(D)evolution & H.G. Wells’ Time Machine
H.G. Wells’ scientific vision of class division and social stagnation
In the popular mind, the term “evolution” is often synonymous with “progress.” But Darwin’s theory of natural selection actually has very little to do with progress toward a general optimization or the betterment of a species. There is no inevitable ideal in evolution, no final perfection at which a species is aimed.
Natural selection is all about adapting traits to ensure survival of the species in response to a specific environment. This means that if greater speed helps a species survive, the faster members of that species will live to pass on their genes while others that are slower die. This process eventually shapes the species to be faster overall. This theory also holds that when greater speed, intelligence or strength is not required for species survival, the species will stop getting faster, smarter, and stronger. It will only “progress” in those ways if it has to.
Whether we’ve always understood this in evolutionary terms or not, humans have been applying the principles of “natural” selection for centuries in agricultural practices. Through selective breeding, scientists and farmers control reproduction of plants and animals to shape a species to their needs, making corn taller, making cows fatter, and taking the seeds out of grapes. Notably, a seedless grape is not a “better” grape. In some obvious ways, it’s worse. The organism has evolved into something that cannot reproduce on its own.
Sometimes, as in breeding, the demands that drive evolution are artificial. Sometimes, they are natural. These twin ideas are central H.G. Wells’ point in The Time Machine.
As a student of biology in his youth, Wells was fully aware of Darwin’s theory and its ambivalent relationship to progress. In The Time Machine, he highlights this ambivalence by contrasting the ideas of social evolution and biological evolution and in doing so he generates a comment on what he sees as an overly rigid (and destructive) social class structure in England.
In a preface to Scientific Romances, H.G. Wells describes the Time Traveler’s narrative as a rebuke to “placid assumptions” prevailing when the book was written in the 1890s which presumed “that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind” (qtd. in Philmus, “The Fourth Dimension as Prophecy”). He also described the novel as “an assault on human self-satisfaction” (ibid.)
These ideas seem to apply equally to the Societal and the Biological.
With the story of the Eloi and the Morlocks, Wells depicts a scenario where natural, biological adaptation is driven by social progress to the point where a utopian vision is achieved. Developments in science and engineering have allowed humans to eliminate threats to survival. They live in peace and plenty.
But this utopia is founded on a rotten social system where the labor class is oppressed by the leisure class. The biological process of evolution that accompanies human social progress eventually makes the Eloi into the delicate, elfin figures we encounter in the novel. Then evolution takes another step and turns this utopia into a dystopia.
In Section 4 of The Time Machine, the Time Traveler discusses a theory of mankind’s relationship to nature wherein people select traits of plant and animal life through breeding. This section of the novel contains perhaps the most utopian vision of a future where mankind “shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.”
In this version of the future, along with these scientific achievements, “[s]ocial triumphs, too, had been effected […] There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle.”
These successes have side-effects, however. Immediately following the outline of a perfect world, Wells projects its costs in specifically evolutionary terms: “For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak.”
Wells is suggesting here that necessity and necessity alone engenders strength in a species. When the need for strength disappears, strength does too.
“We are kept on the grindstone of pain and necessity,” Wells writes, “and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!”
Like the flightless Kiwi bird, the absence of predators and dangers has evolved a species incapable of self-defense, a species whose traits reflect the assumption of security. But without being driven to the adaptation of strength, natural selection can and will generate a weaker species.
For Wells in The Time Machine, this notion also applies to the kind of social complacency that would accept (and even champion) an economic system that fails to address class inequities.
An apparently unassailable leisure class can weaken in the same way the Kiwi lost its ability to fly. This is precisely the story of his elfin Eloi, preyed upon finally by the people they had subjugated, a people living in conditions that forced them to continue to develop strengths.
In the end, not only does The Time Machine’s initial utopia (positive social vision) give way to a dystopia (negative social vision), the utopia is actually the source and cause of the dsytopia that overtakes it.
Evolution doesn’t lead only to progress after all.
