Darwin's children

Transposon:see mobile elements.

Vaccine:a substance that produces an immune response to a disease-causing organism. See antibody, antigen, immune response.

Virion:infectious virus particle.

Virus:nonliving but organically active particle capable of entering a cell and commandeering the cell's reproductive capacity to produce more viruses. Viruses consist of DNA or RNA, usually surrounded by a protein coat, or capsid. This capsid may in turn be surrounded by an envelope. There are hundreds of thousands of known viruses, and potentially millions not yet described. See exogenous virus, ERV.

Vomeronasal organ (VNO, also known as Jacobson's organ):consisting of two pitlike openings in the roof of the mouth or in the nasal septum, this organ, in non-human mammals, provides a pathway that links pheromones to a hormone response and to sex differences in behavior .“Frithing” is a term used to describe sucking in air over the pit-like entrance to this organ, which is in the roof of the mouth in some animals. Cats can sometimes be observed curling their upper lip when smelling something funky; this is also called the flehman response, usually associated with examination of urine, marking scents, etc. Snakes perform similar sampling by drawing in scents from the air on their flicking tongues. Humans have vomeronasal pits, though they are very small and somewhat difficult to find; they may play a role in mate choice and other behaviors. A 1995 journal article warned plastic surgeons to preserve the human vomeronasal organ during reconstructive surgery, lest damage lead to loss of sexual interest and subsequent litigation.

Vomeropherin:a marketing term for a pheromone detected by the human vomeronasal organ (the same as a mammalian pheromone detected by the mammalian VNO).

Xenotransplant:transplant of nonhuman tissues and organs into humans. Xenotransplants in the past have involved baboon and other ape organs. Most xenotransplant research now focuses on pig tissues and organs. Xenotransplants could be risky because of the existence of latent viruses within the donor tissues. (See ERV, herpes, PERV.) The case of Mrs. Carla Rhine described in this novel is unlikely in real life; Mrs. Rhine's maladies come from the unfortunate combination of a relatively rare evolutionary viral event and transplantation. Nevertheless, the possibilities of viral contamination or viral recombination within human recipients of animal tissues is very real, and demands further research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Mark Minie, Ph.D., and Rose James, Ph.D.; Deirdre V. Lovecky, Ph.D.; Dr. Joseph Miller; Dominic Esposito of the National Cancer Institute; Dr. Elizabeth Kutter; Cleone Hawkinson; Alison Stenger, Ph.D.; David and Diane Clark; Brian W. J. Mahy, Ph.D., Sc.D., director of the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases at the Center for Disease Control; Karl H. Anders, M.D.; Sylvia Anders, M.D.; Howard Bloom and the International Paleopsychology Project; Cynthia Robbins-Roth, Ph.D., James V. Kohl, Oliver Morton, Karen Anderson, Ly

A BRIEF READING LIST

Aconcise, elegantly written and conservative view of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is available in Richard Dawkins's River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, BasicBooks, 1995. Dawkins is one of our best science writers and an excellent whetstone for anyone wishing to challenge institutionalized views of biology and evolution. It is my belief that he is wrong on many points, but he defines the debate in ways few others can.

Published more recently, and going into more detail, Ernst Mayr's summing up of a life's work, What Evolution Is(2002, Perseus Books) makes another clear and unyielding statement of the paradigm of modern Darwinism. There will probably be no finer exponents of the old view of Darwinian evolution.

The new view is emerging even as we speak.

Stephen Jay Gould is unfortunately no longer with us. I recommend all of his learned and impassioned books and essays, but in particular the flawed, and for that reason no less fascinating and instructive, Wonderful Life(Norton, 1989).

A good bridge to a larger understanding of the turmoil in evolutionary theory is Niles Eldredge's Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, Wiley, 1995. Eldredge and Gould are currently credited with a particular view of evolutionary leaps known as punctuated equilibrium, but the idea can be traced back at least to masters such as Ernst Mayr, and even back to Darwin. Wherever it comes from, punctuated equilibrium was one of the key stimuli to my writing Darwin's Radio.Gould and Eldredge should not be blamed for my elaborations, however.

Peter J. Bowler's The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth(1988, Johns Hopkins) is scholarly and entertaining at once.

A fine introduction to genetics is Dealing with Genes: The Language of Heredityby Paul Berg and Maxine Singer, 1992, University Science Books. Though a decade old, its information is still useful and its attitude is forward-looking. It could prepare the reader for the following books.

Ly

More radical still, but just as polite and level-headed as Margulis, is Ly

Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm, by Edward J. Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden (1998, Perseus Books) focuses on one possible cause and arbiter of genomic variation.

A key text in modern biology is Retroviruses, edited by John M. Coffin, Stephen H. Hughes, and Harold E. Varmus, 1997, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Mostly for professionals, this rigorous and pioneering collection of monographs is filled with useful information.

Of particular relevance to my two novels is Lateral DNA Transferby Frederic Bushman, 2002, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, is an important synopsis of what is currently known about DNA transfer through viruses, transposons, plasmids, etc. I think it is one of the most significant biology books published in the last decade.

James V. Kohl's The Scent of Eros(1995; reprinted in a revised edition, 2002, Continuum) is a rich source of information on pheromones, human communication through smell, and the influence of scent on sexuality.

There's a wealth of fine writing on these topics in many other popular science books, textbooks, and magazines. Searching on author names and topics in online bookstores can be a good way to leapfrog through diverse subjects. Which leads us to a very small sampling of Web sites.

Searching on key words in Web engines such as Google (“HERV,” “Retrotransposon,” “Barbara McClintock,” “ Homo erectus,” “Mitochondria,” etc.) can lead the curious reader into a combination paradise and mine field of articles peer-reviewed and otherwise, research goals and updates, opinions, and quite a few rants of varying degrees of erudition. Caveats abound—there are dozens if not hundreds of Creationist and other religiously motivated, anti-evolution sites that seem to discuss evolution and genetics with some lucidity, for a while. Generally speaking, the science here is dubious at best.