Vacation time, and I’m — well, never “catching up,” but let’s just say I’m doing more reading than I usually am able to do.
And I just read Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, a horrifying science fiction story about a speciation event in humans. Briefly, the idea is this: mixed in among the “junk DNA” in the human genome are gene-ish blocks of DNA that either prevent or allow large-scale modifications of the genotype; occasionally some set of external conditions trigger the activation of this DNA code; with the result that a (sub-)speciation event occurs. (Picture something of the sort envisioned at the end of the last ice-age when — in this scenario — Neanderthals began to have “deformed” (i.e., cro-magnon) babies.
Continue reading