Evolution has been an important theme in fiction, includingspeculative evolution inscience fiction, since the late 19th century, though it began beforeCharles Darwin's time, and reflectsprogressionist andLamarckist views as well as Darwin's.[1]Darwinian evolution is pervasive in literature, whether taken optimistically in terms of how humanity may evolve towards perfection, or pessimistically in terms of the dire consequences of the interaction of human nature and the struggle for survival. Other themes include the replacement of humanity, either by other species or byintelligent machines.
Charles Darwin'sevolution bynatural selection, as set out in his 1859On the Origin of Species, is the dominant theory in modern biology,[2][3] but it is accompanied as a philosophy and in fiction by two earlier evolutionary theories, progressionism (orthogenesis) andLamarckism.[1] Progressionism is the view that evolution is progress towards some goal of perfection, and that it is in some way directed towards that goal.[4] Lamarckism, a philosophy that long predatesJean-Baptiste de Lamarck, is the view that evolution is guided by the inheritance of characteristics acquired by use or disuse during an animal's lifetime.[5]
Ideas of progress and evolution were popular, long before Darwinism, in the 18th century, leading toNicolas-Edme Rétif's allegorical 1781 storyLa découverte Australe par un homme volant [fr] (The Southern Hemisphere Discovery by a Flying Man).[1]
The evolutionary biologist Kayla M. Hardwick quotes from the 2013 filmMan of Steel, where the villain Faora states: "The fact that you possess a sense of morality, and we do not, gives us an evolutionary advantage. And if history has taught us anything, it is that evolution always wins." She points out that the idea that evolution wins is progressionist, while (she argues) the idea that evolution gives evil an advantage over the moral and good, driving the creation of formidable monsters, is a popular science fiction misconception.[6] Hardwick gives as examples of the evolution of "bad-guy traits" theMorlocks inH. G. Wells's 1895The Time Machine, the bugs'caste system inRobert Heinlein's 1959Starship Troopers, and the effective colonisation byDon Siegel's 1956Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens.[6]
In French 19th century literature, evolutionary fantasy was Lamarckian, as seen inCamille Flammarion's 1887Lumen and his 1894Omega: The Last Days of the World,J.-H. Rosny's 1887Les Xipéhuz and his 1910La mort de la terre, andJules Verne's 1901La grande forêt, le village aérien. The philosopherHenri Bergson's creative evolution driven by the supposedélan vital likely inspiredJ. D. Beresford's English evolutionary fantasy, his 1911The Hampdenshire Wonder.[1]
Darwin's version of evolution has been widely explored in fiction, both in fantasies and in imaginative explorations of its grimmer "survival of the fittest" effects, with much attention focused on possible human evolution. H. G. Wells'sThe Time Machine already mentioned, his 1896The Island of Dr Moreau, and his 1898The War of the Worlds all pessimistically explore the possible dire consequences of the darker sides of human nature in the struggle for survival.[1] More broadly,Joseph Conrad's 1899Heart of Darkness andR. L. Stevenson's 1886Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde portray Darwinian thinking in mainstreamEnglish literature.[7]
The evolutionary biologistJ. B. S. Haldane wrote an optimistic tale,The Last Judgement, in the 1927 collectionPossible Worlds. This influencedOlaf Stapledon's 1930Last and First Men, which portrays the many species that evolved from humans in a billion-year timeframe. A different take on Darwinism is the idea, popular from the 1950s onwards, that humans will evolve more or less godlike mental capacity, as inArthur C. Clarke's 1950Childhood's End andBrian Aldiss's 1959Galaxies Like Grains of Sand. Another science fiction theme is the replacement of humanity on Earth by other species orintelligent machines. For instance,Olof Johannesson's 1966The Great Computer gives humans the role of enabling intelligent machines to evolve, whileKurt Vonnegut's 1985Galapagos is one of several novels to depict a replacement species.[1]
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