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Jim Endersby, "The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology's Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moser Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Professor Jim Endersby about his most recent book that he has published with the University of Chicago Press. The book we are going to discuss today is called the Arrival of the biology's Imaginary Futures 1900-1935. Dr. Jim Endersby is Professor of History of Science at the University of Sussex. He's the author of the Culture History, Imperial Nature, Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, and A Guinea Pig's history of biology. And this book, the Arrival of the Fittest, was just published in 2025 by Chicago University Press. Jim, welcome to New Books Network.
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C
Well, thank you. And thank you for inviting me.
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B
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise, how you became interested in this topic in this area, let's say, and more importantly, where did the idea of this book come to you and why you decided to write it?
- [03:03]
C
Yeah, sure. So I. I was born in Britain and I studied history and various other things at school. I liked science a lot, but I was put off it by the thought of having to do dissection. So I was raised a vegetarian and I really didn't like killing animals. So I switched from kind of sciences to humanities and did all kinds of odd jobs in humanities and so on. Eventually got drawn back to science by reading Popular Science, particularly the work of Stephen Jay Goul. And I love the way Gould wrote, the way that he managed to make things clear without dumbing them down. And I got very interested in the history of evolution. And at the same time, I'd been working for years as a graphic designer and I was getting very bored with that. And I went back to university, really, to finish my degree. I never finished it the first time around in the hope of getting a more interesting job. And luckily, at the time, I had a girlfriend who'd worked for the admissions department. I was living in Sydney at that time and she'd worked for the admissions department at the University of New South Wales, and she knew that there was this subject called history and philosophy of science, which, like most people, I'd never heard of. And she said, that's what you need to do. And she was absolutely right. And from the very first day of my degree, I loved it. I loved the mix of writing, learning about the history of science, but thinking about it from a humanities perspective in terms of history, philosophy, literature and so on. So that's where I got interested. I then came back to Britain, did a PhD at the University of Cambridge, got a job at the University of Sussex teaching history of science. But I was lucky in a way that I ended up in a history department, not a history of science department. So I got a broader range of perspectives from my colleagues at Sussex, thinking about cultural history, about the history of art and literature, political history, social history, economic history, the whole range of different ways of thinking and particularly I think Sussex is famous for thinking about what's called history from the bottom up. So not just the histories of great men, you know, the kind of official histories of governments and wars and so on, but thinking about the lives of ordinary people and the way that they. The power that they play in history. So those things came together to give me a way of thinking about history. So this particular book began actually with guinea pig leftovers. My first book was called A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, and I think influenced a little bit by the kind of history that I'd learned and by the colleagues that I had at Sussex. I wanted to write a history that wasn't just a history of great men, of one great scientist after another, great ideas and geniuses and so on, but was more about the work of science. And I was struck by the fact that a lot of people do a lot of work that's essential to science, who are not scientists and are not famous. So the book takes an animal or a plant as the kind of hero of each chapter and looks at a little bit of the history of that animal or a plant, and then at the role that it played in the history of biology and how it taught us things about the way life works. And so I followed that through a series of animals and plants. I could have done hundreds. I kept it to a manageable number or tried to. And then the people, including the great geniuses like Darwin and so on, come in as characters in the story of the animal or plant. And I wanted. The other thing I wanted to do with that book is not tell a story that was just about success, not one triumph after another. The idea that science sort of leads inevitably to truth is a little bit misleading. The history of science is full of dead ends and blind alleys and mistakes and so on. So I wanted, as it were, a loser organism, a failure. And the one that's kind of one of the ones that's quite famous for historians of science is a plant called Oenotherola marchiana, which is a kind of evening primrose, a North American genus of yellow flowers. And it was central to the story of Hugo de Vries. Mutation theory, which is a very obscure theory from the early 20th century. And if you read the conventional histories of science, the things that I sort of grew up reading as a student, it will tell you that this was a mistake, that de Vries found this plant, it seemed to be producing new species very quickly. He got very excited, founded this theory on the plant, and it turned out that he was wrong. That it wasn't what he thought it was. The plant had sort of led him up the garden path, as it were. And so I tried to write about this plant and realized that of course there weren't very many sources with the kind of famous organisms. There are lots and lots of historians have written about them. But because this is a kind of loser organism, there was almost nothing. So I had to go back to the primary sources. I couldn't read other historians, I had to go back to the original documents. And I got very interested about this plant. There was a lot more published about it at the time than I'd realized. And then there was a funny coincidence. I was teaching class about utopia and I got interested in a utopia called Herland, which is a feminist utopia by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which imagines a kind of lost world hidden away in the Andes, inhabited only by women who reproduce asexually. So for thousands of years they've been cut off from the world of men completely and have created this perfect society isolated from men. And the thing that caught my eye was that one of the women describes the way they became parthenogenetic, that is, asexually reproducing was explained by the law of mutation. Now, this story was written in 1915, and in 1915 the law of mutation could only be a reference to Hugo de Vries and his supposedly forgotten theory. And I thought, that's funny. How did Charlotte Perkins Gilman know about this very obscure and forgotten theory way back then? So I started doing a bit of digging and discovered that actually there was a lot of popular interest in this theory, that although the scientific community lost interest quickly, the wider community stayed interested much longer. So that was the kind of. Sorry, that was a very long answer. But that was the beginning of the book. That was what gave me the original idea for the arrival of the fittest was thinking about the relationship between science in public. What happens to the science when it escapes from the laboratory, it escapes from the experts, the historians, the scientists, the people who decide what is proper science, and it becomes part of ordinary public conversations. And then what do people do with it? The kind of imaginative use that Gilman made of it became something that I discovered other people were doing as well. So that was how the book got started.
- [10:01]
B
It was fascinating both how you got into this field and also the story of the inception of this book. And you made a very interesting point that I'm keen to know more about. You said that you were lucky that you ended up in a history department rather than history of science. Because it gave you a broader perspective. I did my PhD in ecological humanities. I had to read a little bit about history of science. Nothing too deep, let's say, but I had to know a little bit about the history of science and scientific inventions of the 18th and 19th century and how they were reflected in gothic novels that I was doing my PhD on. And I was just fascinated by the topic. And one of the things I really like about the book is that cultural aspect of the history of science that you do include in the book. You talk about novelist that we'll discuss, I'm sure, as we go ahead. And I'm just excited both how the book came about and also we can see, I guess, that passion and love and your diverse background in the book as well. So it's not simply a history of science, but it's more or less, I would say, cultural history of science, maybe.
- [11:10]
C
Yeah, I'm glad that comes across. So the other crucial influence on me is my wife Pam, who is a professor of English literature. And she has also helped to kind of lead me astray, as it were, get me away from being a narrow historian of scientists and to think much more broadly about the way that science is part of culture in a much wider sense.
- [11:34]
B
It's fascinating. You said that it's scientific discoveries or inventions happen, but once they get out of the lab after a few years, the theory might be disproven. So scientists, the scientific community might lose interest, but the cultural impact or the impact it will have on the public, it's something that they have no control about. And one of these theories you talk about in the book is mutation theory, which caused a lot of excitement at the turn of 20th century, but then it's kind of largely forgotten today. And I didn't know about it myself before I read your book. Can you tell us what was mutation theory and what made it so captivating to the public, despite the fact that scientifically speaking, it was more as a flawed theory, which is forgotten now?
- [12:30]
C
Sure, yeah. So the story really begins with Darwin in the 19th century. And Darwin's theory of evolution is obviously very successful, very well received and lots of people are persuaded. But funnily enough, the key mechanism of evolution which Darwin proposes, the idea of natural selection, is actually running into trouble by the end of the 19th century. So people can see how organisms are improved by selection. So the idea of Darwin's theory is that animals and plants produce far more offspring than can survive and this leads to competition and that they all vary slightly, they're not identical to their parents. And so those slight variations, some of them will give the animal or plant an advantage in what Darwin calls the struggle for existence. And some of them will prove to be a drawback, and some will have no impact at all. But the ones that will have an advantage will lead to those organisms surviving more successfully and passing on whatever that advantage was to their offspring. And obviously the ones that have disadvantages will be less likely to produce offspring. So those disadvantageous variations will become rarer over time. That's the core of Darwin's theory. And by the end of the 19th century, a lot of people thinking, well, that's all very well and good, but how does it explain the origins of absolutely new forms of life? So you can imagine how once an organism has, you know, is flying how competition will lead it to fly a little bit faster, a little bit higher, or to save a little of energy so that it doesn't eat as much food or whatever. But how does a flightless organism like an insect, become a flying one? How do real novelties arrive? And so somebody says in a review of de Vries book that natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it doesn't explain the arrival of the fittest. And that's where the title of my book comes from. Where do evolutionary novelties arise? And there are various people offer their own ideas of this. There's quite a wide debate around this at the beginning of the 20th century. And de Vries offers his own theory, which is very exciting at first to the scientific community because he has experimental evidence from this plant that I mentioned before, Inothera lamarckiana. He's actually studied these and seen radically new types appear quickly. And it seems to him that this explains that evolution is quick. His argument is that species are stable most of the time, so very occasionally they will tip into what he calls a mutation period. And in that mutation period, these new forms appear in sufficiently large numbers that they can interbreed with each other, because normally, of course, if a rare improvement occurs, it's going to be swamped by the old unimproved version because it's going to breed with those. So if you think about a field of sunflowers, one of them is freakishly tall because it's what 19th century botanists would have called a sport or a sortation, a leap. It's very nice. It's much taller than the other plants, it gets more sunshine, it's going to photosynthesize more effectively, grow faster, but its pollen is going to fall on the little short flowers around it. And the next generation of flowers are going to be intermediate in size between the tall version and the short version. And because there are so many of the short ones, eventually the average height of the population is going to revert to where it was beginning. One exceptional plant can't make the whole field of flowers taller. And that's why Darwin rejects the importance of these rare sports monstrosities. Whatever, they can't really play a role in evolution, he doesn't think. But de Vries says, well, maybe they can because of these mutation periods, which is what he thinks he's caught. The Oenothera doing is mutating en masse so that the new forms are. They're still rare, but they're common enough that they can breed with each other. And they also tend to be sterile with the old parent plants, so they can't be cross fertilized with the pollen from the old unimproved version. So that's the kind of theory in a nutshell. New species appearing overnight. And of course, the thing that excites people, it seems to solve this problem for Darwinism that explains the origin of really novel organisms. But it also means that evolution is quick instead of being an incredibly slow process that takes centuries and centuries, which is why nobody's ever seen a species evolve. DeVries says, I've actually seen new species coming into existence in my experimental garden, in my laboratory, and that means we can do experiments on evolution. And he says, very honestly, I have no idea why it's mutating. I don't know what's caused this mutation period. But if we keep researching this, now that we can actually study evolution at the lab, we'll figure out what's causing the mutations and then we can induce artificial mutations. And that means we can start to kind of make new plants and eventually new animals, and maybe people begin to think even new kinds of people sort of to order. So this is the first glimpse of what we would now call genetic engineering. At the time they called it experimental evolution. They could do experiments in the laboratory. They could figure out, eventually, they hoped, how to artificially induce mutations and that would accelerate evolution so that we could get there much quicker instead of having to wait centuries for the old theory. And it's that idea of rapid, controllable evolution that really catches the public's imagination.
- [18:05]
B
This is quite fascinating there and how it impacted the public. Another thing you discuss in the book is the experimental evolution and how it created this new kind of utopia, which is known as Biotopia. Can you talk more about this biotopia, how it impacted the public there, what were the. How did the people imagine the nature or limits of nature and the role of humans and humans agency. But maybe it's better to start with a definition of biotopia and how it was created through experimental evolution.
- [18:45]
C
So when I started reading about this, I started just sort of following the plant and following mutation wherever it led me, which led me to novels and early science fiction and all kinds of. Of speculations about the future, utopian ideas and so on. And I realized there was a kind of theme emerging in these books which made them rather different from older utopias. Utopias are kind of a genre that I've been interested in for a long time. And up until the 19th century, most utopias involved tweaking either the kind of physical technology so that, you know, there would be abundant everything, plenty of food, plenty of goods, plenty of cheap transportation, cheap energy, so that there would be no need for people to be greedy and competitive, or they were improvements to people's morals, their religion, their laws, whatever. And all of them were premised on the notion that nature itself can't be changed, and particularly human nature can't be changed. We are by, you know, by our natures. We are flawed, greedy, competitive, selfish creatures. And so utopia is always about fixing the world in such a way as to. To kind of manage the flaws of human beings. And as I started to read things like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Her Land, this utopian novel about a woman, I realized that actually human nature itself has been changed in these books. The most famous example of them, I think, is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which most people have heard of, but actually there are lots of others that are fairly similar, all of which involve not accepting nature, not respecting nature, but actually treating nature, including human nature, as raw material that science allows us to play around with. That biology allows us to actually change the way we are, the way we think, the way we feel, the way we live, the way our bodies work, the way we reproduce. Even the most intimate, personal aspects of life can be subject to scientific manipulation. And of course, for some people, that's a nightmare. That's a dystopia that's the opposite of utopia, but it's very ambiguous. And so I coined the word biotopia to capture this collection of futures built on biology, which were utopias to some people and dystopias to others. And often the same book has utopian and dystopian elements mixed together. And so biotopia as opposed to bioutopia, because of that ambiguity. And I think that. That I use that term as a way of analyzing what these books have in common, what these stories have in common, and what was distinctive and new about them. And I suppose the key thing is that notion that nature itself is deficient. It's not good enough. So there are lots of people criticizing plants that they don't produce enough food, they don't grow quickly enough, they won't grow when and where we want them to. And that animals similarly don't produce enough meat or enough milk or whatever it is that we want from them. And that humans themselves are then subject to the same kind of thinking. If we can improve other kinds of creatures through breeding and biological manipulation, maybe we can do the same with ourselves. So that's the kind of big dream that comes up through the biotopias.
- [22:18]
B
And another part of the book, and I think it's in the first chapter that I really enjoyed, was where you discussed the sort of the emergence of early science fiction fandom of the 1920s. And I think the whole science fiction genre is actually a direct, let's say, result of the birth of science and fascination of the public with scientific discoveries. And it impacts societies. And in your chapter, in that first chapter, if I'm not mistaken, you talk about how there were some radical claims and how they blurred the line between expert and lay person. And you created, let's say, new expert communities which resembled that early science fiction fandom of the 1920s. Can you talk about this part of the book?
- [23:07]
C
Yeah, sure. So because of the kinds of things I'm interested in, the kind of the adventures of science outside the lab, I've been interested in thinking about how do scientific ideas circulate, how do they get out of the scientific community into the wider public? And generally speaking, people used to. Historians used to write about this in terms of popularization or educational diffusion, that ideas spread. And none of those ideas seemed to me to capture quite what's going on, particularly the way that people get excited about scientific ideas often. And they actually kind of interpret them in original, interesting, imaginative ways. So they kind of. They make something of them. And as I was following the word mutation and mutant around, as it were, I found, of course, it crops up a lot in the early science fiction magazines. Science fiction has a recognizable commercial genre, appears in the 1920s. And the early magazines have very large letters pages where lots of people write it in, commenting on the stories. And the magazines run competitions to encourage people to become writers themselves. There aren't actually enough science fiction stories to fill the early magazines. So they're always looking for new talent to shape this new genre. So the genre itself is shaped by this conversation between the editors, the publishers, the authors and the fans, who all kind of blur together a little bit. And the thing that really struck me is that when people wrote in, sometimes they would write in to criticize the story to say it wasn't scientific enough, it wasn't plausible enough. And they described themselves as science fans, not science fiction fans. And that struck me as really interesting. And I began to be interested in fandom. There's quite a lot of academic writing about fandom and the kinds of communities of fans and the way that fans play this part of actively. They take what's given to them, usually like by a commercial publisher or broadcaster or whatever, and they reinterpret it and make it their own. Star Trek fans, for example, will write their own fan fiction where they project their own fantasies and their own ideas onto the characters that everybody knows from the TV show. So they don't just passively accept what's given to them by the commercial broadcaster. They make it their own. And it seemed to me they were doing something interestingly similar with the science. Obviously they were making it their own in terms of making it into stories for the science fiction magazines, but they were also, so it seemed to me, the wider communities of people who got excited about the science were doing a similar kind of thing as they tried to take the scientific idea, the idea of mutation, and interpret it in fresh new ways. So I began to think of the various communities. So the people, like the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is part of a wider community of feminist socialists, anarchists, progressive political progressives, who get excited about mutation and interpret it as having a political significance which really wasn't part of De Vries original intention, but kind of, who cares, you know, the fans decide what the thing means to them. And that seemed to me to capture the, I suppose, the agency of the public in terms of how we make sense of science. And sometimes, of course, the scientific community gets very frustrated by this. So if you think about the word evolution, for example, look at the way it's used in adverts or the way it's used in jokes. Evolution is always used to mean progress. This is more evolved, this product is more evolved than the old product, whatever. And most scientists, most evolutionary biologists will tell you, but evolution doesn't mean that. It just means adaptation to a specific ecological niche. There's no direction to it. There's no progress. There's no kind of goal. Evolution isn't going anywhere. It's just every organism is trying to survive in its particular niche. And when the niche changes, the organism either changes or it goes extinct. But that doesn't matter from a historian's point of view, because the way people use the word actually is what it means from a historical sentence. Most people use the word evolution to mean progress. That is what evolution means to most people. There's no getting away from that as a historical fact. And the scientific community doesn't actually have the power to change that much as they would like to. And a similar thing seem to be happening with mutation, which is obviously part of the story of what does evolution mean, how it's reinterpreted by the public, how they kind of grab hold of it and make it their own, do their own thing with it, decide for themselves what it means and how they're going to apply it to their lives.
- [27:47]
B
And in that period, science, it was a turbulent time in terms of the. I don't like the term, but I mean the phrase we use, but, but the conflict between, let's say, science and religion. But in that time, at that time period, well, there was the idea that nature is spirituality and science, they're all intertwined. I'm curious, how did these new biological ideas interact with religious or spiritual movements of that time, like theosophy, which. Which I guess was born towards the end of 19th century.
- [28:27]
C
Yes. So theosophy is one example of a wider movement which is sometimes called new thought or higher thought, which is a rather diffuse and vague set of ideas, very popular in America, which thought about the world in terms of spiritual progress. So the theosophists borrowed from Hinduism the idea of reincarnation, that the soul is reborn and if you lead a good life, you are reborn in a higher form and so forth. And that, they think is a kind of evolution, that what people like Darwin have discovered is one phase of a broad process of cosmic evolution. So just as I was saying, they use evolution to mean progress, but they use it in this case to mean spiritual progress. So there is the visible process of evolution that science studies. But the scientists, according to the theosophists, are blind to the spiritual reality of evolution on a higher plane, which is where the soul is reborn in a higher form. Now, from a strictly scientific point of view, this makes no sense whatsoever. And most scientists did not kind of get this. But again, the public is very interested in the idea of a more evolved spirituality. And so evolution gets tied into These kinds of ideas, which, as I say, are quite kind of vague and kind of fuzzy. And there's a lot of very idiosyncratic interpretation within the theosophical community, within wider communities of believers in higher thought. But there are these interesting overlaps which are surprising. As you say, traditionally, the story of religion and science has always been told in terms of conflict. Galileo being threatened by the Inquisition, evolution being condemned by the Church and things like this. But actually, there is another story here. And again, if you look at those people as fans, the spiritual fans of evolution, they take what they want from that theory, they graft it onto other bits and pieces, Hinduism and other ideas, and they make something new out of it. And that's exactly the same kind of process that is going on when socialists take evolutionary ideas and graft them onto Marxism or so on. So I thought it was interesting, again, just to kind of get rid of the conflict narrative and actually look at what people are using the science for, the uses to which they're trying to put it.
- [30:54]
B
There is a character in the book, he discussed Luther Birnbach, like I said, I think before, I had never heard of him myself before. And you portray the portrayal that you provide in the book is that he was a seer or he was a prophet. And this challenges our assumption about scientific community. Who was he and why was it an important figure that you decided to write about in the book?
- [31:22]
C
Yeah. So Luther Burbank was an American plant breeder. And very early in his career he came up with a new kind of potato, the Burbank potato, which you can still buy in America. And he created lots of new varieties of plants and he published them in catalogs which were called New Creations in Fruit and Flowers, which is a very eye catching title. And he was already becoming very famous in America before the mutation theory appeared. And he was seen as somebody had an almost supernatural ability to make new plants. He had a kind of great sensitivity to the way plants responded and seemed to have a great eye for finding something new and unexpected. He was famous for the fact that he would cross breed, he would hybridize plants on a vast scale, thousands and thousands of crosses, grow them in large numbers and look for something old and interesting, something rare and unusual, and then breed that and create a new variety as a result. And he becomes incredibly famous in America. I mean, there were times when I was writing a book where I thought he was going to take over the whole book because there's so much written about him, vast amounts of stuff. And as I read more and more about him, I found he's a very contradictory figure. So he's presented in public as being both a scientific man, as a successor to Darwin, but also as this kind of almost mystical figure who has a kind of an affinity to the plants. He can kind of understand them. He's portrayed rather as a kind of loving parent. He loves his plants. He also, although he's childless himself, he writes a book about childcare called the Training of the Human Plant, where he says, you know, children are like flowers. They need fresh air. They should not be released from schools. They should be allowed to play naturally and, you know, to enjoy nature and get out of towns and out of school and enjoy life in the countryside. And yet we know that Burbank also burnt, literally burnt, thousands and thousands of his own plants in an effort to produce these new varieties. So he's a very tough kind of parent. He's a sort of gentle, loving mother, and sometimes I'm a kind of harsh, vengeful father at the same same time. So he's full of these contradictory qualities, the science and the mysticism. He's also always portrayed as somebody who is not interested in making a profit. He doesn't sell his plants himself. He devises new plants, and then he sells them to nurserymen, and they commercialize them. And he makes just enough to keep going with his experiments because he does all this for the love of humanity, to create better plants and feed people. And yet he's also got. Got quite a lot of business savvy, and he actually makes quite a lot of money from his plants, always gets involved in these controversial schemes where people are trying to commercialize his plants. Endless companies that are commercializing his plants go bust. And he somehow always emerges from this without any taint, that he's not a kind of grubby businessman, how to make a profit. He's just a naive altruist who's been taken advantage of by unscrupulous businessmen. So he's got this funny kind of altruistic huckster. He's the kind of. Everyone who writes about him talks about how profitable his plants are, and yet he is always doing it for love and not for money. So he's a mass of contradictions. And one of the things that writing about him made me realize was that he captures a lot of things that I think of as kind of exemplifying baritopianism and giving it a particularly American flavor. So my book covers both Britain and America, comparing and contrasting the two. And America is experiencing mass immigration in the early 20th century, the population is growing at a huge pace, and some people are worried that America may not be able to feed all these new mouths. And people like Burbank promise new plants, better crops and so on. And when the mutation theory appears, De Vries actually visits Burbank in California and becomes friends with him and tries to kind of, he hopes Burbank is discovering new mutations and this will provide fresh evidence for his theory. They have quite a complicated relationship because Burbank thinks he's a genius in his own right and he doesn't need a scientific expert to tell him what he's doing. And de Vries and most of the scientists find the way Burbank describes his work as kind of bafflingly vague and mystical and strange. So there's a kind of tension about his popularity, and the publicity is very desirable in a way. But he himself is a rather difficult character and very difficult to kind of enroll into the project of being part of the science. Yeah. And the mixture of the kind of the commercial and the kind of altruistic kind of ideals of better plants and so on. Feeding the world. One of the things I found fascinating about this story is its contemporary resonance. So there are all kinds of echoes of this still. And when you read about biotechnology, about biotechnology companies genetically modifying plants, creating new crops, you'll always read about feeding the world. We can feed the world. We can end famine with new crops. It's exactly the same rhetoric that you hear around Burbank and other plant breeders and about mutation. De Vries himself says the world is going to experience famine unless we have better crops. And mutation gives us the scientific tools for making better crops. And yet people are still hungry 100 years later. We're still dealing with famine because, to put it very crudely, the reason people go hungry during a famine is not because there isn't enough food. It's because they don't have enough money to buy the food. And if there was money to be made in feeding the starving, they would already be eating. And so commercial biotechnology, I don't think, is ever going to feed the very, very poor, because there's no profit in it. And those dilemmas, those contradictions, are there in the Biotopian dream at the beginning of the 20th century, and they're still echoing along. So the way these arguments are phrased 100 years ago is still kind of with us in a way, when we think about these issues now. And Burbank exemplifies some of the contradictions of being both commercial and idealistic of being both popular, mystical, spiritual and scientific. A very, very well known figure in his day, now largely forgotten, which is kind of fascinating, but his face appeared on American stamps. He was really one of the best known figures in America. Most people would have said who's the greatest living American Scientist in the 20s, a huge number of people would have said Luther Burbank, which is kind of astonishing now. But that's prob. Probably what they would have thought at the time.
- [38:05]
B
As I told you before, my background is English literature and I was really excited when you were talking about literary representations of the impacts of technology and science. You talk about, for example, he Wells in the book. I'm curious to know how the literary representations or the visions of the future which were, let's say, inspired by these evolutionary and scientific discoveries. What do they tell us in the early 20th century, what did it tell us about either optimism or anxieties and concerns about the power, the biobiology's power and its impact on the future?
- [38:45]
C
I mean, literature of all kinds is really important in thinking about how most of us get to hear about scientific ideas. Most of us don't read a lot of science. We certainly, we don't read, read original scientific papers. If we read anything, we read newspaper reports, but most of us don't even read those. So we get ideas about what science is and how it works from literature, amongst many other sources. H.G. wells is a major figure in the book and he captures something I thought I found really interesting. In his first really successful book, the time machine, in 1895. He writes about the future, really in a very depressing way, that the future humanity is doomed. When the time traveler arrives in the future, he finds humanity decaying, almost dead. And one of the reasons this happens is that the world has been perfected by science, so there is no struggle for existence anymore. Natural selection has stopped working because things like improved agriculture have created a perfect food supply. Disease has been conquered, the climate has been improved. There are no kind of noxious insects or anything like that in the future. And the result is because humans don't have to struggle anymore. They have decayed. And the word that was used at the time was degeneration. Humanity has sort of gone backwards because there's no struggle for existence, there's no competition. Natural selection has stopped working. And then about 30 years later, he writes a book called Men Like Gods, which is much less well known, which Invitius imagines really the same kind of world, a world with perfect agriculture, with no disease and so on. And yet, in this world, instead of degenerating, humans have perfected themselves. They have become like gods, and they have extraordinary scientific knowledge. They're all, you know, beautiful. They'll wander around naked, which is kind of interesting. So you can see how beautiful they are. Highly intelligent, they communicate through telepathy. They've created extremely astonishing physics. The book revolves around the utopian scientist creating a kind of time warp or a kind of wormhole that sucks some of people from the contemporary Earth through into utopia, which is the kind of premise of the story, how the earthlings, as they called, react to utopia, what they find there and what they see of it. And so you get this interesting contrast between the pessimism of the 19th century and the optimism of the 20th century in the same writer. And I think what I argue in the book is that Wells himself may not have changed. What has changed is biology itself. That in the 19th century, heredity was always thought of in terms of a burden. What you brought with you into the past, what you inherited couldn't be changed. And so, if you were lucky, you inherited huge tracts of land and a good constitution and high intelligence, whatever, but you might inherit disease and low intelligence and greed and selfishness and so on. Nothing you could do about that. And that the burden of all the negative things about humans would mean that we would almost certainly end up degenerating in time by the 1920s, because of experimental evolution, because of new ideas of mutation, and, of course, at the same time, the early years of genetics, of Gregor Mendel's ideas. The Wells has absorbed this excitement and this enthusiasm and this optimism about the possibilities of the future and men like God's. It may not be the greatest novel. In fact, it's definitely not the best of Welles's novels. But it's full of ideas about this optimistic future. It's another example of the biotopia, that human nature itself can be radically reimagined, as can plants and animals, to create a perfect world. And that's just one of many examples that I talk about in the book of the way different writers express what they've learned about biology. So every writer is, of course, a reader first. And the way people read biology then shapes the kinds of things that they write. And then, of course, what they write then affects other readers, and it shapes the way they think of biology and the way they imagine the future. So there's this endless feedback between the fans and the producers, and often they're the same people. So I write about the American short story writer Edith Wharton, who's a very high literature, high culture figure, written the House of Mirth and books like that, but she writes a number of short stories that deal with biology. She uses the phrase arrival of the fittest in one of her short stories. She is also just a reader of biology. She's fascinated by the latest biological ideas and theories and books and so on. And she reads quite serious technical textbooks and things like that. And then she reinterprets that and makes fiction from it. And far more people would have heard of those ideas, I think, from reading Edith Wharton's short stories, which is serialized in popular magazines like Scribner's. And she has a mass readership than would ever have read the textbooks and so forth. And Wells of course has a similar role as an expert reader and interpreter of biology, whose fictions, and his non fiction as well have a huge influence and bring. He's probably the world's most famous writer at this point and Wells wrote more than 100 books on every kind of genre and was incredibly well known at the period of broadcaster and everything he wrote was reviewed and discussed and so on. So yeah, those figures who straddle the worlds of science and literature, of fact and fiction and so on, are fascinating to me because they illuminate this whole question of the adventures of science kind of outside the lab that I'm so interested by.
- [44:46]
B
And apart from the, let's say, the impact of biology and evolution on literary imagination, it also caused a lot of it also influenced, let's say, political thought. A lot of early socialists embraced mutation theory that you discuss and also scientific technologies, technological breakthroughs, let's say. I'm interested to know more about how, why they, what was their, let's say, what did they see in the potential power of mutation theory and the impact it could have on revolutionary change? What, what made biology, let's say, such a powerful political resource as well.
- [45:31]
C
So two of the great kind of 19th century beards whose influence has been, you know, know, immeasurable in terms of the later history of Darwin and Karl Marx. And at Marx's funeral his old friend Engels made a direct comparison between them and said basically Marx had done for society what Darwin had done for nature. He'd found the historical laws that explained how it evolved, how it changed. And of course Marx, like most 19th century thinkers, thought of evolution in terms of progress, as many people still do. And so he coins the term. He and Engels coined the term scientific socialism, interestingly partly to disassociate themselves from utopianism which they Think is kind of misleading and leads people to waste their time daydreaming instead of joining a political party and organizing for change. And that notion of scientific socialism becomes very important to a lot of socialists in the 20th century. And because, as I said, Darwin's notion of evolution is slow and gradual, little tiny changes accumulated gradually over thousands and thousands of generations, an assumption grows up in the socialist community that the progress towards socialism is going to be similar, that gradually socialist parties will be elected, they will bring in better laws that will gradually improve the conditions of workers. The trade unions will organize more people, they will organize better conditions for the workers, and there will be a gradual improvement in life, and it will evolve slowly into socialism. And so the idea of revolutionary socialism, that you actually need to destroy the capitalist order and impose a new kind of order overnight, becomes kind of unfashionable in certain socialist circles. And the people who insist that we must have a revolution are sometimes criticized by other socialists for being unscientific, which is a grave insult to a socialist. And so. So when the mutation theory comes along and de Vries offers this notion, a reputable scientific idea that imagines rapid evolution with a new species of plant appearing almost overnight, some socialists seize on this and say, ha, you can be scientific and revolutionary at the same time. One of them actually says in this great essay, you know, a plant kind of continues slowly and gradually, and then it enters a mutation period, and it throws up a new species overnight. If a plant, why not a society? And that leap from what is true of plants, is true of people, is one that's made over and over again by different thinkers in the 20th century, different kinds of imaginative interpretations of that. And the socialists are just one. And of course, unfortunately, one of the depressing things about the history of socialism is a great deal of energy gets put into attacking other socialists, often more than is put into attacking capitalists. But there you go. And so they. These fights within the socialist movement become motivated by arguments about the latest scientific ideas. And mutation is picked up on by quite a few socialist writers in America, particularly to justify revolutionary change as opposed to evolutionary change. And that contrast between rapid revolution and slow evolution is one of the things that de Vries motivates. So it's just another example of that kind of creative, imaginative interpretation. You take the science and you make of it what you need, given your political ideals and the particular circumstances in which you find yourself.
- [49:06]
B
And let's go back to literature again. Earlier in the conversation, you talked about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's stories, a Lot of women started writing utopic novels, let's say. But in your book you specifically talk about biotopias and feminist, feminist writers, how they use biology to challenge the ideas about human nature. Can you talk more about women's use of, let's say, biological ideas to write utopias and why biotopia was such a favorite genre with feminist writers?
- [49:47]
C
Yes, sure. So Gilman is a fascinating example. I mean, Gilman is a very highly respected sociologist and economist who wrote a number of books about making the argument for women's equality. And part of her argument is that men have kind of usurped the power of sexual choice. Darwin's other theory of evolution is sexual selection. And in most species the females do the choosing, the men the males display and the females decide who are the best males. And so the improvement of the species comes about through the best females selecting the best males. But because of the economic dependence of women on men, men have usurped the power of choice and they're the ones who pick who they want to marry, she argues. And many other feminists make this argument too. And this leads to a distorting effect where, where basically rich but utterly worthless men who are not great specimens from an evolutionary point of view make the best husbands. And that women who may be highly intelligent and independent may simply not get chosen because men don't like those kinds of women, they don't want to be challenged and so on. So she feels there's a need to kind of reset biology and get back to a proper way of doing things. Evidence and her utopian novels, and there are several of them, Herland is the most famous, set out a vision of what humanity would be like without the distorting effects of economic inequality between the sexes and without the dependence of women on men. So having a women only society in her land is a way of imagining what women are capable of. They become incredibly expert gardeners. They have great scientific expertise in plant breeding. They're described in the books as Lady Burbanks is another example of how Luther, Luther Burbank has become so famous that he's a touchstone for the idea of remaking nature. And they create this kind of perfect world where harmonious and balanced and so on, which sustains them without any need for imports or exports, without any. They don't eat or kill animals or have a dairy industry, anything like this. They've got a kind of harmonious vegan diet set up that allows them to survive in this relatively small country with a stable population and so on. So It's a kind of fascinating vision. And she's just one of a number of women who reject the idea that women are naturally inferior. And again, this goes back to the idea of human nature as something you can't change. And there are a range of arguments made about the capabilities and possibilities that women would have if they were freed from. From the strictures of society, from the kind of the way that men have set up society to favor men. Has created these distorting impacts which prevent women from fulfilling their potential. And as well as kind of literary writers like Edith Wharton and serious political feminists like Gilman, I also found lots of women writing early science fiction. We think of science fiction, at least in its early years, as being a very male dominated genre. The pioneers of the field are all men. Most of the readers are assumed to be men. And it's not really until the arrival of a kind of conscious second wave feminist science fiction in the 60s and 70s, people like Ursula Le Guin and Jana Rust and so on, that you begin to see a kind of overthrow of male dominance in science fiction. But a number of scholars have shown that actually this has been quite true. True. And that there are a lot of women writing for those very early pulps in the 20s. And part of the reason which I alluded to earlier is there weren't enough stories to fill the magazines. And there's this participatory culture around the magazines where it's very easy for readers to become writers. There are competitions and winning story will get published. And you can be a fan and a reader one day and an author the next. And one of the very first women who is known to have published under her own name. A lot of women publish under pseudonyms or only use their initials because they feel they're not going to get a fair hearing if they use their own names. But Claire Wing Harris is one of the first women to publish under her own name. And publishes a number of award winning stories in the pulp science fiction magazines. And actually there are quite a lot of women writing for them. And we assume we don't really know because there's very little evidence that quite a lot of women read them. I mean, Wing Harris was a reader who entered the competition and Wong and became a writer as a result. And their stories, I look at a few of them where they deal with biology and they deal with mutations and they deal with the possibilities of biology. And it's hard to generalize. They're a diverse and interesting group of writers. But there's a kind of Skepticism about technology and science in some of their stories that is quite unusual in the early pulps. And most of the male writers assume science is just good and the future is going to be great because there'll be more science and we'll be able to fix everything. Some of the women's stories tell more nuanced and interesting stories where they think about how science might go wrong and how all the scientific power at this time is in the hands of men. There are very few women scientists in the world and they have very little power, very little authority. And so there's a kind of. There are doubts expressed which makes for a richer, more interesting variety of stories as a result. And as I said, they're a group of women who are now, you know, beginning to be rediscovered, but have been almost entirely forgotten until the last decade or so. And it's kind of great to see those stories re emerging from the vaults and to rethink what science fiction was and to begin to see the variety of voices and ideas that get expressed through it. The way science fiction is always so flexible and so able to address all kinds of different ideas and possibilities and open up different futures for different groups.
- [55:50]
B
And the fact that women were quite active writing about science fiction, writing science fiction novels, what does it tell us about the gendered attitude towards science and technological futures? Unfortunately, more or less. Even nowadays, science is more or less thought to be a more male dominated area. Although a lot of great things is happening, a lot is changing, but still there seems to be this kind of bias. But the fact that a lot of women were writing science fiction novels at that time, what does it tell us, do you think, about the gendered attitudes towards science?
- [56:24]
C
Yeah, I mean, those attitudes, they were certainly very strong in the early 20th century, and they had not changed nearly as much as they need to, I would say. The thing that is, I think, sadly true is that you get this brief kind of rather exciting explosion of diversity within the science fiction field in those early magazines where the doors were really open and all kinds of people could and did become authors and become participants in it. And then the shutters come down fairly Sharply in the 30s, the period which science fiction fans refer to as the golden age of science fiction, is a very dark age indeed in terms of women participating as authors, as publishers, as editors, and as readers. They really get shut out of it again. And so the kind of. Of classic, stereotypical male dominated science and the stories that go with it become the standard for science fiction for sort of 20, 30 years after that. And As I say, it's not until second wave feminism that you begin to see a strong backlash. And it's interesting to track the relationship between the way women, when and how women do get to participate in science and the way they begin to participate in, become part of science fiction. Because I always think there's a kind of, there's a loose but interesting parallel. One of the things that makes people want to be scientists is that they like science fiction when they're young. That's not all of them, obviously, but there's quite a few scientists who think, oh, it's kind of cool. I like science. This seems like fun. You watch Star Trek and you think, oh, maybe I'll be like Mr. Spock, I'll become a cool scientist. That was what happened to me. It didn't work out. But you know, I loved Mr. Spock when I was a kid. And I think the lack of female role models in science fiction is one of the things that puts women off doing science. And of course, the lack of women scientists makes people think, there's no point in writing stories about science fiction about women. There aren't any women in science. So those two things kind of reflect each other in a kind of complicated way. And as you begin to get more women in science fiction, you also get more women in science in the 60s and 70s, both obviously products of, of feminism and demands for different roles for women and different opportunities and so on. But it's interesting to see, for example, how many women enter primatology, the study of apes, and that actually people like Jane Goodall and Dian Fosse, the most famous examples, but there are a lot of them. And actually that becomes a field that is actually dominated by women to a large degree, having been a male dominated field like most scientific fields. So you do see kind of interesting changes and shifts over time. All weight is low and it still seems to be a constant battle. And the things that you think, oh, well, we've won that battle, you may not have done. We're seeing all kinds of advances in people's rights being reversed at the moment, unfortunately, by various governments in Britain and the US in particular, but around the world. So those battles unfortunately have to be fought over and over again. And it always seems to, to be a very, very difficult, long uphill struggle to get anywhere. But I think imagining different futures, imagining the possibility of women being scientists is one of the things that science fiction and fiction more generally can do, which can have a kind of profoundly liberating effect on the way people just imagine their own lives and what kinds of lives they might have, what kinds of careers they might have. And so on.
- [59:52]
B
A final question that I have, you wrote about early 20th century and how there were a lot of fantasies about biological possibilities, about utopias, bioutopias. How does your book help us understand today's debates about the impact of technology and also biology on life, Things like AI, genetic engineering, climate change. How do you think knowing about the history of science, especially in the early late 19th and early 20th century, can help us better understand today's debates?
- [60:30]
C
Yeah, that's a really big, complicated question. And I'm not sure that I. I'm not sure that I have very much to say about it. The kinds of things that the book made me think and I, I'm hoping people will read the book and come to their own conclusions. Obviously, I, I'm not a preacher here. I don't have a blueprint for the future. But there are a couple of things that struck me. One is about this question of how people understand science. And the scientific community, as I say, often insist that we don't understand science, that we are ignorant and that we're deficient, and we need to shut up and listen and learn more science, and then we won't make such ignorant comments. And I understand their frustration. And I constantly read things in the news that make me think, oh for God's sake, how can anybody believe this? But actually understanding how science becomes part of public conversations is an important part of understanding the role science plays. So we have a lot of people at the moment who are anti science, people who are skeptical about vaccines, skeptical about the causes of climate change, skeptical about the value of scientific research and so forth. And I think that it is a mistake to just dismiss those people as ignorant and stupid without understanding why they have come to those conclusions, why their version of science fandom has led them to very different conclusions from mine, for example. And that understanding what science is doing for them, why they've chosen to see it that way, why they've chosen to interpret that way, helps us begin to understand those processes in a way which is a little bit more, I think, a little bit more engaged. I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well, but it's simply dismissing people's views as ignorant is not a good way of getting them to change their minds. And I think that the simple thing about freedom of speech is that it carries with it the obligation to listen. And we're not willing, any of us to accept the obligation to listen to people we disagree with we don't have any freedom of speech. Nobody has freedom of speech. And that's the really hard thing is to shut up and listen to people who say things that you really disagree with and try and understand why they have reached that conclusion and whether you can find some common ground, whether you might move beyond simply shouting abuse at each other, which is what most public debates, particularly on the Internet, seem to turn into, and actually try and understand other people's points of views properly and respect the. Not easy at all when people are raving about banning vaccines and so on in the American government. It terrifies me. But if we don't understand what the audience for, that is, why that is appealing to certain people. Why, for example, a lot of women and a lot of people in the African American community in America are very skeptical about the medical profession and see it as being elitist, arrogant, hostile to their needs and interests, and much more driven by profit than by the needs of ordinary people. Those kinds of fears lead to vaccine skepticism. I'm not endorsing vaccine skepticism at all. But I think we have to understand those fears and anxieties and the way people interpret science, the way they make sense of it from their own points of views, in order to understand that. So that's one thing I would say. The other thing which may be controversial is that that throughout the book, I became increasingly convinced as I researched this that the idea of nature is really a cultural construction. What we think of as nature and natural is a product of particular kinds of cultural ideas, ideas about landscape and about poetry and about religion and all kinds of things that come into shaping our vision of nature. And that one of the things the Biotopians said very clearly and controversially was nature has no moral meaning. It has no guidance to offer us. We cannot take nature as a guide to a good life or how we should live. We need to decide these things for ourselves. And we need to put human values at the center of those conversations and take responsibility for the world around us. Now, that's a very dystopian idea in some ways, the idea of humans arrogantly assuming that they know better than nature. But actually, I think it is a profoundly disturbing idea that we need to take seriously. I will give you one example. Environmentalism. I care very deeply about the environment and I belong to the British Green Party and recycle my milk buckets and all the rest of it. But a lot of people in the environmental movements say we should be more in touch with nature, we should listen to nature, we should live a More natural life. I think that's incoherent nonsense. A natural life would mean dying of preventable diseases and letting our children die of them, and living naked in a cave and eating raw food and so on. Nothing about our lives is natural. If you take something like rewilding. I'm rewilding my garden. I mean, the key principle is laziness rather than environmentalism. But I don't have a lawn, I don't spray fertilizers and weed killers on it and so on. But that's still gardening. And when you create a nature reserve, you're gardening, you're keeping out invasive species, you're keeping out loggers, you're patrolling it with high tech drones and so on to make sure that people aren't poaching and they're not chopping down the rainforest and so on. This is a form of gardening. And the garden is the metaphor that runs through my whole book. Creating a garden. What kind of gardeners do we want to be be? Now of course, we could be grotesquely destructive gardeners and we could spray weed killers everywhere and so on, or we could be kind of careful organic gardeners and think about biodiversity and about the variety of other species that we share the planet with and how to make space for them. But we're still gardeners. We still have to be responsible for the planet and think about what kind of planet we want. The idea we just put our faith in nature seems to me not to make any sense at all and actually to be abdicating a responsibility that for better or worse, we have lumbered ourselves with. And so that kind of thinking, controversial and complex and contradictory as it is, seems to me something that comes out of thinking about the history of biotopianism. Something that is still relevant and still hard to think about, and still hard to know what we should do and how we strike the right balance here. But it seems to me that that's one of the kind of the very positive things about biotopianism that is still relevant and still needs to be considered. What kind of world do we want to live in and what kinds of responsibilities do we have for creating that world? And how are we going to manage the biological resources of the earth properly? Big, complicated questions. I'm not for one second claiming to have answers to them, but the book really made me think about them.
- [67:29]
B
You're right. I don't think it's a question that that can have a straightforward answer to. But I'm always curious, you know, different academics thoughts, you know, on how to deal with the pressing issues of the time? And how can history help us better understand the challenges we face and better and have a more, let's say, historically informed approach to them? And I think you had some great examples of that in your response. Dr. Jim Andersby, I'd like to thank you for taking your time to speak with us. It's a wonderful book, and I wish we could talk more about different parts of the book in more details, in more depth. The book we just discussed was the Arrival of the Fittest, biology's Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935, published by University of Chicago Press. Jim, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network.
- [68:22]
C
Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
- [68:30]
B
Sam.