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.

intelligent machines
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Context

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

Further information: Orthogenesis

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

Robert Heinlein's 1959 Starship Troopers, and the effective colonisation by Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens.[6]

Lamarckism

Further information: 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

Henrique Alvim Corréa
Further information: Speculative evolution

Darwin's version of evolution has been widely explored in fiction, both in fantasies and in imaginative explorations of its grimmer "

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde portray Darwinian thinking in mainstream English literature.[7]

The evolutionary biologist

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

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Stableford, Brian M.; Langford, David R. (5 July 2018). "Evolution". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Gollancz. Retrieved 24 July 2018.
  2. ISBN 978-0-19-923084-6
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  3. ^ "Evolution Resources". Washington, D.C.: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-06-03.
  4. ISBN 978-0-674-03248-4
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  5. S2CID 84729069
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  6. ^ a b 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.
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