Evolutionary psychology

Abstract

This chapter explores the importation into science fiction of evolutionary psychology, including earlier schools such as Social Darwinism and sociobiology. Social Darwinism motivates an anti-utopian tendency to forecast a state of future decadence that can be arrested only by the re-activation of dormant evolutionary mechanisms. This pattern may be familiar enough from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), but is less easily perceived in Octavia Butler’s sequence, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), which predicts a new evolutionary lineage for homo sapiens emerging from a future in which the USA is a failed state. The authority of evolutionary psychology is challenged in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), which satirizes the sociobiological paradigm by taking to the point of absurdity evolutionary explanations for human aggression. Science fiction can, moreover, escape hackneyed Social Darwinist discourses by drawing upon alternative evolutionary psychologies. Naomi Mitchison’s future utopia in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) draws upon attachment theory to offer a renewed feminist ethic of compassion and imaginative understanding, while also estranging our dominant ethical systems.