Evolution in fiction

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All women have evolved to be beautiful, in an illustration by Paul Merwart for a 1911 edition of Camille Flammarion's 1894 novel La Fin du Monde. Science fiction women.jpg
All women have evolved to be beautiful, in an illustration by Paul Merwart for a 1911 edition of Camille Flammarion's 1894 novel La Fin du Monde.

Evolution has been an important theme in fiction, including speculative evolution in science fiction, since the late 19th century, though it began before Charles Darwin's time, and reflects progressionist and Lamarckist 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 by intelligent machines.

Contents

Context

Charles Darwin's evolution by natural selection, as set out in his 1859 On 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) and Lamarckism. [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 predates Jean-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]

Progressionism

Ideas of progress and evolution were popular, long before Darwinism, in the 18th century, leading to Nicolas-Edme Rétif's allegorical 1781 story La 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 film Man 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" the Morlocks in H. G. Wells's 1895 The Time Machine , the bugs' caste system in Robert Heinlein's 1959 Starship Troopers , and the effective colonisation by Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens. [6]

Lamarckism

In French 19th century literature, evolutionary fantasy was Lamarckian, as seen in Camille Flammarion's 1887 Lumen and his 1894 Omega: The Last Days of the World , J.-H. Rosny's 1887 Les Xipéhuz and his 1910 La mort de la terre, and Jules Verne's 1901 La grande forêt, le village aérien. The philosopher Henri Bergson's creative evolution driven by the supposed élan vital likely inspired J. D. Beresford's English evolutionary fantasy, his 1911 The Hampdenshire Wonder . [1]

Darwinism

Illustration for a 1906 edition of H. G. Wells's 1898 "The War of the Worlds" by Henrique Alvim Correa The War of the Worlds by Henrique Alvim Correa 08 b&w.jpg
Illustration for a 1906 edition of H. G. Wells's 1898 "The War of the Worlds" by Henrique Alvim Corréa

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's The Time Machine already mentioned, his 1896 The Island of Dr Moreau , and his 1898 The 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 1899 Heart of Darkness and R. L. Stevenson's 1886 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde portray Darwinian thinking in mainstream English literature. [7]

The evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote an optimistic tale, The Last Judgement, in the 1927 collection Possible Worlds. This influenced Olaf Stapledon's 1930 Last 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 in Arthur C. Clarke's 1950 Childhood's End and Brian Aldiss's 1959 Galaxies Like Grains of Sand . Another science fiction theme is the replacement of humanity on Earth by other species or intelligent machines. For instance, Olof Johannesson's 1966 The Great Computer gives humans the role of enabling intelligent machines to evolve, while Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 Galapagos is one of several novels to depict a replacement species. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Darwinism</span> Theory of biological evolution

Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also called Darwinian theory, it originally included the broad concepts of transmutation of species or of evolution which gained general scientific acceptance after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, including concepts which predated Darwin's theories. English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term Darwinism in April 1860.

<i>Darwins Dangerous Idea</i> 1995 book by Daniel Dennett

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natural selection</span> Mechanism of evolution by differential survival and reproduction of individuals

Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which is intentional, whereas natural selection is not.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social Darwinism</span> Group of theories and societal practices

Social Darwinism is the study and implementation of various pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics. Social Darwinists believe that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease. Social Darwinist definitions of the strong and the weak vary, and differ on the precise mechanisms that reward strength and punish weakness. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others, emphasizing struggle between national or racial groups, support eugenics, racism, imperialism and/or fascism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lamarckism</span> Scientific hypothesis about inheritance

Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Survival of the fittest</span> Phrase to describe the mechanism of natural selection

"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "survival of the form that in successive generations will leave most copies of itself."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orthogenesis</span> Hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve towards some goal

Orthogenesis, also known as orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution, evolutionary progress, or progressionism, is an obsolete biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve in a definite direction towards some goal (teleology) due to some internal mechanism or "driving force". According to the theory, the largest-scale trends in evolution have an absolute goal such as increasing biological complexity. Prominent historical figures who have championed some form of evolutionary progress include Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Henri Bergson.

The Transmutation of species and transformism are 18th and early 19th-century ideas about the change of one species into another that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. The French Transformisme was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory, and other 18th and 19th century proponents of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas included Denis Diderot, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, Robert Grant, and Robert Chambers, the anonymous author of the book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Such ideas were associated with 18th century ideas of Deism and human progress. Opposition in the scientific community to these early theories of evolution, led by influential scientists like the anatomists Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen, and the geologist Charles Lyell, was intense. The debate over them was an important stage in the history of evolutionary thought and influenced the subsequent reaction to Darwin's theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Islamic views on evolution</span>

Islamic views on evolution are diverse, ranging from theistic evolution to Old Earth creationism. Some Muslims around the world believe "humans and other living things have evolved over time", yet some others believe they have "always existed in present form". Some Muslims believe that the processes of life on Earth started from one single point of species with a mixture of water and a viscous clay-like substance. Muslim thinkers have proposed and accepted elements of the theory of evolution, some holding the belief of the supremacy of God in the process. Some scholars suggested that both narratives of creation and of evolution, as understood by modern science, may be believed by modern Muslims as addressing two different kinds of truth, the revealed and the empirical. Others argue that faith and science can be integrated and complement each other.

Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution is the notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time. The concept relates to the idea that evolution has a divine purpose (teleology) and is thus progressive (orthogenesis), for example that feet might be better than hooves, or lungs than gills. However, evolutionary biology makes no such assumptions, and natural selection shapes adaptations with no foreknowledge or foresights of any kind regarding the outcome. It is possible for small changes to be reversed by chance or selection, but this is no different from the normal course of evolution and as such de-evolution is not compatible with a proper understanding of evolution due to natural selection.

Darwinian literary studies is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend of neo-Darwinian thought in intellectual disciplines beyond those traditionally considered as evolutionary biology: evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, affective neuroscience, behavioural genetics, evolutionary epistemology, and other such disciplines.

Michael T. Ghiselin was an American biologist and philosopher as well as historian of biology, formerly at the California Academy of Sciences.

Julian Huxley used the phrase "the eclipse of Darwinism" to describe the state of affairs prior to what he called the "modern synthesis". During the "eclipse", evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism. Historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler have used the same phrase as a label for the period within the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s to around 1920, when alternatives to natural selection were developed and explored—as many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong guess on Charles Darwin's part, or at least to be of relatively minor importance.

Universal Darwinism, also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics, is a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, linguistics, economics, culture, medicine, computer science, and physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of evolutionary thought</span>

Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology; and the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science: as the Enlightenment progressed, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of palaeontology with the concept of extinction further undermined static views of nature. In the early 19th century prior to Darwinism, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Teleology in biology</span> Use of language of goal-directedness in the context of evolutionary adaptation

Teleology in biology is the use of the language of goal-directedness in accounts of evolutionary adaptation, which some biologists and philosophers of science find problematic. The term teleonomy has also been proposed. Before Darwin, organisms were seen as existing because God had designed and created them; their features such as eyes were taken by natural theology to have been made to enable them to carry out their functions, such as seeing. Evolutionary biologists often use similar teleological formulations that invoke purpose, but these imply natural selection rather than actual goals, whether conscious or not. Some biologists and religious thinkers held that evolution itself was somehow goal-directed (orthogenesis), and in vitalist versions, driven by a purposeful life force. With evolution working by natural selection acting on inherited variation, the use of teleology in biology has attracted criticism, and attempts have been made to teach students to avoid teleological language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alternatives to Darwinian evolution</span> List of alternatives to Darwinian natural selection

Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things. The alternatives in question do not deny that evolutionary changes over time are the origin of the diversity of life, nor that the organisms alive today share a common ancestor from the distant past ; rather, they propose alternative mechanisms of evolutionary change over time, arguing against mutations acted on by natural selection as the most important driver of evolutionary change.

<i>Monad to Man</i> 1996 book by Michael Ruse

Monad to Man: the concept of progress in evolutionary biology is a 1996 book about the longstanding idea that evolution is progressive by the philosopher of biology Michael Ruse. It analyses the connection between ideas of progress in culture generally and its application in evolutionary biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Missing link (human evolution)</span> Non-scientific term for a transitional fossil

"Missing link" is a hypothetical or recently-discovered transitional fossil. It is often used in popular science and in the media for any new transitional form. The term originated to describe the hypothetical intermediate form in the evolutionary series of anthropoid ancestors to anatomically modern humans (hominization). The term was influenced by the pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory of the Great Chain of Being and the now-outdated notion (orthogenesis) that simple organisms are more primitive than complex organisms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biology in fiction</span> Overview of biology used in fiction

Biology appears in fiction, especially but not only in science fiction, both in the shape of real aspects of the science, used as themes or plot devices, and in the form of fictional elements, whether fictional extensions or applications of biological theory, or through the invention of fictional organisms. Major aspects of biology found in fiction include evolution, disease, genetics, physiology, parasitism and symbiosis (mutualism), ethology, and ecology.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Stableford, Brian M.; Langford, David R. (5 July 2018). "Evolution". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Gollancz. Retrieved 24 July 2018.
  2. Coyne, Jerry A. (2009). Why Evolution is True . Oxford University Press. p.  17. ISBN   978-0-19-923084-6.
  3. "Evolution Resources". Washington, D.C.: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-06-03.
  4. Ruse, Michael (1996). Monad to man: the Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology . Harvard University Press. pp.  526–539. ISBN   978-0-674-03248-4.
  5. Zirkle, Conway (1935). "The Inheritance of Acquired Characters and the Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis". The American Naturalist . 69 (724): 417–445. doi:10.1086/280617. S2CID   84729069.
  6. 1 2 Hardwick, Kayla M. (22 October 2014). "Natural selection at the movies: Only the bad guys evolve". Nothing in Biology Makes Sense [except in the light of evolution]. Retrieved 24 July 2018.
  7. Levine, George (5 October 1986). "Darwin and the Evolution of Fiction". The New York Times . Retrieved 24 July 2018.