Past Future: Evolution of the Future

“I move from a backyard to Cosmopolis…"
H.G. Wells

In the fall of 1884, 18-year-old Bertie Wells took the short train ride from Bromley to London, and became an alien invading another world.

One morning he walked across Kensington Gardens to an imposing building of red brick and creamy terra cotta, with its display of figures depicting the seven ages of man. He signed his name inside its entrance, crossed the marble mosaic floors, bypassed the wide central stairway and took the lift up to the biological laboratories on the fourth and top floor. It was, he wrote in his autobiography, “one of the great days of my life.”

Normal School of Science 1880s

It was his first day as a student at the Normal School of Science. The building was part of an impressive complex that included the Albert Hall and the magnificent new Natural History Museum. There were domes and arcades, spires and turrets all around it.  It was a deliberate and still unfinished cluster of buildings housing major institutions of the arts and sciences, constructed on what had recently been farmland.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 had been held nearby. Housed in the Crystal Palace, the largest enclosure of glass supported by cast iron ever built to that time, it dazzled visitors (including Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Charlotte Bronte) with the latest technology. The Exhibition was very popular and profitable, with those profits devoted to building some of these South Kensington structures, including the Normal School. This area was now London’s new center of knowledge, especially in the sciences.

Natural History Museum in South Kensington today. A ceremony
was held here when Huxley retired from teaching.

On the top floor Wells found large laboratories equipped with scientific instruments. He could look down over the balcony onto the glass dome of the lecture theatre below. But it would be the labs, and especially a smaller lecture theatre adjacent to the labs that would become his most important focus. There, surrounded by black shelves of mammalian skeletons and skulls, Thomas Henry Huxley would talk.

T.H. Huxley was the Dean of the Normal School of Science, which he had advocated and created. For decades he had been the country’s chief advocate for science. “...he made a profession of science,” wrote his biographer Adrian Desmond. “With him the ‘scientist’ was born.”

T.H. Huxley

He was also a persistent advocate for education in the sciences at all levels, and this time not just for the ruling classes. In 1871 he fused together several separate schools to provide a broad science education. A decade later he gave it an official name, the Normal School of Science, an unsuccessful attempt to suggest the élan of the French Ecole Normale. Shortly after Wells’ time it was renamed the Royal College of Science.

Wells was assigned to Huxley’s basic biology course. “Here were microscopes, dissections, models, diagrams close to the objects they elucidated, specimens, museums, ready answers to questions, explanations discussions,” Wells remembered. “Here I was under the shadow of Huxley, the acutest observer, the ablest generalizer, the great teacher, the most lucid and valiant of controversialists... The year I spent in Huxley’s class, was beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.”

Huxley was one of the most famous men in England, and he inspired awe in his students, including Wells, who was told that beyond a curtain at the back of the auditorium, Charles Darwin himself had sometimes waited, listening to Huxley lecture.

In later life, Wells still wrote of Huxley and Darwin as figures representing his own ideals. “These two were very great men. They thought boldly, carefully and simply, they spoke and wrote fearlessly and plainly, they lived modestly and decently; they were mighty intellectual liberators.”

Wells and his fellow students sought out and read Huxley’s books and articles. Partly due to the structure of the course, partly because Huxley was ill much of that year, others carried out the classroom teaching and the demonstrations. Wells himself never had so much as a conversation with Huxley. He recalled a single morning when they exchanged greetings.

But Huxley gave the guiding lectures. There’s a photograph of Wells’ mimicking Huxley’s habit of draping his arm around the upright skeleton of a gorilla as he talked. Those lectures were the center of the transformation Wells experienced that year. He felt an “extraordinary mental enlargement as my mind passed from the printed sciences within book covers to these intimate real things and then radiated outward to a realization that the synthesis of the sciences composed a vital interpretation of the world."

This synthesis was implicit in the program Huxley had devised for the Normal School. In 1834 British philosopher William Whewell had argued that
the study of the material world was being fragmented, and practitioners of specific sciences didn’t know enough about how their findings related to other sciences. He proposed a new word to describe students of collective scientific knowledge. In an analogy to artists, he wanted to call them “scientists.”

Huxley would not have called his students that—he hated the name. (So did others. It didn’t become fully accepted until World War II, and by then it meant something more general.) But by Whewell’s definition, Wells was one of the first to be deliberately educated as a scientist.

Wells absorbed Huxley’s belief that science was systematic common sense—“common sense at its best,” as Huxley said, “that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.” It was an attitude, a procedure, a process.

Wells later described Huxley's course as "a vivid sustained attempt to see life clearly and to see it whole, to see into it, to see its interconnections, to find out, so far as terms were available, what it is, where it came from, what it was doing, and where it was going."

Beyond his advocacy of science, his years as an educator and his own scientific accomplishments (mostly in comparative anatomy), Huxley remains historically significant for his role in securing the legitimacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, particularly when it was first proposed.

What Wells learned from Huxley, particularly about Darwinian evolution, informed his thinking and his imagining for his long and varied career. Huxley’s interpretation of Darwinian evolution became the single most important and fruitful idea of Wells’ professional life, and the guiding influence on his vision of the future.

In turn, through the ways that Wells developed and expressed this core idea, it has become what we accept as the determining factor of “the future.” The future is a consequence of how humanity responds to the challenges of the present. The future evolves.

Darwin’s theory had its own history, much of it written in Huxley’s lifetime, and nearly all of it related to the age of the machine. It started with geology, and the discovery of deep time.


William Smith was a late 18th century English surveyor who took on two typical jobs of his profession in the industrial age: he did an underground survey for a coal mine, and another for a proposed canal that would link the coalfields to another canal.

The industrial age required a great deal of digging. Smith started noticing the ribbons of different colors and composition at different depths, revealed by cutting into the earth. He guessed they might be continuous, not just in one site but in many, and he made observations elsewhere that tended to confirm this. He had discovered the basic geological feature of strata.

“Because of his hands-on experience as a canal and mine surveyor,” writes Keith Thomson in his book Before Darwin, “Smith was able to tease apart the structure of the earth in ways that no theorist could.”

Smith's geological map of England

Others involved in the study of mining and minerals in Italy and Germany had also noticed the strata. Smith soon became consumed with the study of strata and the fossils found within them. By the early 19th century he had mapped the strata across England. He published a book supporting his theory that each level could be identified according to the particular fossils found in them.

This was an early step in the unassuming science of geology that in a few short decades would culminate in Darwin’s theory. It also illustrates the less obvious relationship that 19th century science had with industry.

With its need for machines, metals, energy sources and transportation, that industry fostered advances in physics and chemistry seems logical. But it also played a role in expanding knowledge in geology and the life sciences. All of these in turn transformed knowledge about the universe and time, and the history of the planet.

Before and even during the industrial age, there was no actual profession of scientist, or geologist or physicist (another word Whewell coined.) There were “natural philosophers” in the major universities, but most science was conducted by individuals with the income and leisure to devote to their researches. During the industrial age, certain individuals of lesser means went beyond their jobs to make immense scientific discoveries.

So for example, in puzzling out why the major theories on conservation of energy should have emerged more or less simultaneously from a number of individuals in different countries, historian of science Thomas Kuhn found that most of them were either trained as engineers or were working on the development of new engines when they made their contributions.

England’s leading energy theorist, Lord Kelvin, was an engineer who also worked with industry to research specific technologies. A number of other discoveries, including the speed of light, were eventual results of attempts to solve practical problems for industry, such as the need for better and more efficient machines and sources of energy.

Then there were enthusiasts like William Smith, who in trying to accumulate knowledge useful to their jobs, joined up in a chain of observations and theories that changed how we view the past.

Portrait of Lyle 1840

Such pioneer studies by Smith, Scotsman James Hutton and others caught the attention of another Scotsman, Charles Lyell, as he studied law at Oxford. While beginning his law practice, Lyell also became fascinated by new fossil finds and their apparent mysteries, such as fossils of freshwater animals found below a layer of sea-bottom sediment.

Lyle gave up the law and traveled through France and Sicily for his own systematic investigations. His detailed studies established that the types of fossils in each strata of the earth were relatively uniform, and that the lower strata contained the fossils of extinct life-forms. The deeper you dug, the more primitive those life-forms tended to be.

In June of 1830, Lyell published the first of his three volume work, Principles of Geology, which not only established geology as a science, but proved case by case (for Lyell put his original training in the law to good use) that in order for the world to be as it is, it must be many times older than was officially believed. Fossils of the same type appeared in strata separated by millions of years of volcanic activity.

For the next decade or so, the work of other geologists continued to add evidence supporting Lyell's interpretations. The earth was much, much older than anyone had previously believed it to be.

young Darwin

Charles Darwin read Lyell's first volume before he left on his famous voyage to South America on the Beagle in 1831, when he conducted the field research that provided his evidence for evolution. He carried it with him and thought of it as he gazed at the Andes.

In the second volume, which Darwin received while in South America, Lyell concluded that the earth itself had evolved. When Darwin returned with his plant and animal specimens and painstakingly worked out the details of his theory of biological evolution, he and Lyell exchanged ideas and theories, and became friends.

But Lyell had already given Darwin the one element he most needed to formulate his theory: time. The long ages of what we now call geological time were more than enough to permit the slow play of accident and incident, and the eventual effects of many momentary dramas of life and death, of survival and generation, of adaptation and change, implied by Darwin's theory of the sculpting of life by environmental forces and how life-forms adapted to them.

Lyell’s third volume even suggested that there had been evolution in life forms. The general notion of evolution had been in the air for several generations—in fact, evolution was in a way the Darwin family business. Charles’ grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had been a principal proponent of the idea.

After returning from his voyage, Darwin poured over his specimens and began working out his theory of natural selection.  He essentially had it by 1838.  But it would be nearly 20 years before he published it.

When Darwin first conceived of his theory, T.H. Huxley was 13. Huxley was born in 1825, in only slightly better circumstances than H.G. Wells would be, above a butcher’s shop in a small village outside London. His father, an educated member of the middle class, was a teacher down on his luck. The son would have to make his own way in the world.

At 15, young Huxley was an apothecary’s apprentice in a dockside slum during a time of high unemployment. He saw the suffering of mothers and children who not only could not buy his medicines, they couldn’t afford food. This experience marked him for life.

Huxley was a poorly paid naturalist for the Royal Navy when he met the independently wealthy Lyell. A few years later as an up and coming man of science in London, he met the independently wealthy Charles Darwin, who suggested he review his latest paper.

Darwin had delayed announcing his theory in part because of the furor he knew it would cause. To assert that humans weren’t specially created but were descended from earlier animals was contrary to church doctrine, at a time when there was little or no separation of church and state in England, and the church leaders were often members of the hereditary ruling class.

But his hand was forced by a former railroad surveyor who was so drawn to the flowers and insects along the routes he was mapping that he gave up his quiet Welsh countryside to become a naturalist along the Amazon.

Wallace

He was Alfred Russel Wallace. Literally in a fever, he suddenly crystallized his own theory of natural selection and sent his paper to a dumbfounded Darwin, hoping that Darwin might show it to Lyell if he didn’t think it was crazy.

Wallace used an industrial age metaphor to explain his idea of natural selection. It was a natural feedback system, like the self-correcting centrifugal governor of the steam engine.

This devastating letter prompted Darwin to immediately publish his theory, in a joint paper with Wallace. Darwin finally finished his book illustrating it, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. He remained sequestered on his estate, suffering from a series of debilitating illnesses. He relied on others to represent his views in the inevitable public debate.

His most effective champion was T. H. Huxley, by then a figure of some renown. Huxley, writes biographer Desmond, “had a huge, multi-talented intellect and seem to run ten lives simultaneously.” He was conducting his own scientific researches, particularly as more and more fossil animals were coming to him, uncovered in the growing number of new coal mines across England.  He eventually theorized that birds had evolved from some warm-blooded dinosaurs, an insight not generally accepted until well into the 20th century.

Huxley 1857

But Huxley’s chief fame came as “Darwin’s bulldog.” His celebrated confrontation with an aristocratic bishop of the time however was only part of his defense of Darwinian evolution. In addition to essays and reviews in scientific journals and the popular press, he applied his clarity of expression to a series of talks that were wildly popular with working class audiences.

In his lectures to workers, as in his lectures to students, Huxley stuck to science.  But the political implications of evolution were clear. Evolution itself means change over time, whatever causes that change.  It meant things were not the same forever in the natural world--some species died out, others appeared.  Perhaps change was possible in the order of things in human civilization, too. The future might be different.  This is one way that evolution was revolutionary.

Darwin proposed natural selection as the major mechanism of evolutionary change. Features of a particular environment sustain life-forms: the sources of nourishment, the climate, the predators etc. When the environment changes in crucial ways, these life forms must adjust and adapt, or die out.

Major adaptations over generations might be a different color to fool predators, a different beak to extract new kinds of seeds, or a new ability like flying or communicating. The process of establishing such adaptations begins with the right random mutation in one or some organisms that allow them to flourish in the new conditions. If this adaptation is passed on to their descendants, they may become fixed and essential characteristics.

Sometimes the adaptation leads to such large changes that a new species evolves. And they in turn become a new factor in the environment, to which other life-forms must adapt. It is not the only engine of change, Darwin cautioned, but the chief one.

The enormous span of time necessary for this process wasn’t the only mind-boggling challenge to orthodox belief, or even conventional modes of thinking. The establishment clergy saw that the process needed no divine intervention or even a guiding intelligence. Others (including for awhile, Huxley himself) resisted the implication that there was no final purpose, and that it cast nature as a war of all against all, all of the time.

Finally, there was a repugnance to the assertion that humans were descendants of some grubby, ugly, grunting ape species.

 The image of the ape in the mid 19th century was relatively new. Londoners had only been able to see ape species (mostly from Asia) at the Zoological Gardens since 1847. The first live African gorilla wasn’t seen in England until 1855, and even then it wasn’t recognized as a gorilla until it was dead. Terrifying stories and images regarding apes and gorillas, often with little basis in reality, had filled this void.

Yet primate fossils that Huxley studied clearly showed the relationship, bone by bone. It was all in the anatomy—that primates and the races of humanity were not very different.

The classic caricature of Darwin as ape/man

It was the celebrated insult by Bishop Wilberforce during their public debate—taunting Huxley by asking him if an ape was his grandfather or grandmother—that remains the defining moment of Huxley’s fame. Huxley replied that if he had to chose whether to have an ape as a grandfather or a wealthy and powerful man who injects “ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

Over the next decades, there were complex political, class and racial undercurrents and issues in the fierce controversies over Darwin’ theory, particularly once the United States Civil War revived the debate over African slaves. Despite Darwin’s careful, dispassionate and even tedious writings, the idea of natural selection, which in part arose from ideas outside biological science, was fraught and emotional—as well over a century later, in some quarters it still is. In his time, Huxley was its most wily and eloquent defender, especially as it pertained to the integrity of science.

In his prime, Huxley was a tall, charismatic figure with black hair and fiery black eyes. By the time he stood in the same room as the young H.G. Wells, he was stocky and sallow, his eyes dimmed to brown, and his hair silver. He was so ill that he only made it through that year with the help of a drug another late 19th century figure would make famous (although a fictional one): cocaine.

First Royal College of Science reunion dinner, chaired by
H.G. Wells in 1908

Huxley would have at least one more significant moment, but Wells’ class at the Normal School would be the end of his 30 years in education. He was Wells’ first teacher, and Wells was one of his last students.

Arguably Wells became the most important. Huxley’s interpretation of Darwin would motivate and guide much of Wells’ influential work over the next half century, including his views on the urgency of the present. He would first take that version of Darwin’s theory about the deep past, and apply it to the deep future.

But Wells had a twisting road ahead before he got that far. His other science teachers were much less inspiring than Huxley, and he got swept up in the Debating Society, and in the school magazine he helped to start.

 Between excited explorations of London, including observing discussions in the homes of prominent socialists, he fell into reveries as he poured over Carlyle, Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, the Buddha and Confucius in the Art Library and other adjacent institutions in the South Kensington complex.

His lethargy may also have resulted from not enough to eat.  He was living on a weekly stipend that was part of his scholarship, but he often ran short and had to skip meals.

In the end he failed to graduate with his class. He soon got enough of a degree to teach science, but at his first school he got badly injured and seriously ill. At first his mystery illness looked terminal, and he had months to contemplate time and the precariousness of life.

He convalesced at Up Park, where again he raided its library, but with new intent. “I was reading... poetry and imaginative work with an attention to language and style that I had never given these aspects of literature before.”

Back in London another teaching position followed (A.A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh, was one of his pupils) and other jobs in education (co-authoring textbooks, working for a correspondence school.) These all ended with another near-fatal fit of illness. Such work seemed to be killing him. His tentative attempts to write for publication now seemed his only alternative. He had to become a writer, but how?

He knew it should be possible to make a living at it. After all, there were many new magazines and newspapers to respond to the demands of a growing literate public.

And there was great public interest in science, his field of expertise. Though the amateur was fading from science, the tradition was still strong, and London readers were keenly following the scientific news of the day, from the latest inventions to the reports on expeditions to previously unexplored reaches of the globe.

Science was even fashionable. During the height of geological discoveries by Lyle and others, weekend rock hunting and fossil finding excursions were popular entertainment. Fashionable Londoners flocked to the zoological gardens, to gawk at the animals from around the world. They nicknamed it “the zoo,” as in the lyrics of a popular song by music hall performer The Great Vance: “The OK thing to do on Sunday afternoon is to toddle in the zoo!”

Wells struggled for awhile, but then he got a tip from a book by J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan. Barrie advised writers for the new journals to anchor their articles in the details of real life, and use the ordinary and familiar to spark their musings.

Liberating moments are highly individual to each writer, and this fairly pedestrian advice was the eccentric key that opened the floodgates. Science, art, experience, style—everything coalesced in this moment.

Wells circa 1891

Wells suddenly became a prolific and popular writer for London journals. At first he was a latter day Boz, the Dickens persona who wittily chronicled London life, often anonymously, and sometimes—as Dickens had done—in the guise of a comic character.

Thanks to the timely rise of the ambitious and generous Pall Mall Gazette, he also became a book critic who won a friend in Joseph Conrad with a sensitive review, and a drama critic who won a friend in Henry James for the same reason. He found himself walking home with fellow reviewer George Bernard Shaw from comedies by Oscar Wilde—without having met him, Wilde had furthered Wells career with a compliment on an early article to an important editor.

But for a longer, more ambitious work, Wells could not yet turn to his own life. He hadn’t yet been out of England, and his experience in a few places in his own country was very limited. He had to explore more imagined worlds.

Wells returned to an idea he sensed was golden. As a college debater he had explored the concept of time as a fourth dimension, equal to the dimensions of space. Would it be possible to travel through time, just as you can travel through space?

 He tried to write a story about it for his school magazine, but he couldn’t sustain it. Again he tried, for the National Observer, but when the publication changed hands the last installments were mercifully cancelled.

William Henley had commissioned the Observer attempt but agreed it wasn’t working. Now editor of the New Review, he encouraged Wells to try it again, but to make it more of a believable story. Could Wells invent a time-traveling character that readers identify with—someone they would want to accompany on this adventure?

Again, it was a key that unlocked the floodgates. Wells wrote and rewrote, with Henley urging him on. “It is so full of invention & the invention is so wonderful,” Henley enthused. “It must certainly make your reputation.”

First edition cover

It did more than that. In The Time Machine, Wells made the future as we know it. In its longest and most famous section, set in a far future, the novel dramatizes consequences of an aspect of the nineteenth century (and our time as well) as governed by T.H. Huxley’s interpretation of Darwinian evolution.

Almost every story of the future since has made this same assumption: the future is an effect of prior happenings, sometimes of plans and progress, but more often, a future of unintended consequences.

Such stories since have seldom been accomplished with such subtlety and rigor as this first one in modern narrative. It remains a revelation of the process that gets us to a future.

Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published only 25 years before Wells studied in Huxley’s class. Darwin himself had been dead for just two years. The debate on what Darwin meant, and its significance was still going on. Wells applied it all to the future, particularly what he had learned as a consequence of that most educational year of his life.

The skeleton of his story is Huxley’s version of how change happens from the past to the present. Wells uses it to tell us how change could happen from the present to the future, and how human consciousness could affect that future.

Next we explore that future in several (hopefully shorter) posts on The Time Machine.

to be continued.  To access earlier posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.