Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
had warned against treating nature like a machine. As the rampant advances of the machine age joined widening speculation on natural selection, writer Samuel Butler turned that concern inside out. In 1863, under the pen name Cellarius, he published an essay called “Darwin Among the Machines.” In it, and in his subsequent novel Erewhon, he described machines as advanced evolutionary species. Butler was considered an eccentric, but with the publication of Erewhon, which went through eight editions in his lifetime, his ideas gained wide popularity.
He also wrote numerous pamphlets, in one of which he makes a typical argument:
As the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up…It appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors…giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivance that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.
Tags: Erewhon, Frankenstein, machine metaphor, natural selection, Samuel Butler
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Posted on April 15th, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
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