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And I know there's a monkey in the future for you
And there's nothing modern science can do
Keeping the thumb but I'm getting dumb
I'm devolving, I'm devolving
I am de-evolving
Jonathan Coulton, "De-Evolving".

And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals.

According to Darwin, evolution is slow, filled with dead ends, and is grossly inefficient. Science Fiction tidies it up a bit.

In fact, Science Fiction writers love the notion of evolution, especially when it irritates their critics. Ironically enough, they often make quite a few faith-based assumptions themselves.

One popular misconception seems to be how the entirety of evolution is preprogrammed, past and future. Evolutionary states that don't exist yet are just waiting in human DNA to be triggered by rather simple means, as opposed to the culmination of little changes brought on by passing down genes over hundreds of generations. Goes hand in hand with the idea that a certain evolutionary path is "supposed" to happen.

Likewise, it's easy to regress in evolution. A Mad Scientist or a Negative Space Wedgie can hit humans with rays that will turn them into Neanderthals or modern monkeys, regardless of the fact that humans evolved from neither. Our ancestral lineage goes back to a genus of apes, not monkeys; apes and monkeys having split off from each other a long time ago; and neanderthals are a cousin species of ours, not an ancestor species.

One problem (which applies almost every time evolution is mentioned in fiction, not just in this trope) is the misconception that biological evolution is a sort of process of continual "improvement", making everyone bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter all the time, with the inevitable end result that we're all super-powered deities. This is not the case; while evolution certainly can make things bigger, faster, stronger, or smarter, those are secondary to the real process. Evolution is actually the result of adapting to survival in your specific environment through the preservation of the genes that are best for reproducing in that environment. This is why single-celled organisms, rats, lower primates, etc. still exist - the form is working for them. It is also quite possible for a creature to evolve to be smaller, slower, weaker, or stupider when (say) its muscles or brain are consuming unnecessary energy and are more than it really needs to reproduce, and thus individuals born with "handicaps" in these areas are more successful and have more descendants.

An excellent example of this would be blind cave fish, which have evolved to lose their sight; while by most standards and in most environments eyes would be considered a big advantage (and their loss a severe disadvantage), to a species of fish that has lived for generations in complete darkness they are purely a disadvantage — they're vulnerable to disease or parasites, they require energy to grow and keep functional, and so forth. Thus, over time, they lose their sight. Those who are born with a mutation that makes them naturally eyeless (who would have been outcompeted and starved under lighted conditions, thus weeding out the trait) become predominant in the gene pool, as they waste less effort growing something useless.

Another common evolutionary misconception has to do with the so-called intermediate stages. Evolution is presented in science fiction as a cycle of stable periods punctuated by periods of high mutation where the "leap" to the next stage happens all at once, within the span of a few generations. If you happen to be an individual born during one of these intermediate phases, the story might even have you spend part of your life in the old form, then spontaneously mutate into the new one (see Energy Beings for some examples). This could conceivably be based on the theory of punctuated equilibrium (though it's usually more to do with the theory of three minutes until the episode ends), where long periods of stability in which not much evolutionary change happens are interrupted by shorter periods of flux where a lot of evolutionary change happens. However, in reality, the "short periods" of change are still measured in millions of years and do not involve spontaneous transformation within an individual's lifetime. With only hypothetical exceptions, the only non-transitional forms are extinct forms (and there are plenty of those).

Relatedly, in Science Fiction, evolutionary mutations are usually triggered by a change in the environment (aka Lamarckian Evolution). In real life, it's not that the earth flooding causes people to start growing gills — a small number of people were growing gills all along, but it was a lot harder for them to get dates before the flood made those people more likely to survive long enough to bear children than the ones who weren't.

Evolutionary Levels also have a strange tendency to suddenly affect large populations at once. For example, Mutants all around the world suddenly have the same mutation at the same time. In real life, mutations happen rarely and are then passed on to a greater share of the population, generation by generation.

Evolved humans often have gigantic heads that house massive brains, often giving Psychic Powers along with increased intelligence, and are physically weak. However, this has slowly slid into Discredited Trope territory over the past few decades. An overevolved human will typically be described by the specific term homo superior (X-Men, The Tomorrow People, Red Dwarf, Babylon 5, Time Trax, David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things"). However, the concept of future generations of humans transferring their brains or their minds into machines or robotic bodies is slowly gaining popularity over the evolved human trope.

This has been a popular misconception since Darwin started publishing his theories, making this Older Than Radio.

However, note that Science Marches On; Scientists at Princeton University have suggested that some organisms may have the capacity to direct their own evolution. This hypothesis, coming as it does from only one set of experiments, is hardly widely accepted by the scientific community. Time will tell.

Subtrope of Hollywood Evolution. See A God Am I for one end result of sufficient hopping through Evolutionary Levels. See Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence for another. For super power inheritance, see Lamarck Was Right and Superpowerful Genetics. When each generation is on a higher "level" than the previous one, get ready for some Goo Goo Godlike action. For villains using this, see Darwinist and Evilutionary Biologist.

Examples

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Literature: Semi-subverted in the earliest science fiction novel, "Last and First Men." After leaving a dying Earth and settling on Venus, humanity goes through eighteen stages of evolution, each adapting to their unique evironment. For example, the dwarf "Ninth Men" who are limited by size due to excessive gravitation, the flying "Sixth Men" who live a harsh existence competing their seal-like relatives, and the "Tenth to Seventeenth Men" whose sentience reemerges after the "Sixth Men" civilization crumbles into savagery. Subverted towards the end when the last "Eighteenth Men" are the most advanced human species before being exterminated by a Supernova in the Solar System.

Western Animation: Used in the 1980s series, "Mighty Max", where a mad scientist named Dr. Zygote develops a ray that devolves anything to their prehistoric state. A bunch of human tourists become apes, Max's pet lizard becomes a dinosaur, and Virgil (a lemurian who is supposed to be the next step in human evolution) gets turned into a pteradactyl?? Later it's used by Dr. Zygote to turn a bunch of devolved mutated monsters into primordial ooze. He surmises that the ray "reversed their evolutionary path to the final quagmire, an evolutionary dead-end." What?! Going back to the furthest stages of evolution does not mean it's an evolutionary dead end! It's like he pulled that hypthesis out of his ass than from his head. You can look at it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owZqBj0vLXU&feature=related
  • Then in another episode, Dr. Zygote uses the ray again to further evolve himself into a more advanced form, from a big brained alien, to a lemurian, to a floating giant brain, and finally into a flash of light. How can Zygote evolve himself? Isn't evolution based on random mutations and not a set of straight pre-programmed levels? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmB5NDeziMk

  • Anime: Sort of subverted (I guess) in the Anime Monster Rancher. Although the concept of evolution is never delved upon, a large variety of monsters appear to come from the same species, but evolved slightly different physical characteristics. For example, compared to the character Tiger (a blue wolf-like monster with curved horns), there are also the reptilian-like wolf monsters and even an insect based variety. This is the same for all the other characters (minus the humans).
    • The video game version describes the monsters as defined by a primary breed (which defines its basic form and abilities) and a sub-breed (which defines its color scheme, modified appearance, and slightly alters its statistical abilities).