multi-storied #22: Beastly evolution
An outtake from "A Dominant Character"
One of the enjoyable aspects of writing a book is the chance to wander. Tracks of thought may lead you down surprising routes, although it is, of course, up to you to figure out how long a stroll to take before making your way back to your main thoroughfare. All the drafts of “A Dominant Character,” my biography of the scientist and Communist J. B. S. Haldane, contained numerous such excursions. Some stayed in. A few fell out; I felt, perhaps, that I was straying too much.
Here’s one of the outtakes, which, in the first draft, followed a survey of the fractious state of evolutionary studies in the late 19th / early 20th century. I’d wanted to describe how the arguments over evolution weren’t happening in sealed chambers at the very tops of ivory towers—how, in fact, they were influencing the creative imagination, showing up in the popular literature that little Jack Haldane was reading at the time. Writing this involved a very, very enjoyable month of reading classic science fiction in the Trinity College library in Dublin. (Reading. That’s one of the other enjoyable aspects of writing a book. How I miss it.)
ALL these debates occurred between scientists, but they also heated up the popular imagination. Darwin had, after all, been so bold as to erase a full view of the world and pencil in a new one, with startling new conceptions of nature, time, God and human life. Literature responded to these gifts with enthusiasm—in particular, the genre that went on to be called science fiction. Much later, in the 20th century, the sensible argument arose that futuristic fiction would never have come into being without Darwin. Darwin gave writers the notion of deep time; a past that stretched back millions of years, rather than the few thousand claimed by church doctrine, also generated a future of similar abundance. The narrative possibilities became suddenly limitless. Between 1870 and 1900, at least 70 futuristic fantasies premised on evolution were published in England. The writers Jack was reading in his boyhood found it impossible to avoid Darwinian ideas. H. G. Wells, in The First Men in the Moon, described a race of Selenites who had evolved to prosper in lunar conditions. Two Jules Verne adventurers, tramping through Gabon in The Village in The Treetops, discover a tribe of simian creatures who might just constitute the so-called “missing link” between ape and man. Kipling filled his Just So Stories with animals that transformed along Lamarckian lines.
Inevitably, novelists thinking through Darwinism—its mutability of creatures, its prospects for power—began to forecast the grim degeneration of the human race. Under the watchful eye of God, man was forever perfect, and He cared for the species with tenderness. Darwinism offered only dispassion and the potentially callous vagaries of chance. It wasn’t very long ago that apes turned into men. What prevented men from turning back into apes, or into some other kind of animal? Scratch the surface of this refined creature, and the ancient beast still lurked underneath. Europe in the fin de siècle was already worried about the decline of its civilisation and the corruption of its racial purity. In 1892, the year of Jack’s birth, a German writer named Max Nordau published Degeneration, a screed in which he fretted about his time’s decadent aesthetics and the “Darwinian mechanisms” by which they were being passed on from generation to generation. (“Degenerates lisp and stammer… They draw and paint like children, who dirty tables and walls with mischievous hands. They confound all the arts, and lead them back to the primitive form they had before evolution differentiated them.”) The fragility of human sophistication—the swiftness with which the species could regress into atavism—seeped into fantasy fiction as well. It only required a chemical draught to turn Dr Edward Jekyll into a bestial killer. It only required a persistent mingling of races, in H. Rider Haggard’s She, to reduce the residents of the once-proud city of Kôr into a debased race. The Belgian writer Ray Nyst, who populated his 1909 novel La Caverne with a human tribe living a million years ago, observed: “Prehistoric man isn’t dead. He lives in us.”
No writer ransacked these themes more thoroughly than H. G. Wells, who had studied biology under T. H. Huxley, the staunchest champion of Darwin’s theories. “I believed then he was the greatest man I was ever likely to meet, and I believe that all the more firmly today,” Wells said of Huxley. In his novels and short stories, and in essays and columns in The Saturday Review, Wells wrestled with the implications of Darwinism for the future of the human race. He regarded natural selection with apprehension; it grips us grimly, he wrote in a column in 1895, and it uses death to achieve its cold ends. “Has anything arisen to show that the seed of the unfit need not perish, that a species may wheel into line with new conditions without the generous assistance of Death, that where the life and breeding of every individual in a species is about equally secure, a degenerative process must not inevitably supervene?” Wells thought not. To evolve was to suffer, and not necessarily to improve: “The phenomena of degeneration rob one of any confidence that the new forms will be, in any case or in a majority of cases, ‘higher’…than the old.” Wells’ view of natural selection was much bleaker, in fact, than that of its first theoretician. “From the war of nature,” Darwin had written in The Origin of Species, “from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
In two novels in particular, Wells revealed the despair he felt about the evolutionary future of mankind.
Published in 1895, The Time Machine follows an inventor travelling into the future, to the year 802,701. He meets, first, the Eloi, descendants of humanity, all with “the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb.” They lead easy lives, eating fruit and wearing silk and sleeping in splendidly ruined palaces, as if every one of them is an effete Roman emperor. The Time Traveller presumes that the Eloi have long completed a perfect conquest of nature. Having wiped their surroundings clean of every conceivable threat, they had no use for strength or intelligence, so evolution burgled them of these qualities. If there is a blandness to the Eloi spirit, the Traveller concludes, it has been a small price to pay to free mankind from the grindstone of necessity, and to achieve this last, great peace.
Speedily, these assumptions have to be revised. The Traveller’s time machine disappears, and he finds that it has been stolen by the Morlocks: “bleached, obscene, nocturnal,” an order of beings living in tunnels under the earth. In the cold-water shock of realisation that often splashes upon Wellsian heroes, the Traveller understands that humanity has bifurcated into two different species. The Morlocks are, in fact, the distant offspring of mankind’s working classes, banished to labour below ground, living so long in their tunnels that their skin turned ash-white and their eyes carbuncle-red. They toil still to tend to their overlords, the Eloi, ensuring they’re fed and clothed, keeping their world tranquil. But the Morlocks are also deprived of sustenance. Cows, sheep, horses and dogs have gone extinct, so the Morlocks eat the only meat they can get: the Eloi. Wretched though they may be, the Morlocks are not so much serving the Eloi as farming them.
In his description of the gulf between the bosses and their workers, Wells was flying his political colours; he had declared himself a socialist for the past decade, and he abhorred the divisions of class in British society. But in his fantasy about the bosses becoming dinner, Wells was explaining the dismal truth about evolution. Life has to keep running to survive. “It is a law of nature we overlook,” the Traveller muses, “that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.” Man’s inclination, though, is to stop running, to tame the world altogether. And yet, as we gain more and more safety and security, we weaken. Our strength and intellect, unrequired, begin to rust. We degenerate. Natural selection will be ruthless with us.
In reverse, our attempts to be ruthless with natural selection are bound for defeat as well, Wells thought. A year after The Time Machine, Wells published The Island of Dr Moreau, its dark plot premised on vivisection—which he ferociously opposed—but applicable to every human effort to re-engineer nature against its will.
SOMEWHERE in the southern Pacific, a ship brings its cargo of wild animals to a remote island; along the way, it has rescued Edward Prendick, a sailor who has survived a wreck, and it deposits him here as well. The island’s staff of curiously distorted men keeps Prendick confined to his room in a compound, but he learns that he is receiving the reluctant hospitality of a certain Moreau. The name tugs at his mind until he recalls, suddenly, the controversial physiologist who had been howled out of England by an outcry against his heinous experiments on animals.
Prendick observes the island’s residents more closely. One man has pointed ears and eyes that gleam in the dark. Another walks on all fours. Some have chinless faces, lipless mouths, retreating foreheads, and scant, bristly hair; they wear nothing but a swatch of fabric around their torsos. “Each of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into it—into its movements, into the expression of its countenance, into its whole presence—some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast.”
Moreau is engaged in nothing less than the godly project of man-making: carving animals up, juggling their chemical rhythms, refashioning them in his own image. For 20 years, he has ground away at gorillas and leopards and hyenas and pumas, convinced he can lift them into the higher plane of human existence. But he has never fully succeeded, he admits at last to Prendick. He gets the shape right, although his creations still tend to have paws rather than hands. It’s the mind, though, that foils Moreau. There is, he says, “something that I cannot touch, somewhere—I cannot determine where—in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst forth suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear.” Like a man trying to push a buoy underwater, Moreau suppresses the wild traits in his subjects, but they always hurry back to the surface. “But I will conquer yet! Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’”
As he tries to short-circuit evolution, Moreau pays no heed to the ethics of his methods. “The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature,” he tries to explain. But Prendick is aghast at how Moreau, crazed with power, has descended into wanton cruelty. Even after the torment of the physical transformation ends, his creatures suffer an existential agony. “Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand.”
When they’re finally freed of Moreau’s control, the hybrids degenerate, slip-sliding back the way they came, returning to the traits imposed by their stubborn beast-flesh. The dog-man drops to all fours, grows more hair, and stops speaking; the monkey-man jabbers incomprehensibly. Prendick senses that he will soon be in danger, from the regressed pumas and hyenas around him; he builds a boat and flees the island, eventually finding his way back to London. Even in the metropolis, though, he feels the latent animalism of the men and women around him—their evolved humanity applied as just thin veneer upon their brutal spirits. The degradation of the islands, Prendick fears, will be presently be played over again on a larger scale. Natural selection is fickle, and its gains never fully secured, Wells thought. We may study the mechanics of evolution, and perhaps even understand them fully, but they will forever thwart our exertions to control them.