Chapter Darwin begat Huxley begat Wells of The Time Machine - Study Guide by H G Wells

hold true: each generation becoming increasingly indolent and stupid and passing this onto its offspring in a biological fashion.

To be fair to Wells, in 1895, Evolution was a young discipline, and at least some of the Eloi's uselessness could be down to cultural transmission - though this idea is rather against the spirit of the book. A better application of the idea becomes apparent with the appearance of the Morlocks: "Thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother out of the ease and the sunshine. And now the brother was coming back - changed." The Morlocks have been undergoing very different selection pressures to the Eloi, and in a very different environment. They have certainly become the 'best fitted' to their niche. "Man had not remained one species," observes the Time Traveller, "but had differentiated into two distinct animals." And the Morlocks seem extremely specialised to their environments: "Plainly, this second species of Man was subterranean," with its largely nocturnal emergence; bleached skin; large, light- sensitive eyes and confusion in the sunshine. And how has this creature evolved? "Proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position... There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants... This tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky... It had gone deeper and deeper into larger and even larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein."

The Morlocks have thrown off the versatility of Homo sapiens that has made him successful across the globe, and become the ultimate specialists. As John Lawton writes, 'the Morlocks are single- diet single- environment creatures, as over-adapted as giant tortoises' (that Darwin encountered on the Galapagos). And again Wells is setting the mould for the evolutionary process to occur from the world of 1895: "Even now, does not at East- end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut of from the natural surface of the earth?" Moreover, images of this sunless world inhabited by the lower classes can be found in Wells' own life: as an infant he would have spent a great deal of time in the basement of his parents' shop in Bromley. Towards the top of the wall was a grating and a window, through which the young Wells could glimpse the outside world, almost entirely in terms of passing feet. The experience was reinforced by life at Uppark, the mansion near Chichester, to which his mother went as house- keeper, and in which the servants moved unseen by the masters through a labyrinth of underground tunnels.

This widening physical gulf between the classes "will make that exchange between class and class that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour." This idea of two populations being physically separated until sufficient biological differences emerge that prevent interbreeding is a classic pattern of speciation defined by geography.

And by 802,701 it seems that the Morlock are beginning to gain the upper hand: "Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Underworld being in contact with machinery, which... still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character than the upper." As man has become lesser, smaller, machinery has got bigger - a not unreasonable assumption of the time, even if this is the opposite (with the regard to the machines at least) of what has happened in just the first hundred years since The Time Machine. And the Morlocks have turned to cannibalism - or rather to preying on the other species of man: "These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlock preserved and preyed upon - probably saw to the breeding of." The cannibalism is the final revelation of the degradation that the Morlocks have de-evolved to, but the Time Traveller does make the point that man's "prejudice against human flesh is no deep- seated instinct. ... I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone."