Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Mathers' machine, Griffiths is advanced 10,000 years into the future, and
afterwards his development continues spontaneously, taking him millions
of years further. By the end of the story the Welsh lad is hardly recognizable;
the megacephalic features that now dramatically set him off from even the
brilliant geneticist who has engineered his transformation are the outward
signs of an intellect so transformed that Gwyllm now views his human
companions as mere apes. What is also apparent is that every step of his
evolution is making Gwyllm into a scientist. Even before he steps inside
the evolution machine, he has exchanged his miner's clothes for a white lab
coat, but afterwards his intellectual tastes grow in accordance with his ever-
expanding cranium. At first, Gwyllm's insatiable appetite for knowledge
turns him to art. In one scene, Professor Mathers finds him playing Bach
preludes on the piano with the skill of an advanced concert performer, but
this interest is quickly subsumed by scientific aspirations as he realizes that
“playing the piano is only a matter of mathematics with a certain degree of
manual dexterity.”
The virtue of Gwyllm's scientific evolution is in doubt at first. The
young Welshman's smoldering anger has now become so pronounced that
his initial contempt for the local mining village now threatens to boil over
into a genocidal mania made possible by his enhanced powers. In this
regard, the first phase of Gwyllm's evolution is merely a recapitulation of
scientific history as it was popularly conceived during the Cold War. As
his scientific powers grow, so also does the temptation to destroy the world
from which he has arisen. Ultimately, however, just as his wrath is about to
fall upon his neighbors, evolution redeems him. He moves “beyond hatred
and revenge or even the desire for power,” beyond those emotional impulses
that formerly empowered science for destruction. Hatred gives way to com-
passion, and Gwyllm now wishes to fully realize this destiny by returning
again to the evolution machine. He recognizes that in the fullness of evolu-
tion he will be set free from the corruptions of the body.
I feel myself reaching that stage in the dim future of mankind when the
mind will cast off the hamperings of the flesh and become all thought
and no matter—a vortex of pure intelligence in space. It is the goal of
evolution; man's final destiny is to become what he imagined in the begin-
ning when he first learned the idea of the angels. But that is far ahead and
I am impatient to go the whole way.
This story manifests in narrative form the same linkage between biolog-
ical evolution and the scientific identity that we witnessed in the Musée de
