While Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through Victorian England with its novel theories of evolution and natural selection, the groundbreaking work concludes with a hopeful message: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin not only intimates that a creator may have “breathed” life into early organisms, maintaining the idea of divine creation, but asks us to see the “grandeur” in the concept of evolution. Species—and by extension, humankind—are ultimately progressing upward, toward perfection.
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Although Victorian sci-fi pioneer H.G. Wells studied biology under T.H. Huxley and was a devout Darwinist, he challenged the optimistic gloss on Darwin's theory of natural selection, supposing that the evolution of homo sapiens could as easily lead to stagnation and regress as to progress. With an uncanny prescience, Wells' novels predict many of the horrors of mankind following WW1—nuclear weapons, tanks, bombing planes, the harnessing of technology by totalitarian superstates to crush privacy and freedom, and more.
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‍The Island of Doctor Moreau is a fascinating riff on Darwin’s theme of the grandeur of evolution. The story begins when Edward Prendrick, a shipwrecked biologist, is picked up by a passing schooner packed with a menagerie of animals and meets a man named Montgomery. Montgomery informs Prendrick that they’re headed towards an island, and we soon learn there is something sinister lurking beneath the surface. Once Prendrick is tossed off the ship and forced to make shelter on the island, he’s instantly disoriented. The island is populated by strange animal-human hybrids referred to as Beast Folk, and lorded over by a crazed scientist, Dr. Moreau, whom Montgomery is assisting. The Beast Folk, Prendrick later discovers, are the result of Moreau’s gruesome experiments in vivisection.
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While the Beast Folk have limited ability to speak and reason, they’re gifted a moral code by Moreau, consisting of injunctions like “not to walk on all fours,” “not to claw the bark of trees,” and “not to eat flesh.” As time passes and even Prendrick finds himself growing increasingly wild as the sole human survivor on the island, the Beast Folk begin to reassume their animal forms, losing their grasp of language and forgetting the ethical code. Upon his return to England, Prendrick is permanently shaken. He muses: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that.”
‍
Through his portrait of Moreau and the so-called order of the natural world created under his “overmastering spell of research," Wells questions the tie between modern science and progress as well as the evolutionary destiny of mankind.
While Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through Victorian England with its novel theories of evolution and natural selection, the groundbreaking work concludes with a hopeful message: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin not only intimates that a creator may have “breathed” life into early organisms, maintaining the idea of divine creation, but asks us to see the “grandeur” in the concept of evolution. Species—and by extension, humankind—are ultimately progressing upward, toward perfection.
‍
Although Victorian sci-fi pioneer H.G. Wells studied biology under T.H. Huxley and was a devout Darwinist, he challenged the optimistic gloss on Darwin's theory of natural selection, supposing that the evolution of homo sapiens could as easily lead to stagnation and regress as to progress. With an uncanny prescience, Wells' novels predict many of the horrors of mankind following WW1—nuclear weapons, tanks, bombing planes, the harnessing of technology by totalitarian superstates to crush privacy and freedom, and more.
‍
‍The Island of Doctor Moreau is a fascinating riff on Darwin’s theme of the grandeur of evolution. The story begins when Edward Prendrick, a shipwrecked biologist, is picked up by a passing schooner packed with a menagerie of animals and meets a man named Montgomery. Montgomery informs Prendrick that they’re headed towards an island, and we soon learn there is something sinister lurking beneath the surface. Once Prendrick is tossed off the ship and forced to make shelter on the island, he’s instantly disoriented. The island is populated by strange animal-human hybrids referred to as Beast Folk, and lorded over by a crazed scientist, Dr. Moreau, whom Montgomery is assisting. The Beast Folk, Prendrick later discovers, are the result of Moreau’s gruesome experiments in vivisection.
‍
While the Beast Folk have limited ability to speak and reason, they’re gifted a moral code by Moreau, consisting of injunctions like “not to walk on all fours,” “not to claw the bark of trees,” and “not to eat flesh.” As time passes and even Prendrick finds himself growing increasingly wild as the sole human survivor on the island, the Beast Folk begin to reassume their animal forms, losing their grasp of language and forgetting the ethical code. Upon his return to England, Prendrick is permanently shaken. He muses: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that.”
‍
Through his portrait of Moreau and the so-called order of the natural world created under his “overmastering spell of research," Wells questions the tie between modern science and progress as well as the evolutionary destiny of mankind.
While Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through Victorian England with its novel theories of evolution and natural selection, the groundbreaking work concludes with a hopeful message: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin not only intimates that a creator may have “breathed” life into early organisms, maintaining the idea of divine creation, but asks us to see the “grandeur” in the concept of evolution. Species—and by extension, humankind—are ultimately progressing upward, toward perfection.
‍
Although Victorian sci-fi pioneer H.G. Wells studied biology under T.H. Huxley and was a devout Darwinist, he challenged the optimistic gloss on Darwin's theory of natural selection, supposing that the evolution of homo sapiens could as easily lead to stagnation and regress as to progress. With an uncanny prescience, Wells' novels predict many of the horrors of mankind following WW1—nuclear weapons, tanks, bombing planes, the harnessing of technology by totalitarian superstates to crush privacy and freedom, and more.
‍
‍The Island of Doctor Moreau is a fascinating riff on Darwin’s theme of the grandeur of evolution. The story begins when Edward Prendrick, a shipwrecked biologist, is picked up by a passing schooner packed with a menagerie of animals and meets a man named Montgomery. Montgomery informs Prendrick that they’re headed towards an island, and we soon learn there is something sinister lurking beneath the surface. Once Prendrick is tossed off the ship and forced to make shelter on the island, he’s instantly disoriented. The island is populated by strange animal-human hybrids referred to as Beast Folk, and lorded over by a crazed scientist, Dr. Moreau, whom Montgomery is assisting. The Beast Folk, Prendrick later discovers, are the result of Moreau’s gruesome experiments in vivisection.
‍
While the Beast Folk have limited ability to speak and reason, they’re gifted a moral code by Moreau, consisting of injunctions like “not to walk on all fours,” “not to claw the bark of trees,” and “not to eat flesh.” As time passes and even Prendrick finds himself growing increasingly wild as the sole human survivor on the island, the Beast Folk begin to reassume their animal forms, losing their grasp of language and forgetting the ethical code. Upon his return to England, Prendrick is permanently shaken. He muses: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that.”
‍
Through his portrait of Moreau and the so-called order of the natural world created under his “overmastering spell of research," Wells questions the tie between modern science and progress as well as the evolutionary destiny of mankind.
While Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through Victorian England with its novel theories of evolution and natural selection, the groundbreaking work concludes with a hopeful message: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin not only intimates that a creator may have “breathed” life into early organisms, maintaining the idea of divine creation, but asks us to see the “grandeur” in the concept of evolution. Species—and by extension, humankind—are ultimately progressing upward, toward perfection.
‍
Although Victorian sci-fi pioneer H.G. Wells studied biology under T.H. Huxley and was a devout Darwinist, he challenged the optimistic gloss on Darwin's theory of natural selection, supposing that the evolution of homo sapiens could as easily lead to stagnation and regress as to progress. With an uncanny prescience, Wells' novels predict many of the horrors of mankind following WW1—nuclear weapons, tanks, bombing planes, the harnessing of technology by totalitarian superstates to crush privacy and freedom, and more.
‍
‍The Island of Doctor Moreau is a fascinating riff on Darwin’s theme of the grandeur of evolution. The story begins when Edward Prendrick, a shipwrecked biologist, is picked up by a passing schooner packed with a menagerie of animals and meets a man named Montgomery. Montgomery informs Prendrick that they’re headed towards an island, and we soon learn there is something sinister lurking beneath the surface. Once Prendrick is tossed off the ship and forced to make shelter on the island, he’s instantly disoriented. The island is populated by strange animal-human hybrids referred to as Beast Folk, and lorded over by a crazed scientist, Dr. Moreau, whom Montgomery is assisting. The Beast Folk, Prendrick later discovers, are the result of Moreau’s gruesome experiments in vivisection.
‍
While the Beast Folk have limited ability to speak and reason, they’re gifted a moral code by Moreau, consisting of injunctions like “not to walk on all fours,” “not to claw the bark of trees,” and “not to eat flesh.” As time passes and even Prendrick finds himself growing increasingly wild as the sole human survivor on the island, the Beast Folk begin to reassume their animal forms, losing their grasp of language and forgetting the ethical code. Upon his return to England, Prendrick is permanently shaken. He muses: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that.”
‍
Through his portrait of Moreau and the so-called order of the natural world created under his “overmastering spell of research," Wells questions the tie between modern science and progress as well as the evolutionary destiny of mankind.
While Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through Victorian England with its novel theories of evolution and natural selection, the groundbreaking work concludes with a hopeful message: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin not only intimates that a creator may have “breathed” life into early organisms, maintaining the idea of divine creation, but asks us to see the “grandeur” in the concept of evolution. Species—and by extension, humankind—are ultimately progressing upward, toward perfection.
‍
Although Victorian sci-fi pioneer H.G. Wells studied biology under T.H. Huxley and was a devout Darwinist, he challenged the optimistic gloss on Darwin's theory of natural selection, supposing that the evolution of homo sapiens could as easily lead to stagnation and regress as to progress. With an uncanny prescience, Wells' novels predict many of the horrors of mankind following WW1—nuclear weapons, tanks, bombing planes, the harnessing of technology by totalitarian superstates to crush privacy and freedom, and more.
‍
‍The Island of Doctor Moreau is a fascinating riff on Darwin’s theme of the grandeur of evolution. The story begins when Edward Prendrick, a shipwrecked biologist, is picked up by a passing schooner packed with a menagerie of animals and meets a man named Montgomery. Montgomery informs Prendrick that they’re headed towards an island, and we soon learn there is something sinister lurking beneath the surface. Once Prendrick is tossed off the ship and forced to make shelter on the island, he’s instantly disoriented. The island is populated by strange animal-human hybrids referred to as Beast Folk, and lorded over by a crazed scientist, Dr. Moreau, whom Montgomery is assisting. The Beast Folk, Prendrick later discovers, are the result of Moreau’s gruesome experiments in vivisection.
‍
While the Beast Folk have limited ability to speak and reason, they’re gifted a moral code by Moreau, consisting of injunctions like “not to walk on all fours,” “not to claw the bark of trees,” and “not to eat flesh.” As time passes and even Prendrick finds himself growing increasingly wild as the sole human survivor on the island, the Beast Folk begin to reassume their animal forms, losing their grasp of language and forgetting the ethical code. Upon his return to England, Prendrick is permanently shaken. He muses: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that.”
‍
Through his portrait of Moreau and the so-called order of the natural world created under his “overmastering spell of research," Wells questions the tie between modern science and progress as well as the evolutionary destiny of mankind.
