Review:
I have decided Greg Bear is just not a writer I can enjoy.
His books are full of characters to whom things just happen. They don't act as much as flail around, buffeted by forces they don't understand, until finally the story just stops, right in time for the sequel hook, which is probably the part of the book that the author has been thinking about since page 20.
So, instead of trying to read Darwin's Children and see if there is actually some fire behind all this smoke, I am going to stop wasting my time, and read actual books with actual characters that actually do things that actually have some effect on their lives.