Devolution (biology)
In the 19th century, when belief in orthogenesis was widespread, zoologists such as Ray Lankester and Anton Dohrn and palaeontologists Alpheus Hyatt and Carl H. Eigenmann advocated the idea of devolution.
[2] Earlier views that species are subject to "cultural decay", "drives to perfection", or "devolution" are practically meaningless in terms of current (neo-)Darwinian theory.
[2] The concept of devolution as regress from progress relates to the ancient ideas that either life came into being through special creation or that humans are the ultimate product or goal of evolution.
Biologists refer to this misconception as teleology, the idea of intrinsic finality that things are "supposed" to be and behave a certain way, and naturally tend to act that way to pursue their own good.
Modern humans may be evolving towards never having wisdom teeth, and already have lost most of the tail found in many other mammals - not to mention other vestigial structures, such as the vermiform appendix or the nictitating membrane.
Dohrn claimed cyclostomes such as lampreys are degenerate fish as there is no evidence their jawless state is an ancestral feature but is the product of environmental adaptation due to parasitism.
[15] The historian of biology Peter J. Bowler has written that devolution was taken seriously by proponents of orthogenesis and others in the late 19th century who at this period of time firmly believed that there was a direction in evolution.
[23] Blumenbach claimed Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos and the Chinese were fair skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors.
Blumenbach denied that his "Degeneration theory" was racist; he also wrote three essays claiming non-white peoples are capable of excelling in arts and sciences in reaction against racialists of his time who believed they couldn't.
Similarly, Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy has the same premise, with the main character the subject of a military hibernation experiment that goes awry, taking him 500 years into the future.
While in "The Marching Morons", civilization is kept afloat by a small group of dedicated geniuses, in Idiocracy, voluntary childlessness among high-IQ couples leaves only automated systems to fill that role.
[26] The 1998 song "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger finds lighthearted humor in dysgenics with the lines "Been around the world and found/That only stupid people are breeding/The cretins cloning and feeding/And I don't even own a tv".
The American new wave band Devo derived both their name and overarching philosophy from the concept of "de-evolution" and used social satire and humor to espouse the idea that humanity had actually regressed over time.
[27] According to music critic Steve Huey, the band "adapted the theory to fit their view of American society as a rigid, dichotomized instrument of repression ensuring that its members behaved like clones, marching through life with mechanical, assembly-line precision and no tolerance for ambiguity.
"[27] DC Comics' Aquaman has one of the seven races of Atlantis called The Trench, similar to the Grindylows of British folklore, Cthulhu Mythos' Deep One, Universal Classic Monsters' Gill-man, and Fallout's Mirelurk.
[29] Robert E. Howard, in The Hyborian Age, an essay on his Conan the Barbarian universe, stated that the Atlanteans devolved into "ape-men", and had once been the Picts (distinct from the actual people; his are closely modeled on Algonquian Native Americans).
[30] Similarly, Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, believed, contrary to standard evolutionary theory, that apes had devolved from humans rather than the opposite, through affected people "putting themselves on the animal level".
[31] Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels contains a story about Yahoos, a kind of human-like creature turned into a savage, animal-like the state of society in which the Houyhnhnms—descendants of horses—are the dominant species.
