Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
l'Homme, but it also gives this a clear religious meaning, much like George
Bernard Shaw's
Back to Methuselah
(1921), from which the above speech was
lifted almost verbatim. Not only does evolution make human beings more
scientific, it also brings them closer to realizing a gnostic salvation from
the slavery of matter. Ultimately Gwyllm's desire to follow its path into the
realm of pure spirit is thwarted by his girlfriend Cathy, who takes charge
of the genetic time machine and reverses his course, but evolution is by
no means impugned by this act. As the story closes, a narrator steps in to
explain that humans are merely not ready for this final destiny.
An experiment too soon, too swift. And yet may we not still hope to
discover a method by which within one generation the whole human race
could be rendered intelligent, beyond hatred, revenge, or the desire for
power? Is that not after all the ultimate goal of evolution?
The “method” that will achieve this ultimate goal is the technological mas-
tery of evolution that this story imagines—science, in other words. In the
end, the evolution of science converges with the evolution of nature; they
are the same thing.
This theme found perhaps its most poignant statement a few years
later in Stanley Kubrick's film
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). The mystical
union of science and evolution that reaches its climax deep in space, in the
then-distant future of the twenty-first century, is anticipated in its opening
episode, “The Dawn of Man,” where australopithecine tribes battle extinc-
tion in the harsh Pliocene deserts of Africa. As yet without tools or speech,
they struggle to find food and to avoid becoming food, but their fate takes
a hopeful turn with the appearance of a mysterious black monolith, the
creation of an extraterrestrial intelligence that has been supervising human
evolution for eons. This object triggers a new stage of brain development,
and this manifests in the discovery of primitive tools. The spirit of science
that hovers over the deep is guiding human evolution toward a scientific
future, and Kubrick visually underlines this theme at the close of this act
when the story's hominid inventor triumphantly thrusts his bone weapon
into the air. As it tumbles above the earth, the club becomes a space station
orbiting the moon four million years later, where a second evolutionary
epoch is about to begin. A second monolith has now been found at the cen-
ter of the Moon's Tycho crater, buried deep beneath the meteoric dust that
has accumulated since alien scientists deposited it there four million years
earlier. As daybreak again falls upon the newly excavated monolith, it emits
