Darwin's Children Term Paper

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Darwin's Children: Book Review

Bear, Greg. Darwin's Children. New York: Del Rey, 2003.

No, it's not a story of the children of the famous 19th century British naturalist and author of The Origin of Species. Rather, Darwin's Children is a sequel to science fiction author Greg Bear's previous novel, Darwin's Radio and expands upon some of the political and sociological issues raised by this master of high-quality sociological science fiction. This particular instillation in Bear's saga chronicles the results of human evolution, but in the far future rather than in the natural world of the past.

According to author Bear, the next stage of human evolution has arrived with the birth of a new form of human being, a generation of virus children, children whom are hypersensitive to stimulus and have strange, marked faces that immediately give them away as other and alien, even to their own parents. This specific installation in Bear's saga also chronicles how the world views the growing maturity of this disturbing generation of mutated offspring.
To deal with the supposed threat, the government puts the virus children into camps to protect the rest of the world from the dangers posed by these supposed children that are revealed by scientists of quality to be purely spurious. The two heroes of the novel are scientists with a virus child daughter named Stella.

Religion and science are intertwined in the novel, over its course, as the mother and scientist Kaye tries to accept and deal with the fact of her daughter's alternative species. The conflict between religion and science in contemporary society is thus further illuminated, as well as the conflict between the 'truth' provided by science and the more transitory and hysterical nature of the demands of politics, that affect scientific 'facts' nonetheless. The children and their parents are constantly watched and monitored for political reasons that have nothing to do with their rights or with true science, but occur because of the demands of government and….....

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