| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
31 Jan 2007 02:04:29 PM |
| Object: |
Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine |
H. G. Wells meets Thomas Huxley and Darwin.
---
Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine
Date Monday, January 29 @ 00:01:17
Topic Terrestrial Origins
From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition comes a story of a now
legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in Oxford. On 30 June 1860, Darwinıs Bulldog, Thomas Huxley,
strode into the meeting and faced a large and eager audience. His
opponent for the evening was Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford -- a fervent
public speaker who was nicknamed Soapy Sam for his habit of rubbing his
hands together as he sermonised. But Wilberforce was about to meet his
match.
Setting the tone for the battle that was to follow, Wilberforce
condemned Darwinıs theory as ³a dishonouring view of Nature . . .
absolutely incompatible with the word of God². Becoming quickly carried
away by his oratory, the meeting took a decisive twist. Turning to his
antagonist with a smiling insolence, Wilberforce begged to know, was it
through Huxleyıs grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent
from a monkey? Huxley slowly and deliberately rose, very quiet and very
grave, whispering ³The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands², and
replied:
³A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would
rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice²
The effect on the meeting was electrifying. One woman fainted and was
carried out. Many others jumped to their feet in the excitement, and
Captain FitzRoy of the famous Beagle paced up and down, brandishing the
Bible, and chanting ³The Book, the Book!²
Once the meeting was over:
³every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day . . . some
naive person wished it could come over again; and Mr Huxley, with the
look on his face of the victor who feels the cost of victory, put us
aside saying, Once in a life-time is enough, if not too much.ı²
But the drama of Darwinism had just begun. Nationalists used Darwinism
to argue for a strong state as the fittest among nations, militarists
found in it the sanction for war, and imperialists the justification for
the conquest of inferior racesı. Only an exceptional few took a
conscious part in condemning these developments. And one of those
radical challengers was Huxleyıs own student, H G Wells.
Darwinıs Influence
The publication in 1859 of Darwinıs Origin of Species had a tremendous
impact upon popular fiction and the communication of astrobiology. It
transformed all spheres of thought - scientific, social, spiritual, and
artistic. And one of the most popular forms was the utopian tale, which
not only provided a fictional vehicle for thinking about the future, it
also examined the social implications of evolution itself.
The irresistible rise of the metaphor of evolution spawned around 70
futuristic fantasies in England between 1870 and 1900. As a result, an
increasing number of people met the astrobiological ideas of Darwinian
evolution, not through science, but as a text. These books inspired
emotional as well as intellectual reactions and embedded the idea of
evolution and the future of humanity even deeper into the public
imagination.
One of the best examples of the age was The Time Machine (1895) by HG
Wells.
The Time Machine
Herbert George Wells emerged from an English lower middle class, that
had previously spawned only one other key author - Charles Dickens.
Wellsı mother had been in service, his father a gardener. Though they
were hopeful of elevating the family status on becoming shopkeepers, the
shop failed gradually, year after year. Wellsı own employment began as a
draper's apprentice, but ended rather abruptly when the young man was
told he was not refined enough to be a draper. Such rejection at the
sharp end of a class-conscious Victorian age later became the motivation
for Wellsı critique of the worldıs distribution of wealth in novels such
as Kipps (1905).
But Wellsı watershed came on meeting Darwinıs Bulldog.
Wells had won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, later the
Royal College of Science, studying evolutionary biology under the great
TH Huxley. A fervent Darwinian, Huxley was the science communicator in
chief of the Victorian age. He had created the phrase agnosticı for
doubters like himself, and impressed humankindıs hominid ancestry on the
public imagination, with his writing, and with his rhetoric. His public
lectures attracted huge audiences; 2000 were reportedly turned away at
St Martinıs Hall in 1866, the year of Wellsı birth.
With Huxley as his inspiration, Wells began as an author, living in the
dark, lanterned, black macadam streets of Victorian London, engine-room
of the British Empire. The first of Wellsı seminal science fiction
novels, The Time Machine plotted a dark future for Man, and pictured a
sceptical view of the devilish enginery of progress and imperialism. It
was an instant triumph.
The Time Machine has two major themes: evolution and social class.
Both subjects are ingeniously explored in a voyage of discovery through
the invention of a machine, which is central to the bookıs concern with
the dialectic of evolutionary time. The machine itself symbolises the
power of science and reason. The Time Traveller sets out in his machine
to navigate and dominate time, only to discover the grim truth: time is
lord of all. The real significance of the storyıs title becomes clear;
Man is trapped by the diabolical mechanism of time, and bound by an
inexorable history that leads to his inevitable death and extinction
signalled by the new science.
The Travellerıs headlong fall into the future begins at home. The entire
voyage through the evolved worlds of Man shows little spatial shift,
with the terror of each age unravelling in the vicinity of the
Travellerıs laboratory. ³It is not what man has been, but what he will
be, that should interest us² Wells had written in his essay The Man of
the Year Million. And in The Time Machine we had Wellsı answer - a
vision calculated to ³run counter to the placid assumption that
Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for
mankind². Timeıs arrow initially thrusts the narrative forward to the
year 802701 AD. The Traveller meets the Eloi, a race of effete,
virtually androgynous and child-like humans living an apparently
peaceful and pastoral life. Manıs total conquest of nature, it seems,
has led to decadence. But on discovering the dark subterranean machine
world of the albino, ape-like Morlocks, a new theory emerges.
Over time, the gulf between the classes in Victorian society has
produced separate species:
³At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seems clear
as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely
temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer,
was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque
enough to you and wildly incredible! and yet even now there are
existing circumstances to point that way²
Initially believing the Eloi to be dominant descendants of the ruling
class, the Traveller ultimately discovers that a potentially predatory
working class have evolved into the bestial Morlocks, cannibal hominids
who man the machinery that keeps the Eloi - their flocks - passive and
plentiful:
³The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape
in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general
cooperation Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with perfected
science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of
today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a
triumph over nature and the fellow-man.²
An Astrobiological Future?
Wells foresaw a bifocal future. One image in the lens, ³upper-world man
had drifted towards his feeble prettiness², focuses on what Man may
become when a vigorous natural selection is eradicated, as with the
Eloi. And the lens of the Morlockian future, ³the under-world [of] mere
mechanical industry² arises when the cultural condition of
industrialisation serves as a natural, though chronic, selective
environment. Wellsı warning vision is all the more powerful for making
the reader feel responsible; it is the inequities of contemporary class
society that leads to such monstrous futures.
But Wells took a further momentous leap in the fictional portrayal of
evolution; ³People unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the
younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by
one into the parent body². For the first time, the evolution of Man was
revealed not merely as a biological and social process, but also as an
astrobiological development, played out against a backdrop of dying
planets and dying Sun; a vision of Man being swept away ³into the
darkness from which his universe arose². Rescuing his machine from the
Morlocks, the Traveller journeys to the far future. The solar system is
in meltdown. The Earth is locked by tidal forces, as the planets spiral
toward a red giant Sun, which appears to hang motionless in an endless
sunset on a terminal beach upon which the time machine reappears. And in
this death, where the strange round black creatures Man has become hop
about ³against the weltering blood-red water², Wells ends his terrible
account of our progressive devolution, set in the entropic decay of the
cosmic machine.²
---
http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=2222
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
.
|
|
| User: "Michelle Malkin" |
|
| Title: Re: Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine |
31 Jan 2007 08:04:30 PM |
|
|
"johac" <jhachmann@sbcglobal.com> wrote in message
news:jhachmann-8054D7.12042931012007@news.giganews.com...
H. G. Wells meets Thomas Huxley and Darwin.
This was fascinating. Thanks, John. I've been
collecting Wells' books (the less well known ones)
for a few years, now, planning to read them
after I retire and have long periods of time to really
think deeply about what he wrote. Wells wrote a lot
of books and most of them are very heavy going.
Have you ever seen the movie "Things To Come"
which was taken from a non-fiction description of
a possible future? It's primitive as hell but very
well done. That and the George Pal version of
"The Time Machine" with Rod Taylor are my two
favorite movie versions of his books.
---
Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine
Date Monday, January 29 @ 00:01:17
Topic Terrestrial Origins
From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition comes a story of a now
legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in Oxford. On 30 June 1860, Darwinıs Bulldog, Thomas Huxley,
strode into the meeting and faced a large and eager audience. His
opponent for the evening was Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford -- a fervent
public speaker who was nicknamed Soapy Sam for his habit of rubbing his
hands together as he sermonised. But Wilberforce was about to meet his
match.
Setting the tone for the battle that was to follow, Wilberforce
condemned Darwinıs theory as ³a dishonouring view of Nature . . .
absolutely incompatible with the word of God². Becoming quickly carried
away by his oratory, the meeting took a decisive twist. Turning to his
antagonist with a smiling insolence, Wilberforce begged to know, was it
through Huxleyıs grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent
from a monkey? Huxley slowly and deliberately rose, very quiet and very
grave, whispering ³The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands², and
replied:
³A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would
rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice²
The effect on the meeting was electrifying. One woman fainted and was
carried out. Many others jumped to their feet in the excitement, and
Captain FitzRoy of the famous Beagle paced up and down, brandishing the
Bible, and chanting ³The Book, the Book!²
Once the meeting was over:
³every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day . . . some
naive person wished it could come over again; and Mr Huxley, with the
look on his face of the victor who feels the cost of victory, put us
aside saying, Once in a life-time is enough, if not too much.ı²
But the drama of Darwinism had just begun. Nationalists used Darwinism
to argue for a strong state as the fittest among nations, militarists
found in it the sanction for war, and imperialists the justification for
the conquest of inferior racesı. Only an exceptional few took a
conscious part in condemning these developments. And one of those
radical challengers was Huxleyıs own student, H G Wells.
Darwinıs Influence
The publication in 1859 of Darwinıs Origin of Species had a tremendous
impact upon popular fiction and the communication of astrobiology. It
transformed all spheres of thought - scientific, social, spiritual, and
artistic. And one of the most popular forms was the utopian tale, which
not only provided a fictional vehicle for thinking about the future, it
also examined the social implications of evolution itself.
The irresistible rise of the metaphor of evolution spawned around 70
futuristic fantasies in England between 1870 and 1900. As a result, an
increasing number of people met the astrobiological ideas of Darwinian
evolution, not through science, but as a text. These books inspired
emotional as well as intellectual reactions and embedded the idea of
evolution and the future of humanity even deeper into the public
imagination.
One of the best examples of the age was The Time Machine (1895) by HG
Wells.
The Time Machine
Herbert George Wells emerged from an English lower middle class, that
had previously spawned only one other key author - Charles Dickens.
Wellsı mother had been in service, his father a gardener. Though they
were hopeful of elevating the family status on becoming shopkeepers, the
shop failed gradually, year after year. Wellsı own employment began as a
draper's apprentice, but ended rather abruptly when the young man was
told he was not refined enough to be a draper. Such rejection at the
sharp end of a class-conscious Victorian age later became the motivation
for Wellsı critique of the worldıs distribution of wealth in novels such
as Kipps (1905).
But Wellsı watershed came on meeting Darwinıs Bulldog.
Wells had won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, later the
Royal College of Science, studying evolutionary biology under the great
TH Huxley. A fervent Darwinian, Huxley was the science communicator in
chief of the Victorian age. He had created the phrase agnosticı for
doubters like himself, and impressed humankindıs hominid ancestry on the
public imagination, with his writing, and with his rhetoric. His public
lectures attracted huge audiences; 2000 were reportedly turned away at
St Martinıs Hall in 1866, the year of Wellsı birth.
With Huxley as his inspiration, Wells began as an author, living in the
dark, lanterned, black macadam streets of Victorian London, engine-room
of the British Empire. The first of Wellsı seminal science fiction
novels, The Time Machine plotted a dark future for Man, and pictured a
sceptical view of the devilish enginery of progress and imperialism. It
was an instant triumph.
The Time Machine has two major themes: evolution and social class.
Both subjects are ingeniously explored in a voyage of discovery through
the invention of a machine, which is central to the bookıs concern with
the dialectic of evolutionary time. The machine itself symbolises the
power of science and reason. The Time Traveller sets out in his machine
to navigate and dominate time, only to discover the grim truth: time is
lord of all. The real significance of the storyıs title becomes clear;
Man is trapped by the diabolical mechanism of time, and bound by an
inexorable history that leads to his inevitable death and extinction
signalled by the new science.
The Travellerıs headlong fall into the future begins at home. The entire
voyage through the evolved worlds of Man shows little spatial shift,
with the terror of each age unravelling in the vicinity of the
Travellerıs laboratory. ³It is not what man has been, but what he will
be, that should interest us² Wells had written in his essay The Man of
the Year Million. And in The Time Machine we had Wellsı answer - a
vision calculated to ³run counter to the placid assumption that
Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for
mankind². Timeıs arrow initially thrusts the narrative forward to the
year 802701 AD. The Traveller meets the Eloi, a race of effete,
virtually androgynous and child-like humans living an apparently
peaceful and pastoral life. Manıs total conquest of nature, it seems,
has led to decadence. But on discovering the dark subterranean machine
world of the albino, ape-like Morlocks, a new theory emerges.
Over time, the gulf between the classes in Victorian society has
produced separate species:
³At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seems clear
as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely
temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer,
was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque
enough to you and wildly incredible! and yet even now there are
existing circumstances to point that way²
Initially believing the Eloi to be dominant descendants of the ruling
class, the Traveller ultimately discovers that a potentially predatory
working class have evolved into the bestial Morlocks, cannibal hominids
who man the machinery that keeps the Eloi - their flocks - passive and
plentiful:
³The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape
in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general
cooperation Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with perfected
science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of
today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a
triumph over nature and the fellow-man.²
An Astrobiological Future?
Wells foresaw a bifocal future. One image in the lens, ³upper-world man
had drifted towards his feeble prettiness², focuses on what Man may
become when a vigorous natural selection is eradicated, as with the
Eloi. And the lens of the Morlockian future, ³the under-world [of] mere
mechanical industry² arises when the cultural condition of
industrialisation serves as a natural, though chronic, selective
environment. Wellsı warning vision is all the more powerful for making
the reader feel responsible; it is the inequities of contemporary class
society that leads to such monstrous futures.
But Wells took a further momentous leap in the fictional portrayal of
evolution; ³People unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the
younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by
one into the parent body². For the first time, the evolution of Man was
revealed not merely as a biological and social process, but also as an
astrobiological development, played out against a backdrop of dying
planets and dying Sun; a vision of Man being swept away ³into the
darkness from which his universe arose². Rescuing his machine from the
Morlocks, the Traveller journeys to the far future. The solar system is
in meltdown. The Earth is locked by tidal forces, as the planets spiral
toward a red giant Sun, which appears to hang motionless in an endless
sunset on a terminal beach upon which the time machine reappears. And in
this death, where the strange round black creatures Man has become hop
about ³against the weltering blood-red water², Wells ends his terrible
account of our progressive devolution, set in the entropic decay of the
cosmic machine.²
---
http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=2222
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit
atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
.
|
|
|
| User: "johac" |
|
| Title: Re: Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine |
01 Feb 2007 01:07:32 AM |
|
|
In article <q5OdnbLA3K8_11zYnZ2dnUVZ_tyinZ2d@comcast.com>,
"Michelle Malkin" <hypatiab7@comcast.net> wrote:
"johac" <jhachmann@sbcglobal.com> wrote in message
news:jhachmann-8054D7.12042931012007@news.giganews.com...
H. G. Wells meets Thomas Huxley and Darwin.
This was fascinating. Thanks, John. I've been
collecting Wells' books (the less well known ones)
for a few years, now, planning to read them
after I retire and have long periods of time to really
think deeply about what he wrote. Wells wrote a lot
of books and most of them are very heavy going.
I read "War of the Worlds" when I was in elementary school. I was
fascinated by it. The only thing was that it was the book used British
spelling and I was thrown off by words like 'colour' or 'armoured' . I
thought to myself "Great book, but why can't these guys spell?" I was
about nine or ten at the time.
Have you ever seen the movie "Things To Come"
which was taken from a non-fiction description of
a possible future?
One of my favorites too. I haven't seen it in a long while. I'll have to
see if I can get it on DVD.
It's primitive as hell but very
well done. That and the George Pal version of
"The Time Machine" with Rod Taylor are my two
favorite movie versions of his books.
That's the version to get. I like it much better than the recent one.
---
Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine
Date Monday, January 29 @ 00:01:17
Topic Terrestrial Origins
From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition comes a story of a now
legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in Oxford. On 30 June 1860, Darwinıs Bulldog, Thomas Huxley,
strode into the meeting and faced a large and eager audience. His
opponent for the evening was Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford -- a fervent
public speaker who was nicknamed Soapy Sam for his habit of rubbing his
hands together as he sermonised. But Wilberforce was about to meet his
match.
Setting the tone for the battle that was to follow, Wilberforce
condemned Darwinıs theory as ³a dishonouring view of Nature . . .
absolutely incompatible with the word of God². Becoming quickly carried
away by his oratory, the meeting took a decisive twist. Turning to his
antagonist with a smiling insolence, Wilberforce begged to know, was it
through Huxleyıs grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent
from a monkey? Huxley slowly and deliberately rose, very quiet and very
grave, whispering ³The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands², and
replied:
³A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would
rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice²
The effect on the meeting was electrifying. One woman fainted and was
carried out. Many others jumped to their feet in the excitement, and
Captain FitzRoy of the famous Beagle paced up and down, brandishing the
Bible, and chanting ³The Book, the Book!²
Once the meeting was over:
³every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day . . . some
naive person wished it could come over again; and Mr Huxley, with the
look on his face of the victor who feels the cost of victory, put us
aside saying, Once in a life-time is enough, if not too much.ı²
But the drama of Darwinism had just begun. Nationalists used Darwinism
to argue for a strong state as the fittest among nations, militarists
found in it the sanction for war, and imperialists the justification for
the conquest of inferior racesı. Only an exceptional few took a
conscious part in condemning these developments. And one of those
radical challengers was Huxleyıs own student, H G Wells.
Darwinıs Influence
The publication in 1859 of Darwinıs Origin of Species had a tremendous
impact upon popular fiction and the communication of astrobiology. It
transformed all spheres of thought - scientific, social, spiritual, and
artistic. And one of the most popular forms was the utopian tale, which
not only provided a fictional vehicle for thinking about the future, it
also examined the social implications of evolution itself.
The irresistible rise of the metaphor of evolution spawned around 70
futuristic fantasies in England between 1870 and 1900. As a result, an
increasing number of people met the astrobiological ideas of Darwinian
evolution, not through science, but as a text. These books inspired
emotional as well as intellectual reactions and embedded the idea of
evolution and the future of humanity even deeper into the public
imagination.
One of the best examples of the age was The Time Machine (1895) by HG
Wells.
The Time Machine
Herbert George Wells emerged from an English lower middle class, that
had previously spawned only one other key author - Charles Dickens.
Wellsı mother had been in service, his father a gardener. Though they
were hopeful of elevating the family status on becoming shopkeepers, the
shop failed gradually, year after year. Wellsı own employment began as a
draper's apprentice, but ended rather abruptly when the young man was
told he was not refined enough to be a draper. Such rejection at the
sharp end of a class-conscious Victorian age later became the motivation
for Wellsı critique of the worldıs distribution of wealth in novels such
as Kipps (1905).
But Wellsı watershed came on meeting Darwinıs Bulldog.
Wells had won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, later the
Royal College of Science, studying evolutionary biology under the great
TH Huxley. A fervent Darwinian, Huxley was the science communicator in
chief of the Victorian age. He had created the phrase agnosticı for
doubters like himself, and impressed humankindıs hominid ancestry on the
public imagination, with his writing, and with his rhetoric. His public
lectures attracted huge audiences; 2000 were reportedly turned away at
St Martinıs Hall in 1866, the year of Wellsı birth.
With Huxley as his inspiration, Wells began as an author, living in the
dark, lanterned, black macadam streets of Victorian London, engine-room
of the British Empire. The first of Wellsı seminal science fiction
novels, The Time Machine plotted a dark future for Man, and pictured a
sceptical view of the devilish enginery of progress and imperialism. It
was an instant triumph.
The Time Machine has two major themes: evolution and social class.
Both subjects are ingeniously explored in a voyage of discovery through
the invention of a machine, which is central to the bookıs concern with
the dialectic of evolutionary time. The machine itself symbolises the
power of science and reason. The Time Traveller sets out in his machine
to navigate and dominate time, only to discover the grim truth: time is
lord of all. The real significance of the storyıs title becomes clear;
Man is trapped by the diabolical mechanism of time, and bound by an
inexorable history that leads to his inevitable death and extinction
signalled by the new science.
The Travellerıs headlong fall into the future begins at home. The entire
voyage through the evolved worlds of Man shows little spatial shift,
with the terror of each age unravelling in the vicinity of the
Travellerıs laboratory. ³It is not what man has been, but what he will
be, that should interest us² Wells had written in his essay The Man of
the Year Million. And in The Time Machine we had Wellsı answer - a
vision calculated to ³run counter to the placid assumption that
Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for
mankind². Timeıs arrow initially thrusts the narrative forward to the
year 802701 AD. The Traveller meets the Eloi, a race of effete,
virtually androgynous and child-like humans living an apparently
peaceful and pastoral life. Manıs total conquest of nature, it seems,
has led to decadence. But on discovering the dark subterranean machine
world of the albino, ape-like Morlocks, a new theory emerges.
Over time, the gulf between the classes in Victorian society has
produced separate species:
³At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seems clear
as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely
temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer,
was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque
enough to you and wildly incredible! and yet even now there are
existing circumstances to point that way²
Initially believing the Eloi to be dominant descendants of the ruling
class, the Traveller ultimately discovers that a potentially predatory
working class have evolved into the bestial Morlocks, cannibal hominids
who man the machinery that keeps the Eloi - their flocks - passive and
plentiful:
³The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape
in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general
cooperation Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with perfected
science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of
today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a
triumph over nature and the fellow-man.²
An Astrobiological Future?
Wells foresaw a bifocal future. One image in the lens, ³upper-world man
had drifted towards his feeble prettiness², focuses on what Man may
become when a vigorous natural selection is eradicated, as with the
Eloi. And the lens of the Morlockian future, ³the under-world [of] mere
mechanical industry² arises when the cultural condition of
industrialisation serves as a natural, though chronic, selective
environment. Wellsı warning vision is all the more powerful for making
the reader feel responsible; it is the inequities of contemporary class
society that leads to such monstrous futures.
But Wells took a further momentous leap in the fictional portrayal of
evolution; ³People unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the
younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by
one into the parent body². For the first time, the evolution of Man was
revealed not merely as a biological and social process, but also as an
astrobiological development, played out against a backdrop of dying
planets and dying Sun; a vision of Man being swept away ³into the
darkness from which his universe arose². Rescuing his machine from the
Morlocks, the Traveller journeys to the far future. The solar system is
in meltdown. The Earth is locked by tidal forces, as the planets spiral
toward a red giant Sun, which appears to hang motionless in an endless
sunset on a terminal beach upon which the time machine reappears. And in
this death, where the strange round black creatures Man has become hop
about ³against the weltering blood-red water², Wells ends his terrible
account of our progressive devolution, set in the entropic decay of the
cosmic machine.²
---
http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=2222
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit
atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
.
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "" |
|
| Title: Re: Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine |
01 Feb 2007 04:03:42 AM |
|
|
On Feb 1, 9:04 am, johac <jhachm...@sbcglobal.com> wrote:
H. G. Wells meets Thomas Huxley and Darwin.
---
Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine
Date Monday, January 29 @ 00:01:17
Topic Terrestrial Origins
From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition comes a story of a now
legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in Oxford. On 30 June 1860, Darwin=B9s Bulldog, Thomas Huxley,
strode into the meeting and faced a large and eager audience. His
opponent for the evening was Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford -- a fervent
public speaker who was nicknamed Soapy Sam for his habit of rubbing his
hands together as he sermonised. But Wilberforce was about to meet his
match.
Setting the tone for the battle that was to follow, Wilberforce
condemned Darwin=B9s theory as =B3a dishonouring view of Nature . . .
absolutely incompatible with the word of God=B2. Becoming quickly carried
away by his oratory, the meeting took a decisive twist. Turning to his
antagonist with a smiling insolence, Wilberforce begged to know, was it
through Huxley=B9s grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent
from a monkey? Huxley slowly and deliberately rose, very quiet and very
grave, whispering =B3The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands=B2, and
replied:
=B3A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would
rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice=B2
Awesome rejoinder. If Huxley had posted that here it would be worthy
of an AQOTM at least. ;-).
Bill
.
|
|
|
| User: "johac" |
|
| Title: Re: Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine |
01 Feb 2007 11:58:36 PM |
|
|
In article <1170324222.239272.96220@p10g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>,
wrote:
On Feb 1, 9:04 am, johac <jhachm...@sbcglobal.com> wrote:
H. G. Wells meets Thomas Huxley and Darwin.
---
Darwin's Bulldog and the Time Machine
Date Monday, January 29 @ 00:01:17
Topic Terrestrial Origins
From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition comes a story of a now
legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in Oxford. On 30 June 1860, Darwinıs Bulldog, Thomas Huxley,
strode into the meeting and faced a large and eager audience. His
opponent for the evening was Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford -- a fervent
public speaker who was nicknamed Soapy Sam for his habit of rubbing his
hands together as he sermonised. But Wilberforce was about to meet his
match.
Setting the tone for the battle that was to follow, Wilberforce
condemned Darwinıs theory as ³a dishonouring view of Nature . . .
absolutely incompatible with the word of God². Becoming quickly carried
away by his oratory, the meeting took a decisive twist. Turning to his
antagonist with a smiling insolence, Wilberforce begged to know, was it
through Huxleyıs grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent
from a monkey? Huxley slowly and deliberately rose, very quiet and very
grave, whispering ³The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands², and
replied:
³A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would
rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice²
Awesome rejoinder. If Huxley had posted that here it would be worthy
of an AQOTM at least. ;-).
Most definitely. Huxley was a eloquent speaker. To bad he's not around
today to debate the IDiots and the cretinists.
Bill
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
