Pandemonium Read Online Free

apart from getting married in a quick wedding ceremony in New York two days ago, attended by Geoffrey’s rushed parents, she and Geoffrey had so far spent their marriage separated from each other. Geoffrey had had to attend several high-level meetings at the United Nations to lobby for the hendros’ freedom while Nell departed for Woods Hole to give this lecture. Both of them realized, however, that their fates were inextricably intertwined with that of the hendropods. The sooner the hendropods won their freedom, the sooner Nell and Geoffrey would regain theirs.
    An athletic man with a coffee and cream complexion, handsome African features, and pale blue eyes burst through the doors at the back of the auditorium. With relief, Nell recognized her husband, despite his new haircut. Geoffrey’s dreadlocks were shorn, and she noticed the pleasing shape of his cranium in the soft light. “Hi, husby!” she said.
    A round of laughter and applause acknowledged the newlywed scientists. He waved back as an audience member offered him his seat near the back. After dealing with UN diplomats for two days, Geoffrey had been flown from LaGuardia to Logan Airport only three hours ago, racing in a government limousine to get here. He thanked the man and sat, sighing, as he waved at her.
    “Now, then,” she said. “To the topic of tonight’s chat. Most scientists claim no special origin for human beings out of a desire to acknowledge that the same evolutionary processes that created all life on Earth produced us, as well. I believe, however, that this bias might have obscured an essential factor in the understanding of human evolution, one which may well explain the spectacularly rapid rise of our species in such a relatively short time. In fact, I think that humans and hendros, unlike all other species, share a unique and powerful evolutionary dynamic: We are both the product of intelligent design !”
    The feisty first row harrumphed, ready to pounce, as she knew they would, and catcalls rose in the back of the auditorium. Geoffrey braced himself.
    Nell smiled and squeezed the clicker to project an image of a cute wallaby. “Kangaroos and this Henders species helped retire Plato’s definition of human beings as the ‘featherless biped.’” A series of images showed a furry biped with an anvil-like head bashing the window of a doomed NASA lab abandoned on Henders Island. The pictures elicited gasps, as did all pictures of Henders organisms. “Benjamin Franklin defined man as the ‘tool-making animal.’” Nell put up a photo of a wise bonobo ape with penetrating eyes. “Jane Goodall disproved his definition by discovering toolmaking chimpanzees. We now know that some birds, like crows, also fashion twigs into tools. After the discovery of the hendros, however, I believe that an entirely new distinction redefines ‘humanity.’ Humans, I suggest, are the only animals that create themselves .”
    The theater hummed with tension as she projected an image of a primitive stone ax. “Nature still had to provide the raw material: DNA sequences that produced a brain that could conceptualize, a vocal apparatus that could create sounds to symbolize concepts, and coordinated hands with opposable thumbs that could facilitate creativity. But this potential was all nature could provide. When a human ancestor with these innate abilities made the giant innovation of assigning a vocalized sound to an abstraction—a specialized grunt symbolizing ‘lion,’ for example—that creative act connected these aptitudes in a new way and introduced a unique evolutionary force to the animal kingdom, and this new force could operate over generations just like DNA. Creative behavior that required specific physical aptitudes was transferred by language from generation to generation, creating a new evolutionary pressure.”
    Nell gauged the audience as she took a breath and they settled back in their seats.
    “Language required aptitudes for