Evolution in fiction

[5] Ideas of progress and evolution were popular, long before Darwinism, in the 18th century, leading to Nicolas-Edme Rétif's allegorical 1781 story La découverte Australe par un homme volant [fr] (The Southern Hemisphere Discovery by a Flying Man).

[6] Hardwick gives as examples of the evolution of "bad-guy traits" the Morlocks in H. G. Wells's 1895 The Time Machine, the bugs' caste system in Robert Heinlein's 1959 Starship Troopers, and the effective colonisation by Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens.

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine already mentioned, his 1896 The Island of Dr Moreau, and his 1898 The War of the Worlds all pessimistically explore the possible dire consequences of the darker sides of human nature in the struggle for survival.

A different take on Darwinism is the idea, popular from the 1950s onwards, that humans will evolve more or less godlike mental capacity, as in Arthur C. Clarke's 1950 Childhood's End and Brian Aldiss's 1959 Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.

For instance, Olof Johannesson's 1966 The Great Computer gives humans the role of enabling intelligent machines to evolve, while Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 Galapagos is one of several novels to depict a replacement species.