Speculative evolution
[4] Speculative evolution is a long-standing trope within science fiction, often recognized as beginning as such with H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine, which featured several imaginary future creatures.
The modern speculative evolution movement is generally agreed to have begun with the publication of Dougal Dixon's 1981 book After Man, which explored a fully realized future Earth with a complete ecosystem of over a hundred hypothetical animals.
One of the earliest works usually recognized as representing one of speculative evolution is H. G. Wells's science fiction novel The Time Machine, published in 1895.
[2][3][5] The Time Machine, set over eight hundred thousand years in the future, features post-human descendants in the form of the beautiful but weak Eloi and the brutish Morlocks.
[8][9] Frederik Pohl wrote that before Weinbaum, science fiction's aliens "might be catmen, lizard-men, antmen, plantmen or rockmen; but they were, always and incurably, men.
... it was the difference in orientation – in drives, goals and thought processes – that made the Weinbaum-type alien so fresh and rewarding in science fiction in the mid-thirties.
[11] Besides conventional environment-driven evolution -during which offshoots of humanity experienced both elevated and the total loss of sentience - the book anticipates the science of genetic engineering, and is an early instance of the fictional group mind idea.
The Rhinogrades are characterized by a nose-like feature called a "nasorium", the form and function of which vary significantly between species, akin to Darwin's finches and their beak specialization.
[3] In 1976, the Italian author and illustrator Leo Lionni published Parallel Botany, a "field guide to imaginary plants", presented with academic-style mentions of genuine people and places.
[15] A central idea of After Man, besides a wave of extinction following humans, is convergent evolution as new species bear a close resemblance to their unrelated predecessors.
Speculative evolution continues to endure a somewhat mainstream presence through films and TV shows featuring hypothetical and imaginary creatures, such as The Future is Wild (2002), Primeval (2007–2011), Avatar (2009), Terra Nova (2011),[3] and Alien Worlds (2020).
[15] Although primarily characterized as entertainment, speculative evolution can be used as educational tool to explain and illustrate real natural processes through using fictional and imaginary examples.
Many of the animals featured in Dixon's After Man are still considered plausible ideas, with some of them (such as specialized rodents and semi-aquatic primates) being reinforced with recent biology studies.
[20] Dixon extrapolated on the ideas of paleontologists such as Robert Bakker and Gregory S. Paul when creating his creatures and also used patterns seen in the actual evolutionary history of the dinosaurs and pushing them to an extreme.
[15] Similarly, After Man in 1981 represents a sort of time capsule of geological thought before global warming was fully discerned, but Dixon also portrays a sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene before it was commonplace to do so.
Caminalcules, named after Joseph H. Camin, are a group of animal-like lifeforms, consisting of 77 purported extant and fossil species that were invented as a tool for understanding phylogenetics.
[30] Astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter speculated that a "hunters, floaters and sinkers" ecosystem could populate the atmospheres of gas giant planets like Jupiter, and scientifically described it in a 1976 paper.
For example, Robert Forward's 1980 Dragon's Egg[34] develops a tale of life on a neutron star, and the resulting high-gravity, high-energy environment with an atmosphere of iron vapor and mountains 5-100 millimeters high.
Once the star cools down and stable chemistry develops, life evolves extremely quickly, and Forward imagines a civilization of "cheela" that lives a million times faster than humans.
[36] Perhaps the most famous speculative work on a hypothetical alien ecosystem is Wayne Barlowe's 1990 book Expedition, which explores the fictional exoplanet Darwin IV.
[37] Other examples of speculative evolution focused on extraterrestrial life include Dougal Dixon's 2010 book Greenworld,[15] TV programmes such as 1997 the BBC2/Discovery Channel special Natural History of an Alien[15] and the 2005 Channel 4/National Geographic programme Extraterrestrial[38] as well as a variety of personal web-based artistic projects, such as C. M. Kosemen's "Snaiad" and Gert van Dijk's "Furaha", envisioning the biosphere of entire alien worlds.
[41] Further, H. R. Giger's design of the Alien incorporated the features of insects, echinoderms and fossil crinoids, while concept artist John Cobb suggested acid blood as a biological defense mechanism.
[42] James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar constructed a fictional biosphere full of original, speculative alien species; a team of experts ensured that the lifeforms were scientifically plausible.
[3][43][44] The creatures of the movie took inspiration from Earth species as diverse as pterosaurs, microraptors, great white sharks, and panthers, and combined their traits to create an alien world.
[48][16] Although the foundations of this subset were laid by Wells's The Time Machine already in 1895, it is generally agreed that it was definitively established by Dixon's After Man in 1981, which explored a fully realized future ecosystem set 50 million years from the present.
[55][48] Ward quotes the paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who points out that the fantastical or even whimsical creatures devised by Dougal Dixon, echo nature's tendency to converge on the same body plans.
