Evolution In Action: FInal Note

If you look long enough at the science fiction genre, you will notice how it isn't just about how species evolve, or how well they follow the basic axiom of evolution, namely "When the environment changes, adapt or die."

Science fiction itself, and to some extent its cousins fantasy and horror, have evolved themselves.

The concepts have changed as the science has become more refined. Once, it was the splitting of the atom, and few people had an inkling of what an atom looked like - hence the stylised image with which everybody is by now familiar.

Of course, with advances in knowledge, the development of mathematical processes to better understand the nature of the particles within the atom and various forms of computer modelling, eventually we discovered that atoms are a lot more probabilistic and, well, fuzzy, than we thought -

Quantum mechanics has changed the way we think about many things. Concepts such as viewscreens, considered outrageously futuristic back then, turned out to be so commonplace today that we can't imagine a life without them. From an understanding of how quantum processes work, we have developed the lasers H G Wells foresaw back in the 1890s - and watched them turned to use in CDs and DVDs, Blu rays and holographic anti-forgery seals instead of death beams.

Our understanding of biology also changed and advanced but we had to wait until 1953 for Watson and Crick to make the breakthrough there, with their structure of DNA - itself only possible through developments made by Roentgen and later Bragg. Before 1953, nobody knew how heredity worked - by the 1960s, comic book editors and authors had a sufficiently rudimentary knowledge of DNA to create stories about mutants which invoked heredity, genes and DNA for a sense of verisimilitude unheard of in a previous generation.

It is in the field of technology, however, that science fiction has evolved beyond all expectations. From initial ideas of having a man-shaped Golem-like robot and robotic dog in every Jetsons home, through to concepts once considered inconceivable such as entire computers and gigabyte memories fitting into a SD card no bigger than a piece of a fingernail, our technology has changed the way we even think - making the technologies and communications media of old TV shows such as Star Trek, and even the likes of Babylon 5 and Voyager, completely obsolescent.

Then, of course there came this ...

and the world inverted itself. Again.

In this modern world, even the very media in which we read out science fiction stories has evolved, adapted, as less-adaptable media have gone to extinction. Print, as we know it, is now Print On Demand, or it comes in the form of PDF documents or similar formats, which one can either read from a laptop screen, mobile phone or a mobile library called a Kindle - a device uncannily reflected in the PADDs of the old TV show Star Trek.

In many ways, many of the things we thought would be with us in this day and age are no longer with us; and many new and unexpected things, from smartphones to internet memes, and whole new slews of political storms about class and privilege from people who have no shoes on their feet, but would die without their smartphone contract, now fill the void we thought would be filled with stories about derring-do among the stars, with spaceships and robots and rayguns and sassy aliens with pointy ears or bumpy foreheads.

But that's evolution for you. Even with memes, sometimes an adaptation occurs which causes the organism to be so completely different from its predecessor that it can no longer mate with its predecessors, leading to an entirely new species.

Thus Science Fiction and fantasy have together faced such technological changes, from roleplaying games to MMORPGs, from electronic books to smartphones, that sometimes the stories emerging in this day and age suggest different mores that are utterly incompatible with the stories of the past.

There has been, as it were, speciation - the narrative of modern humanity has evolved into a whole new narrative in this century which would be unthinkable even to a man living even in the latter part of the 1990s, with the new century and millennium, and its challenges, waiting to happen.

This isn't business or capitalism.

It is evolution. The evolution of the human mind.