After Evolution

Abstract This chapter analyzes the effects of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Herbert Spencer’s idea of the “survival of the fittest” on intergenerational ethics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While both American eugenicists and utopian novelists maintained that future generations could be improved through bio-social engineering, Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881) and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) critique the assumption that the living can script the future. These novels, unlike Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), raise ethical and logistical questions about the effects of intervening in complex social and biological processes. Rather than imagining ideal societies, Lane and Schuyler explore the contradictory impulses that underwrite any vision of a “utopian” society.