The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935

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One of the key aspects of Jim Endersby’s magnificent study is the emphasis he places upon ‘participatory culture’: the extent to which different audiences reinterpreted and made use of the new—and as yet incomplete—theory of mutations, generating cultural meanings that went beyond its initial formulation in 1901 by the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries. As a result, Endersby’s analysis foregrounds the historical moment in which these reinterpretations and new uses were made. His book, though, is itself a participant, and an intervention, in the history of mutation theory which, as Endersby clarifies, has had a long, enduring afterlife even though de Vries’s account was largely discredited by 1930. Reading this book now, in the current context of neo-eugenics; demands for racial and sexual purity; the dismantling of the state in the name of efficiency; technological boosterism; and the distorting media effects of celebrity and propaganda, it is hard not to have a sense of déjà vu. History, by itself, does not repeat, but those who do not read history—who regard it, like the high prophet of efficiency Henry Ford, as ‘bunk’—are condemned to repeating its mistakes (usually at other peoples’ expense). The salutary effect of Endersby’s book, as detailed and as comprehensive as it is, is that it goes beyond a mere historical account and addresses concerns that are vital to the culture in which we currently participate. By revealing how contentious, unstable and, in many respects, downright wrong scientific knowledge was in the early twentieth century, Endersby compels us to also question the supposed certainties that are currently being trumpeted in the age of the ‘tech-bro.’

Joshua Glenn, on behalf of his series of MIT Press reprints, has dubbed the period 1900 to 1935 ‘the Radium Age.’ Yet, as Endersby convincingly argues, it should really be called ‘the Mutation Age,’ so powerfully did de Vries’s theory capture the public imagination. At the heart of its meteoric rise, dramatic decline and trailing iridescence was a single question: how did new species emerge? Although Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, still hotly contested and disputed by biologists at the start of the twentieth century, had indicated how certain species survived, it failed to explain how new species arrived. Since the process of natural selection was incalculably slow, how could new variants take hold without being swamped by the dominance of pre-existing biological forms? The apparent failure of Darwin’s theory to explain this discrepancy suggested that, if Darwinism was not totally wrong, it was seriously flawed, and open to new or resistant theories.

This space generated not only competing versions of Darwinism—alongside Darwin himself, there was still the legacy of Jean-Baptise de Lamarck’s theory of inherited characteristics as well as the work of Darwin’s contemporaries such as Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and August Weismann—but also contested definitions and usages of keywords, most notably, that of ‘evolution’ itself. Endersby pays particular attention to the concept of ‘experimental evolution’: that the process of evolution could not only be studied by experiment but also intervened in and accelerated. In a rebuff to historians of science, Endersby shows, both in his main text and the appendices that examine the contents of over 150 science textbooks published between 1900 and 1932, experimentalism was not primarily associated with the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendelism, and the realization that the answer to the question of how new species arrived was a new theory of heredity based upon Mendel’s focus on hybrids and Darwin’s natural selection, only gradually took hold after T.H. Morgan’s work on fruit flies in the 1910s. As Endersby notes, even as late as the mid-1920s, biologists such as Julian Huxley were still conflating Morgan’s discoveries with de Vries’s theory of mutations: something that even Morgan and his colleagues did themselves.

However, the other key factor in de Vries’s greater popularity was that his work was simply more exciting and sensationalistic than Mendel’s plodding and seemingly esoteric observations with pea plants. Into the space opened up by the irresolution of Darwin’s theory poured the new journalistic literature, hungry for attention-grabbing novelties. Endersby draws extensively upon concepts such as bricolage, familiar from fan and subcultural studies, to show how ideas, still contested and unproven within the scientific community, slid into popular discourse and became entangled with other cultural and political ideologies. In a further critique of his own discipline, Endersby demonstrates that a narrow focus on the work of scientists, as evidenced by the elite readerships for scientific papers and academic journals, offers a drastically one-sided account of how scientific knowledge was popularly understood. Instead, although de Vries’s description of apparently spontaneous plant mutations was not translated until the 1910s, the idea was appropriated by US magazines a decade earlier. In an era of mass circulation and limited copyright laws, the thrilling concept of sudden mutations was rapidly disseminated, often in apocalyptic terms that declared the end of Darwinism and the revelation of how the evolutionary principle could be seized and manipulated. Whilst on the one hand, mutation theory seemed to offer the possibility of developing new foods at the expense of Malthusian fears of overpopulation, on the other hand (as Endersby shows), the apocalyptic rhetoric enmeshed with both theosophical ideas and the peculiarly Californian pseudo-religion of ‘New Thought’ in claiming that scientific discoveries, such as those by de Vries, could revive the occult knowledge of Chaldean wisdom and presage a new developmental stage in human consciousness. Although Endersby’s focus is on biology, his analysis dovetails with how physics and mathematics were also viewed in the same period as part of a spiritual awakening, for example, the role of theosophy again in Mark Blacklock’s 2018 account, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension.

This odd mix of American can-do and mystical otherworldliness was embodied by Luther Burbank. Endersby compares Burbank’s experiments with new plant species with his near-contemporaries, fellow botanist Lewis Hyde Bailey and electrical inventor Thomas Edison. Bailey, unlike Burbank, retained a pastoral view of nature: that the natural world was inherently good and morally sustaining, but that humanity’s role was to work with nature and cultivate it for the greater good of human need. Consequently, although Endersby portrays Bailey as a more conservative figure than Burbank, he nonetheless embodies what Endersby calls the ‘biotopian’ tone of the popular literature: a forward-looking view in which nature is not there to be managed but actively intervened in and reshaped for the progress of human society.

Burbank, like Bailey, was portrayed as a simple folksy figure—sensitive, caring, even maternal—but in his ruthless destruction of aborted experiments, Burbank also appeared to be indifferent to the natural world except as a vessel for human needs. His relentless approach led Burbank to being compared with Edison, the epitome of the engineer paradigm, as Roger Luckhurst has argued in relation to pulp SF, but (like Edison) Burbank was also called a ‘wizard’: the very folksiness attributed to him also seemed to describe a mystical wisdom, an ancestral knowledge that came from working with the very processes of natural development. Although such descriptions were patently false (one of Burbank’s chief proponents was Garrett P. Serviss, author of the Wellsian rip-off, Edison’s Conquest of Mars [1898]), Burbank was nevertheless content to go along with them. Again, like Edison, he was a ruthless and talented self-promoter, riding the wave of boosterism that was a keynote of the popular journalism. Whereas de Vries also attempted to promote himself through the same channels, he was hampered not only by his non-US identity but also by his academic background; Burbank’s lack of formal training was actually an advantage by playing up to his public image as an untutored, supposedly natural genius. In fact, as Endersby drily observes, nearly all of Burbank’s results were disasters, but that didn’t stop US governmental departments throwing lucrative contracts in his direction or academic institutions falling over themselves to be associated with him (although Burbank’s idiosyncratic and undisciplined approach proved a nightmare for his more professional colleagues). Who knows what might have happened if Theodore Roosevelt or W.H. Taft, so impressed by Burbank’s vaunted skills, had offered him a place in their administration, maybe heading up a department of national efficiency? Instead, as Endersby deftly describes, Burbank’s rhetoric of weeding out undesirable elements and cultivating previously unsophisticated ones neatly overlapped with the racialist discourse surrounding the contemporaneous US invasion of the Philippines.

As Burbank’s fame eclipsed de Vries’s initial popularity, calling into question public understanding of what constitutes ‘science’ or a ‘scientist,’ whilst also extending the biotopian impulse afforded by mutation theory, a very different trajectory emerged in Britain. Endersby takes as his starting point T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1894), arguing that while Huxley rejected the idea of nature as innately good and viewed it instead as a plastic, material resource for human need, he was constrained by the Malthusian reinterpretation of original sin: that humans were inherently competitive and destructive. How could nature, on the one hand, be repurposed and improved at the expense, on the other hand, of the human desire for violence and conflict? Was it possible to not only intervene in the natural world but also human nature, if the ends justified the means?

As Endersby concedes, Huxley’s exploration of this ethical dilemma was inconclusive, but in the process, he outlined not only the terms of the argument to be taken up by his successors but also supplied a science-fictional (and residually Christian) imaginary: the bio-engineered future as a new Eden; a planned and cultivated garden that complemented the visions of Bailey and Burbank. This garden imagery, though, is profane rather than sacred, populated with artificially grown hybrid species. In describing the perversity of this biotopian nature, Endersby slightly misses a trick by not also noting the contemporaneous imagery of the hothouse flower that runs through the Decadent writing of the same period or, indeed, Arthur Symons’s description (only a few months before Huxley) of Decadence’s ‘spiritual and moral perversity’ as ‘a new and beautiful and interesting disease.’ H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), to which Endersby turns, is also in dialogue with the Decadent movement—the Eloi as lotus eaters, the Morlocks as vampiric predators—whilst Men Like Gods (1923), a central text for Endersby, fully embraces the artificial paradise favored by both Huxley and Symons. Endersby also glosses over the post-WW1 context of Men Like Gods, a vitriolic riposte to such apocalyptic novels as Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922), but convincingly sets it alongside such key speculative essays as J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924) and J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929). One of the most important aspects of Endersby’s analysis is the extent to which he troubles the blanket use of ‘eugenics’ to describe these writings. Whilst Wells’s infamous winnowing of African and Asian peoples in his essay Anticipations (1902) embodies some of the worst aspects of negative eugenics, both Men Like Gods and the essays of Bernal and Haldane either switched to more positive forms of eugenics or rejected the pseudo-science altogether, famously proposing, for example, the uses of artificial reproduction.

Both Bernal and Haldane had published in the pioneering pamphlet series To-day and Tomorrow, which sought to communicate both a world of ideas and competing visions of the future to a curious general audience. This democratization of scientific thought is also explored through Endersby’s extensive analysis of science textbooks, to which Wells contributed via The Science of Life (1929), his collaboration with his son G.P. and Julian Huxley. Besides detailing how The Science of Life offers a non-fictional counterpart to Men Like Gods, Endersby convincingly demonstrates how textbooks not only kept alive the now discredited theory of mutations but also preserved its authority by setting it alongside the more accepted theories of Darwinism, Mendelism and heredity.

Textbooks and pamphlets, seemingly more temperate than the hyperbole of popular journalism yet nonetheless infused with the same biotopian vision, were an important interpreter for political activists. Whilst Darwinism, in the form of social conservatives such as Galton, Haeckel and Spencer, seemed to offer a biological justification for the status quo, its emphasis upon the perversity and mutability of nature also lent succor for those seeking the overthrow of capitalism or patriarchy. Yet, the gradualism of natural selection, although approved by reformers such as Ramsey MacDonald, was anathema to more radical campaigners. Consequently, de Vries’s mutation theory, by declaring the spontaneity of change, seemed like a gift, and it rapidly became recommended reading (in one or other popularized form) for those on the revolutionary Left. Endersby pays particular attention to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) as both a feminist and socialist utopia which, unlike Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), actively argues for the re-engineering of nature. Although Endersby examines the Darwinian roots for Gilman’s racism, he balances this ideological blemish by stressing the extent to which she viewed gender as a cultural category and (like other turn-of-the-century feminists, it might be added) appropriated Darwin’s concept of sexual selection as a means of female intervention.

Another demographic for the textbooks were the young, predominantly but not exclusively male, readers of the early pulp SF magazines such as Amazing Stories. Just as he deftly alludes to fan and subcultural studies as part of his interdisciplinary approach, Endersby makes respectful use of critics such as Samuel R. Delany and Paul Kincaid to consider pulp SF as a discourse that effectively rehearses many of the themes that preoccupy his earlier chapters. In a survey of writers from David Keller and Jack Williamson to John Michel and Clare Winger Harris, Endersby explores not only how the concept of mutation was reinterpreted as part of an exciting series of optimistic technological visions but also how it informed the participatory culture of First Fandom: the so-called ‘backyard’ of the letter pages overlapped with Hugo Gernsback’s encouragement for readers to pursue their own ‘backyard science’ like miniature clones of Burbank. There is more that could be said here about Gernsback’s support of technocracy—a 1930s movement that has acquired contemporary relevance thanks to the fascist sympathies of Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather—but Endersby wisely leaves that for other writers to investigate.

Endersby contrasts the emergent pulp SF with the post-Wellsian scientific romances of J.D. Beresford, Julian Huxley and Olaf Stapledon. However, whilst Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) clearly utilized the speculative visions of Bernal and Haldane, Endersby also observes how Stapledon’s work, alongside Wells’s Star Begotten (1937), influenced its US counterparts. To that end, Endersby pays close attention to how Huxley’s ‘The Tissue-Culture King’ (1926) was reframed within the pages of Amazing Stories, and how Beresford inserted a scientific dialogue into The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911) for its US publication, so as to clarify the origins of the mutant prodigy. (I will admit I was unaware of the details of this addition when I wrote about the novel in my own Modernism and Science Fiction; equally though, Endersby pays less attention than he might to Beresford’s usage of Henri Bergson’s ‘creative evolution.’) Leaping forward to such movie franchises as the X-Men, Endersby astutely observes that it is SF which has kept the folk-science of mutation alive long after the original theory’s demise; an observation that could have been developed further by noting how Stapledon’s concept of homo superior passed into the wider culture via David Bowie’s song ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971).

In his conclusion, Endersby addresses the elephant in the room, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but does so by emphasizing that what Huxley offers is not a eugenic but a bio-engineered future, coupled to Pavlovian conditioning, which critically reflects the optimistic visions of Wells, Haldane, Bernal and his own brother Julian. Endersby tends to downplay, though, Huxley’s own complicity in these same ideologies which adds greatly to (at least for this reader) the unpleasant ambiguity of his novel. However, in noting that Brave New World is ultimately a satire on the Americanization of modern life, Endersby observes that it can also be read as a critique of the hollow promises of Luther Burbank (albeit written by an elite English intellectual). Despite these criticisms, though, Huxley tended to side with the burden of ancestral heredity, the dilemma that his grandfather had contended with, rather than the potential of speculative heredity as proposed by his brother. Endersby concludes that the cultural effect of novels such as Brave New World is to dissuade us from intervening in nature—that nature, somehow, knows best—whereas existential crises such as climate change dictate that intervention, in recognizing and embracing the perversity of nature, may actually be the right course of action.

Lavishly illustrated, engagingly written, and beautifully packaged by the University of Chicago Press, The Arrival of the Fittest is a substantial achievement. Its capacious approach to the subject is testament to both the generosity and humility of its author. This is interdisciplinary research of the highest order: it transforms our understanding of the period into more complex and subtle forms whilst also setting a high bar for those to follow. Meeting that challenge would be the perfect response for a work that dramatically alters how we view the cultural field of the early twentieth century.

Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-commissioning editor for Gold SF (Goldsmiths Press). His most recent book, J.G. Ballard’s Crash (Palgrave Macmillan), was shortlisted for the BSFA Awards in 2025.