Captain Future's Log

It's a Wells World After All?

Dr. Oliver Curry, described as an evolutionary biologist at the London School of Economics, is making some headlines with his predictions of the shape of humans to come. Although some of his extrapolations are being questioned, and despite at least one TV station (in Salt Lake City, interestingly) that headlined, "Human Sex Organs Will Get Bigger," Curry's contention that's capturing attention is the future split of humanity into two separate species, one derived from the Haves, and the other the Have Nots.

This of course was the premise of what for all intents and purposes was the first modern science fiction novel, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, still among the best known s/f stories (and one of the most assigned novels of any kind in American schools.) Wells extrapolated from the extreme differences of the new industrial working class and the upper reaches of the leisure class in London in the late 19th century, to posit a far future of lanquid Eloi, the beautiful people out of Aubrey Beardsley illustrations who live blissed out on the surface, while the ugly hulking Morlocks toil in underground mines and factories.

Wells was writing a cautionary tale about social conditions, justice and awareness, as well as a illustrations of the brutality of evolution, and how the common view of it as inevitable progress was not implicit in the Darwinian matrix. He also showed that by dividing, the human race destroyed itself. The Eloi were literally the Molocks' lunch meat. Wells, like his mentor Thomas H. Huxley, believed that humanity had to take its own evoluton into its own hands, through consciousness and action.

Like Wells, Curry sees the rich becoming more beautiful--tall, slim, healthy and attractive. The poor would devolve into stooping hairy stupid brutes. Curry also posits the combination of today's racial characteristics into a single coffee-colored human. That's not much of a stretch--as Richard Rodriguez and others have pointed out, America is already becoming brown demographically, and physically we're seeing the next generation in Tiger Woods. But his rich and beautiful, poor and ugly division is not so certain. As in Wells time, a major problem for the poor is health care and nutrition. The super-rich have access to the best and the latest, including cosmetic enhancements that may in the future become genetic enhancements.

But that's no guarantee. In this world as in this country, there are few rich and many who are not. An entire subspecies descended from the extremely wealthy is doubtful. If the division is between the pretty well off and the very poor, then the beautiful/ugly distinction becomes less sure. I think of those heartrending pictures from the Sudan and the Congo, of people starving, being forced from their homes, being slaughtered--and they are among the most physically beautiful people on earth, especially in their poor but elegant clothing of many beautiful colors and patterns. Contrast them to the Americans who seemed to have doubled in size in recent decades, dumb with fast food and dulled by endless TV commercials. I don't see many Eloi candidates. Morlocks with credit cards maybe.

The growing financial divide between rich and poor, and between rich and poor nations, is leading us to not two species but one very weak one, ripe for the evolutionary picking, if the climate crisis doesn't get us first. Wells is still relevant in this regard. Fortunately, there are countercurrents in our culture and on our planet. Wells is relevant in those patterns as well. He saw the need for human unity, for a united world, for universal human rights and social justice, and more economic equality. Though he shared some of the prejudices of his age, these principles are still good blueprints. But for the moment, it is the ascendant empathy of the human heart that is our greatest hope, for a future of a maturing and ascendant humanity.