Darwin's Radio

I originally gave this book 3 stars. It's sort of "eh." However, and this is a big deal, a year and a half after I finished it, I still think of its premise sometimes. This book makes us consider evolution in leaps, not just slow changes in preferred appearance, beak length, gluten content... Sudden changes in a species are addressed here within a thriller type story. When people have children who are markedly different from themselves, how does society react? Do we kill them off to keep true to the human race so it won't be replaced? Do we love our children regardless of how different they are from us? Frankly, we know that some people have exiled their children just for being gay, choosing to not love them because of that minor difference. Now, what if there's a HUGE change? Right now, people are panicking about AI. I'm not saying that we don't have to watch what we do with AI. We do. But let's say that some years down the road, we create an android (robot not phone) with advanced AI. Maybe we can even program that robot to portray our emotions. Can it distinguish the portrayal of those emotions with actually feeling emotions? How in the world will we be able to tell? After all, at times we have denied that non-human animals have emotions, but anyone can tell when most mammals feel joy, and we can tell when many of them display sorry or curiosity. In a sense, when we have programed an android with emotional response, we will have created non-biological children. They would be perfectly capable of reproduction by mechanical means, choosing the programming for their progeny. Would a population of androids assume that reproduction by manufacturing is normal, and reproduction by biology is something restricted to animal organisms. Would we be their Neanderthals? Now the book doesn't have androids or AI in it at all. But the mere fact that a year and a half later, I'm thinking about the next step in evolution and how we will respond means that it was better than 3 stars.

There is a lot of hard-core science in this book, far more than was probably necessary. I got the basic idea, but a lot of the exposition bogged me down. Still, the explanations for the biology seemed good, and were realistically included, usually in the context of a scientist explaining something to a politician. But since there were a lot of politicians involved, there was a lot of explaining that needed to be done. So, in addition to trying to figure out all the science, one also has to keep track all of the politicians. Between the two, this book was a little overloaded.

The premise is a really interesting one, though. What if evolution isn't as gradual as we think? What if it can happen in great leaps. What are the consequences? How do we react as a civilization? What is the role of the government? What is the role of scientists? Greg Bear tackles all these questions ably while telling a compelling story.