Article ID: CBB001450146

The Machinate Literary Animal: Butlerian Science for the Twenty-First Century (2014)

unapi

Current inquiry into nongenetic forms of inheritance has deep roots in the nineteenth century. Samuel Butler's evolutionary science writing and fiction points ahead, beyond the twentieth-century dismissal of pre-Darwinian science, to our own questions about how the experiences of an individual organism may effect change at the species level. This includes the way that symbolically mediated information, which rapidly shapes the human environment, exercises a downward pressure on slower-moving, genetic change. Butler's theories of unconscious memory and extended cognition, along with the Lamarckian principle that acquired traits could be passed on to descendants, together constituted an evo-devo approach to species history. In particular, language---specifically literary language---for Butler functioned as a machinate extension of the mind that could communicate transformative information to successive generations. Such extension therefore enables the little events of a lifetime to reach into the evolutionary future and transform it.

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Authors & Contributors
Barbujani, Guido
Lidwell-Durnin, John
Pareti, Germana
Gillott, David
Towheed, Shafquat
Susman, Millard
Concepts
Genetics
Human genetics
Inheritance
Lamarckism
Heredity
Genomics
Time Periods
19th century
21st century
20th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Places
United States
France
Great Britain
Institutions
Human Genome Project
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