Evolution

Entry updated 6 February 2023. Tagged: Theme.

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

There is, inevitably, an intimate connection between the development of evolutionary philosophy and the history of sf. In a culture without an evolutionary philosophy most of the kinds of fiction we categorize as sf could not develop. Like the idea of progress, evolutionary philosophy flourished in late eighteenth-century France, and it was first significantly represented in literature byRestif de la Bretonne's evolutionary fantasyLa découverte Australe par un homme volant ["The Southern-Hemisphere Discovery by a Flying Man"] (1781), an allegorical treatment of ideas partly derived from the Comte du Buffon (1707-1788). In the early nineteenth centuryPhilosophie zoologique (1809), the Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) developed a more elaborate evolutionary philosophy, introducing the key notion of adaptation, and paved the way for Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and his theory of natural selection, promulgated inThe Origin of Species (1859). Because we have fallen into the habit of labelling various theoretical heresies "Lamarckian", it is easy to forget that for most of the nineteenth century Lamarck was the more influential writer, especially in France. In the UK, Darwin was ardently championed by T H Huxley (1825-1895) and the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and his ideas took much firmer hold in the UK than elsewhere. Thus there was a sharp divergence of emphasis between French and UK evolutionary sf, and this lasted well into the twentieth century. The writers who pioneered the tradition of French evolutionary fantasy were CamilleFlammarion, most notably inLumen (1887; trans anon1892) [for further publication details seeFlammarion] andOmega (trans1894), and J-HRosny aîné in his many prehistoric fantasies, inLes Xipéhuz (inL'Immolation ["The Sacrifice"] coll1887;1888; trans as "The Shapes" inOne Hundred Years of Science Fiction, anth1968, ed DamonKnight) and in "La mort de la terre" (1910; trans as "The Death of the Earth" 1978). JulesVerne's only evolutionary fantasy,La grande forêt, le village aérien (1901; trans I O Evans asThe Village in the Treetops1964), is also Lamarckian.

Lamarck's successor, Henri Bergson (1859-1941), whose theory of "creative evolution" made much of the notion of theélan vital – which Lamarck had rejected – seems to have provided the seed of one of the most important UK evolutionary fantasies, J DBeresford'sThe Hampdenshire Wonder (1911; exp vtThe Wonder1917), but for the most part UK writing was dominated by the implications of Darwinian theory and the catch-phrases by which it was vulgarized: "the survival of the fittest" and "the struggle for existence". H GWells was taught by T H Huxley in the early 1890s, and remained ever-anxious that the qualities which had shaped human nature for survival in the struggle for existence might prevent our ever achieving a just society – a fear powerfully reflected, in different ways, inThe Time Machine (1895),The Island of Dr Moreau (1896),The War of the Worlds (April-December 1897Pearson's;1898) andThe Croquet Player (1936 chap). (An interesting antidote to Wellsian pessimism is administered in one of the several sequels toThe Time Machine: DavidLake'sThe Man Who Loved Morlocks [1981].) Wells also launched an sfCliché with his vision of evolved future man with bulging brain and part-atrophied body in his essay "The Man of the Year Million" (6 November 1893Pall Mall Budget).

The ominous spectres arising from the harsher versions of Darwinian philosophy also feature strongly inErewhon (1872) by SamuelButler (who also wrote several anti-Darwinian tracts) and intrude upon most of the speculative fiction of GrantAllen (who wrote several pro-Darwinian tracts). The political implications of the careless transplantation of Darwinian ideas into theories of social evolution (seeSocial Darwinism) were such that Wells's one-time fellow-Fabian George BernardShaw renounced Darwinism in favour of neo-Lamarckism on political grounds, and his playBack to Methuselah (1921; revs1921-1945) was published with a long introductory essay explaining this renunciation. Similar steps were taken by T D Lysenko (1898-1976), in the name of Soviet communism, and Luther Burbank (1849-1926), in the name of US fundamentalism. It was not widely realized that the implications of Darwinism were not necessarily as harsh as vulgar Darwinians tended to assume. An interesting allegorical popularization of a more humane Darwinism is GeraldHeard'sGabriel and the Creatures (1952; vtWishing Well1953). The influence of Darwinian ideas can be seen in such US works as EdgarFawcett'sThe Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895) and AustinBierbower'sFrom Monkey to Man (1894); the latter is an early attempt to presentGenesis as an allegory of evolution.

Human evolution was explored by writers in terms of its probable past (seeAnthropology;Origin of Man) and possible future. Wells's classic essay, "The Man of the Year Million" (6 November 1893Pall Mall Budget), imagined mankind as evolution might remake us, with an enormous head and reduced body, eyes enlarged but ears and nose vestigial – an image which became a stereotype adopted by many other writers. It became a cliché in earlyPulp-magazine sf, although most writers took a dim view of the "fitness" of such individuals, and usually represented them as effete entities doomed to extinction; "Alas, All Thinking!" (June 1935Astounding) by HarryBates is a graphic example. Few pulp writers, though, had much idea of the actual implications of Darwinism, and they produced very few extrapolations which could stand up to rigorous examination – a state of affairs which still persists. Most sf writers contemplating the evolutionary future of mankind have been inordinately taken with the idea of sudden, large-scale mutations of a kind in which modern Darwinians do not believe (seeMutants). Many stories appeared in which mutagenic radiation accelerated evolution to a perceptible pace, including JohnTaine'sThe Iron Star (1930) andSeeds of Life (Fall 1931Amazing Stories Quarterly;1951) and EdmondHamilton's "Evolution Island" (March 1927Weird Tales). Hamilton's fiction also showed a persistent interest in thePseudoscientific notion of retrograde evolution (seeDevolution), which had earlier been luridly featured in George AllanEngland'sDarkness and Dawn (1914) and which crops up also in OlafStapledon's curiously un-DarwinianLast and First Men (1930). In Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved" (April 1931Wonder Stories) a man who bathes himself in mutagenic radiation first turns into the man-of-the-year-million stereotype and then regresses, ending up as a blob of undifferentiated protoplasm. Equally pseudoscientific, though more interesting, is Edgar RiceBurroughs's "extrapolation" of Haeckel's law ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") inThe Land that Time Forgot (stories September-November 1918Blue Book; fixup1924); in this romance the recapitulation takes place during active life rather than embryonically. Similar schemes are credited to alien life-systems in TheodoreSturgeon's "The Golden Helix" (Summer 1954Thrilling Wonder) and JamesBlish'sA Case of Conscience (September 1953If; exp1958).

Sf of the 1920s and 1930s was frequently pessimistic about the long-term evolutionary prospects of mankind, but bold success stories are featured in J B SHaldane's "The Last Judgment" (inPossible Worlds, coll1927) and LaurenceManning'sThe Man Who Awoke (five stories March-August 1933Wonder Stories; fixup1975). The former influenced and the latter was influenced by the most detailed and most extravagant of all evolutionary fantasies, Stapledon'sLast and First Men. This extraordinary study of mankind's many descendant species, extending over a timespan of billions of years, exhibits an odd combination of optimism and pessimism further extrapolated on the grander stage ofStar Maker (1937), whose experimentally inclined God-figure is working His way through an evolving series of Creations. Those sf stories in which the human evolutionary story does not end with eventual extinction or with the acquisition of a stabilizingImmortality usually propose, like Shaw inBack to Methuselah, that there will eventually be aTranscendence that frees human intelligence from its association with frail flesh, and that our ultimate descendants will be more-or-less godlike entities of "pure thought" – an idea which echoes continually through E E "Doc"Smith's work and crops up briefly but rather disturbingly in Robert AHeinlein'sMethuselah's Children (July-September 1941Astounding; rev1958). A particularly memorable pulp sf evocation of this sort of motif is Eric FrankRussell's "Metamorphosite" (December 1946Astounding). Even when mankind fails to stay the distance – as in John WCampbell Jr's "The Last Evolution" (August 1932Amazing), where it is our machines, not their creators, which ultimately achieve the state of "pure consciousness" – this is conventionally seen as the logical end-point of evolution, as it still is in such novels asThe Singers of Time (1990) by FrederikPohl and JackWilliamson andEternal Light (1991) by Paul JMcAuley. Given that images of the next stage in human evolution (seeSuperman) usually invoke pseudoscientific notions about mental powers (seeESP) based on Cartesian illusions about mental ghosts in bodily machines, the idea that evolution tends towards disembodiment is a natural and psychologically plausible extrapolation, though arguably rather silly.

The post-World War Two boom in stories of human mental evolution produced a number of stories which invoked the notion of a universal evolutionary schema. The most notable were Arthur CClarke'sChildhood's End (April 1950Famous Fantastic Mysteries as "Guardian Angel"; much exp1953; rev1990), which shows a whole generation of Earthly children undergoing a kind of metamorphic apotheosis to fuse with the "cosmic mind", and two stories by Theodore Sturgeon:More than Human (fixup1953) andThe Cosmic Rape (1958), which deploy similar imagery on a smaller scale, using the idea of collective mental gestalts. Another interesting example of such a schema is to be found in the material linking the short stories inGalaxies like Grains of Sand (1959; full text restored1979) by Brian WAldiss, which proposes that the next step in human evolution might be complete somatic awareness and control. A more modest schema of human evolution, past and future, underlies Gordon RDickson'sChilde Cycle novels, and is elaborated in some detail in hisThe Final Encyclopedia (1984). A remarkable philosophical allegory surreally re-examining many ideas about mankind's possible future evolution is RobertSilverberg'sSon of Man (1971). The most widely seen (but by no means most widely understood) symbolic representation of evolutionary apotheosis is that contained in the final frames of the film2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Last and First Men also includes in its multi-faceted discussion of future human evolution the possibility – first raised in Haldane's essayDaedalus, or Science and the Future (1923) that humans might take charge of their own physical evolution by means of what is nowadays termedGenetic Engineering, but this line of inquiry was not widely explored until much later. DamonKnight'sMasters of Evolution (January 1954Galaxy as "Natural State"; exp1959) features the anti-technological "muckfeet", who have allegedly progressed beyond the need for machines and cities in acquiring biological control of their environment, but stories of this kind, inspired by a growing interest inEcology and a corollary antipathy towardsCities (see alsoDystopias;Machines), have been heavily outnumbered by those which – following AldousHuxley's example inBrave New World (1932) – consider the idea of tampering with human nature implicitly horrific. Examples include FrankHerbert'sThe Eyes of Heisenberg (1966) and T JBass'sHalf Past Human (December 1969Galaxy and November 1970If; fixup1971), the latter featuring a "human hive" – an image invoked in many stories as a highly unfortunate but nevertheless probable destiny for evolving human society (seeHive Minds), most notably in J DBeresford's and Esme Wynne-Tyson'sThe Riddle of the Tower (1944). The idea that our future evolution might involve turning ourselves intoCyborgs – memorably pioneered by E VOdle's remarkableThe Clockwork Man (1923) – has usually been treated with similar unenthusiasm. The idea of any future metamorphosis of the human species, however modest, is repugnant to many whose aesthetic standards are not unnaturally defined by our present ideals: even to those who abhor anything that might smack of Nazism, the desirable notion of "men like gods" inevitably conjures up an image of serried ranks of Aryan matinée idols. One sf writer who has tried particularly hard to escape this imaginative straitjacket is IanWatson, whose exuberant adventures in evolutionary possibility extend to bizarre extremes inThe Gardens of Delight (1980) andConverts (1984).

A surprising number of sf stories look forward – often with a curious inverted nostalgia – to the time when mankind's day is done and we must pass on our legacy to the inheritors of Earth (or of the Universe). Usually the inheritors are machines, as in Lesterdel Rey's "Though Dreamers Die" (February 1944Astounding) and Edmond Hamilton's "After a Judgement Day" (December 1963Fantastic), but sometimes they are animals, as in Del Rey's "The Faithful" (April 1938Astounding), Clifford DSimak'sCity (May 1944-December 1947Astounding, January 1951Fantastic Adventures; fixup1952; exp1981) and TerryBisson's "Bears Discover Fire" (August 1990Asimov's). OlofJohannesson, inThe Tale of the Big Computer (1966; trans1968; vtThe Great Computer), plots an evolutionary schema in which the function of mankind is simply to be the means of facilitating machine evolution; while L Spraguede Camp's and P SchuylerMiller's ironicGenus Homo (March 1941Super Science Stories;1950), NealBarrett Jr's puzzle-storyAldair in Albion (1976), DougalDixon's fascinating picture-bookAfter Man: A Zoology of the Future (1981) and KurtVonnegut Jr's jeremiadGalápagos (1985) all describe new species which take up the torch of evolutionary progress after mankind's demise. Such stories have strong ideative links with extravagantAlternate-History stories which contemplate alternative patterns of earthly evolution, notably GuyDent'sEmperor of the If (1926), HarryHarrison'sWest of Eden (1984) and its sequels – in which primitive men must compete with intelligent descendants of theDinosaurs – and Stephen RBoyett'sThe Architect of Sleep (1986), in which it is raccoons rather than apes that have given rise to sentient descendants.

Accounts ofAlien evolution are separately considered in the section onLife on Other Worlds, but mention must be made here of the frequent recruitment of the ideas of convergent evolution and parallel evolution to excuse the dramatically convenient deployment of humanoid aliens. Writers conscientious enough to construct a jargon of apology for such a situation often argue that the logic of natural selection permits intelligence to arise only in upright bipeds with binocular vision and clever hands, and that, had such bipeds not evolved from lemurs, they might instead have evolved fromCat-like or even lizardlike ancestors. There are, however, relatively few stories which actually turn on hypotheses of this kind; examples include PhilipLatham's "Simpson" (March 1954Cosmos), one of several stories about humanlike aliens who are not as similar to us as they seem, and LloydBiggle Jr'sThe Light that Never Was (1972), which addresses the question of whether "animaloid" species are necessarily inferior to "humanoid" ones.

Alternative life-systems capable of Lamarckian evolution are featured in a few stories, including Barrington JBayley's "Mutation Planet" (inFrontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives, anth1973, ed RogerElwood) and Brian MStableford's "The Engineer and the Executioner" (May 1975Amazing; rev1991). GregBear explores a world of competing Lamarckian ecosystems ("ecoi") inLegacy (1995).

The Butlerian idea that machines may eventually begin to evolve independently of their makers has become increasingly popular as real-worldComputers have become more sophisticated; images of such evolutionary sequences have become more complex, as in James PHogan'sCode of the Lifemaker (1983). Several recent images of universal evolutionary schemas – notably the one featured in GregoryBenford'sAcross the Sea of Suns (1984) and the trilogy begun withGreat Sky River (1988) – imagine a fundamental ongoing struggle for existence between organic and inorganic life-systems. The beginnings of such a division are evident in BruceSterling's series of stories featuring the Shapers and the Mechanists, which culminates inSchismatrix (1985). A related but somewhat different Universe-wide struggle for existence is revealed in the concluding volume of BrianStableford'sAsgard trilogy,The Centre Cannot Hold (1990), and an even stranger one is first glimpsed inThe Angel of Pain (1991), the second volume of another Stableford trilogy.

Mutational miracles still abound in modern sf, in such apocalyptic stories of future evolution as GregBear'sBlood Music (June 1983Analog; exp1985) and his less drasticDarwin's Radio (1999), and there is a strong tendency to mystify evolution-related concepts such as "Ecology" and "symbiosis" (seeParasitism and Symbiosis) in a fashion which is at best interestingly metaphorical and at worst hazily metaphysical. Patterns of evolution on alien worlds (seeLife on Other Worlds) are often placed in the service of some kind of Edenic mythology, and this is true even in the work of writers well versed in the biological sciences. Perhaps this is not unduly surprising in an era when religious fundamentalists are still fighting the teaching of Darwinism in US schools, demanding equal time for "Creation Science" or its barely disguised successor "Intelligent Design" and frequently succeeding in censorship of science textbooks. Some evolutionary philosophers have not yet given up hope of producing a crucial modification of the Darwinian account of evolution which is more aesthetically appealing; among those to attempt it have been Rupert Sheldrake inThe Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981), an idea adapted to sf use by PaulCook inDuende Meadow (1985). Given the continued success of Darwinism as a source of explanations, however, it is lamentably unfortunate that so few sf stories have deployed the theory in any reasonably rigorous fashion. An exception, perhaps, is StephenBaxter's part-documentary novelEvolution (2002), which unsparingly traces the human species from its lemur-like ancestors in theDinosaur era, through the present and on into far-futureDevolution. [BS/DRL]