Subject: Review: Darwin's Radio

From: Gary McGath <[email-masked]>
Date: 31 Jul 2000 11:46:09 -0400

Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear
	Review Copyright Gary McGath	

This isn't a review in the full sense.  About halfway through the book, I
became sufficiently bored with the characters and impatient with the
scientific mystery that I began skimming the "people" passages to get to
the resolution of the mystery. Thus, I'm restricting my comments here to
the scientific issue.

The premise of the book is that since our ancestors were monkeys, there
has been a feature in our genetic makeup which causes abrupt advances in a
single generation. This feature caused the leap from Neanderthal to modern
human and in the course of the book causes a leap from human parents to
superhuman babies.

I am not a biologist but simply from the standpoint of information theory,
Bear's premise is wildly implausible.

The genetic feature, called SHEVA (Scattered Human Endogenous RetroVirus
Activation), is discovered to have been causing miscarriages in the
Caucasus area for decades, and something about it has been prompting acts
of mass murder against women who have been affected. It quickly becomes
worldwide in the course of the book. The discoverers speculate on some
stress which activated SHEVA on such a broad scale, but never come up with
an explanation. It affects only married or long-term couples; again, this
is not explained.

Bear provides only a vague analogy to a "network" by which SHEVA operates.
But a network is a collection of interconnected information channels. DNA
is, in the broad sense, information; evolution requires updated
information in order to continue.  According to conventional evolution
theory, the information on which it operates is that the parents of an
organism were able to survive and pass on their genetic code. This is a
slow, error-prone process which takes millennia to bring about specific
change.

SHEVA operates in a different way. Women affected by it conceive a fetus
which is little more than an ovary; it aborts itself after leaving a
self-fertilized ovum in the womb. At first the secondary fetuses aren't
viable. But then SHEVA modifies itself globally, and women begin giving
birth to the new post-humans. These children have fifty-two chromosomes
compared to the standard forty-six; they look a little different from
normal humans and learn much more quickly.

Each chromosome of the human genetic makeup contains a large amount of
information. According to standard biology outside Kansas, there is no
programmer coding these chromosomes; they have developed by the process of
natural selection. But SHEVA, by some unspecified method, has coded up
these six new chromosomes in a way that generates a significantly improved
Homo. Moreover, it somehow got information that the first generation was
unsuccessful, so it made corrections.

How does SHEVA get its information? What is the "network" which allows it
to design successfully modified offspring or to know about its failures?
There is no answer. Does the intermediate generation have some role in
gathering this information? No clue is given as to how it could.

SHEVA's success is comparable to writing 50,000 lines of code to add new
features to a program, sending it out to a beta tester who doesn't send
back reports, and then making successful fixes based on the unreported
failures at the beta site -- all without ever having studied programming.

When I started the book, I was hoping for a decent James Hogan-style
scientific detective story. Instead, the protagonists' view is bolstered
only by the facts that their opponents act like jerks and that ultimately
viable SHEVA children are born. Bear writes in the afterword, "I've made a
substantial effort to make the science accurate and the speculation
plausible." This effort didn't succeed.

%A Bear, Greg
%T Darwin's Radio
%I Ballantine Books
%C New York
%D September 1999
%G ISBN 0-345-43524-9
%O Paperback, US$ 6.99

Other book reviews which I've written can be found at 
<http://www.shore.net/~gmcgath/revlist.html>

Gary McGath    [email-masked]
http://www.shore.net/~gmcgath/