolution of people. Or, for example, how you can pay experts to say there is or is not global warming; that is, it is the premise first, and facts second.

When I was in school, it was sorely disappointing to see that it was not this great adventure, not any halls of learning for its own sake, not a grand opportunity for me to grow but a lot of petty crap, with all the profs in separate camps, with their little grad student behind them.  There was that underlay of politics. I thought it would be about my learning curve and not about indoctrination to various camps, and that’s pretty much why I decided to not pursue professional academics. It is better for me to cherry pick it than to be on the front lines arguing with dogmatic jerks, as of course now, in my prime of perception, it is obvious that I am the most sober and perceptive of all, ha ha.

The whole retrovirus thing, with DNA, etc, is a little over my head, but it is cool that the author is addressing how punctuated equilibrium might actually happen, i.e. FAST. Good science fiction does point the way to the future and the current Darwinian synthesis has got to evolve as new stuff is learned. The fact is though, that no one was there when speciation events happened, so we fill in the blanks with a good theory.

But, say, at the end of the last Ice Age, in the last 15,000 years, there didn’t seem to come any new species. What happened was a lot of the specialized ones died off, particularly the large ones and their predators, and then the generalists rose to prominence after the big specialist ones were gone. And, once people got rid of the big nasty predators and got better technology and domesticates, we could not be stopped. After the Great Leap Forward, it seems as if humanity had the ace in the hole for all that has happened since. We have been extremely successful, but sometimes the cost of winning can actually mean that you lose.

Whatever, there does seem to be shit on the horizon that will hit the fan, people are causing so many problems, extinctions, global warming, pollution, denuding the land, fouling the fresh water, fishing out the oceans, that some consequence will come of it all, maybe more like Mad Max and Planet of the Apes than Darwin’s Radio, but one thing I’ll bet, I won’t be around to see no SHEVA come and create a new human. Quien sabe? What the fuck is going to put some sense into the human race to stop the short run thinking? I’ll attach letter I wrote to the New Yorker saying basically that people have stupidity embedded in them from their biology, as long as its about survival of me, or you or them, then we are doomed to fight it out.

I love a good Neandertahl fiction book, I’ve read a lot of them, I had supposed at the beginning that maybe the mass graves in Georgia were of actual Neanderthals or hybrids, or that the unfrozen cadavers were releasing the new bug to Neanderthal us all down, but then what, the Neanderthal discovering guy has to get laid, but I’m not quite done yet, so will save my grand finale until then. I also liked that the author managed to work Kennewick man and NAGPRA into the story, he wove some fun threads.

And now that it’s all over, I see that the next phase of human evolution addresses our current violent, intolerant nature and that the new Homo novus is friendly, tolerant, not prone to standing in judgment of all that is different. Pretty cool about the facial spots that change color.

And also, the whole punctuated equilibrium thing seems to only be framed as if it was either/ or, that or gradualism, which is a typical pitfall in my opinion, that the world must conform to a black and white view, which may be indicative of no more than it is males who make most of the theories, and that is how they think.

Thanks for sending the book, it was a good read.

Fred