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Concept
Evolution in fiction
Summary
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. 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.
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, but it is accompanied as a philosophy and in fiction by two earlier evolutionary theories, progressionism (orthogenesis) and Lamarckism. Progressionism is the view that evolution is progress towards some goal of perfection, and that it is in some way directed towards that goal. 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.
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 (The Southern Hemisphere Discovery by a Flying Man).
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. Hardwick gives as examples of the evolution of "bad-guy traits" the Morlocks in H.
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