Jim Endersby, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 400 pp. $37.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837567
Jim Endersby’s The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935 intervenes in histories of evolution by unearthing the popularity of a largely dismissed theory: mutation. Tracing the diffusion of Hugo de Vries’ theory of the emergence of new species through sudden genetic changes from its fleeting presence in scientific journals to its presence in popular science journalism, school textbooks, gardening manuals, and novels, Endersby moves easily between popular literary forms to engineer a new history for a much-discarded idea in the history of science. Far from a theory quickly abandoned, mutation emerges from Endersby’s new narrative as the dominant popular understanding of evolution in early twentieth-century America.
While in step with evolution’s long slow crawl, mutation theory was, Endersby presents, unsatisfied with Darwin’s gradualist explanation of evolution in establishing how evolutionary changes arrived – the actual moment when one species became another – and proposed that these happened quickly, immediately. While evolution may take millions of years, the beginnings of these changes could be witnessed and, consequently, controlled, selected, and developed within human timescales. Therefore, mutation fostered a culture of what Endersby calls ‘biotopianism’ – the idea that the future would be founded in humanity seizing the power of evolution through biological engineering, in contrast to the Nature-centred ‘ecotopianism’ of re-wilded, pastoral futures such as William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). The concept of ‘biotopianism’ is Arrival of the Fittest’s foremost contribution. Though the term has been used for a while with various definitions – Joshua Schuster has previously offered a definition of ‘biotopia’ as ‘seeking or staking a position on utopian or ideal visions of bios or life’ – Endersby’s is clearer, more focussed: biotopia is a ‘refusal to accept what nature provided … willingness to use the latest biology to change nature, and its unwillingness to wait for the future to arrive’(22).[i]
This is strengthened by the Arrival of the Fittest’s second core contribution: the centrality of the popular reader in the history of ideas. Endersby argues mutation theory and biotopian narratives flourished precisely because of their dependence on popular literature – journalism, novels, textbooks, gardening manuals – and the non-expert reader. This flourishing is unseen when histories of scientific ideas focus predominantly on the academic sciences. In essence, mutation’s presence in popular literature took biology and time out of the hands of Nature’s sluggishness or the scientific elites and placed the hope of the future in the hands of the common man by requiring readers to be active participants in the science they were reading, using writing on mutation – fictional and factual – as a practical tool for imagining and building the future.
Though the volume is structured through eight chapters, the literary forms of journalism, school textbooks, landscape gardening manuals, and science fiction novels do not remain neatly compartmentalised. In their bleed between chapters, Endersby persuasively dissolves the boundaries between factual writing and science fiction.
The first chapter establishes the groundwork of the popular understanding of evolution at the turn of the century, looking to the lack of consensus in science journalism which Endersby suggests opened the gates for de Vries’ theories of mutation to take hold. The second and third chapters then disrupt the boundary between academic and popular science, particularly in the US, where Luther Burbank framed his horticultural breeding as scientific research that proved de Vries’ theories, suggesting the biotopian future of biological engineering had arrived. Chapter Four then explores how these ideas of mutation moved from the world of popular science and gardening into esoteric thought systems such as New Thought and Theosophy, complementing Bergson’s concepts of vitalism which were already in use by utopian thinkers.
The narrative to this point is largely focussed on the US. This is no accident, Endersby argues, as he moves into Chapter Five, exploring the ethical and eugenicist debates around biotopianism and mutation theory in Britain. The British public, he suggests, was more inclined to the opinions of experts, and so the dismissal of de Vries’ theories of mutation by prominent scientists had greater effect.
Chapter Six returns to the US, leaving the British exploration of biotopianism scarce, though justified. Public debate over textbooks and the development of the teaching of biology in schools during a period where evolution was put on trial are positioned alongside the strangely science fiction-like explanations of mutation in textbooks. This further demonstrates the undercurrent to the whole book: the distinction between factual writing and science-fiction is often difficult to discern. Chapter Seven returns to Britain in a comparison between British and American socialists and feminists in their adoption of mutation and biotopianism, finding that, like the rest of the British readership, British socialists were less receptive to mutation than their American counterparts, preferring understandings of socialist utopias as natural evolution to bioengineered future. Chapter Eight interrogates how different theories of evolution feature in science fiction, finding an unexpected resurgence in ideas of mutation in interwar British science fiction – such as H G Wells’ Star Begotten (1937) – perhaps owing to its previous unpopularity and publishing’s need to constantly reinvent to create new, exciting visions of the future.
Arrival of the Fittest is, therefore, wide-reaching in its exploration of the vast scope of media and contexts where mutation theory and the utopian possibilities of evolution took hold, and is measured in expression and meticulously researched. One moment where this research falters, however, is the surface-level gendered reading. The attention women receive in subsections of two chapters – an examination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work and a short section entitled ‘Evolving Women’ in the seventh and eighth chapters – is generally good, and offers interesting new understandings of Gilman’s work, but is not afforded the same depth as is found in the rest of the volume. While men practice biotopianism in Endersby’s narrative, women in these two sections only write fiction about it or are the subject of that fiction, whether they embrace its liberatory potential or critique biology’s patriarchal control. Here, Endersby does not satisfyingly address the otherwise persuasive slip between fact and fictional writing, or explore why his women are confined to the world of fiction.
This is partly the result of an oversight in the significance of women in mutation research – not a conscious ignorance on Endersby’s behalf, but a result of scientific publishing’s gendered bias in the early twentieth century. Marsha Richmond’s research into early twentieth-century women geneticists may have enriched the narrative in this regard: what of Anna Lutz’s influence on Davenport, though he refused to credit her for her work; or, in Britain, of the women in William Bateson’s plant genetics laboratory who would go on to be among the most prominent feminist radical gardeners of the twentieth century?[ii] Both Davenport and Bateson receive attention in Arrival of the Fittest, though the women fundamental to their ideas do not. Women, therefore, have more presence in Endersby’s narrative of mutation than the scant, sequestered attention to women’s science fiction writing would suggest. Nevertheless, the light-touch gendered reading leaves productive room for the ideas developed in Arrival of the Fittest to be applied to women’s scientific and utopian thought in future research.
The Arrival of the Fittest concludes by considering the ongoing influence of mutation theory and biotopianism in the post-war period from the X-Men films, to contemporary research into synthetic biology, to the debates around ‘bio-hacking’. Lines between popular utopianism, science fact, and science fiction are still significantly blurred, and therefore Endersby models how ‘biotopianism’ can be applied to, and critically illuminate, our relationships with the biological sciences today.
Arrival of the Fittest closes with a provocative musing on the biological imagination’s place in shaping our own futures. Stating that biotopianism’s artificial futures are the only futures worth fighting for, as the cultural category of ‘Nature’ has too often been employed ‘to galvanise lynch mobs’ (348) seems to jar with Endersby’s otherwise measured, nuanced, and critical approach, one that allows the problematic and the progressive to sit uncomfortably side-by-side. Arrival of the Fittest raises, throughout, the ethical concerns with biotopianism, so now to brush them away (by arguing that we need only ‘adopt very different ethical, political, and economic standards’ (348) for biotopianism to succeed) is logically unsubstantiated. Need we choose between artificial biotopian futures and ‘Natural’ futures? Can we not also adopt these different ethical, political, and economic standards to the cultural category of ‘Nature’? Why does biotopianism emerge salvageable and ‘Nature’ remain condemned to the thought of the ‘lynch mob’? These questions raised – perhaps inadvertently – by Arrival of the Fittest’s final lines demand greater interrogation and demonstrate how contentious biology’s imaginary futures still are.
Endersby has, therefore, produced an evocative, engaging, and – notwithstanding some qualms about the closing comments – persuasive history of popular biology’s imaginations of progress, of the world to come, of utopia. He successfully intervenes into established narratives of the popular understanding of evolution and, in identifying biotopianism as a strain of scientific utopian thought distinct from other environmental utopianisms, will no doubt plant the seed for new conversations and new strains of research to grow where Arrival of the Fittest so tantalisingly leaves off.
Alice Dodds, Courtauld Institute of Art
[i] Joshua Schuster, ‘Modernist biotopias: organicism and vitalism in early twentieth-century American poetry’, PhD Thesis (University of Pennsylvania, 2007).
[ii] See Marsha L Richmond: ‘Women in the early history of genetics: William Bateson and the Newnham College Mendelians, 1900-1910’, Isis 92, no. 1 (2001); ‘Women in mutation studies: the role of gender in the methods, practices, and results of early twentieth-century genetics’, in L. Campos and A. Schwerin (eds) Making mutations: objects, practices, contexts (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2010), pp.11-48; ‘The imperative for inclusion: a gender analysis of genetics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science,90 (2021), 247-264.
