Jim Endersby, "The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology's Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Jan 7, 2026

Jim Endersby, a Professor at the University of Sussex, dives into the early 20th-century intersection of biology and culture. He discusses Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory and its fleeting fame, sparking public imagination about evolution. Endersby explores the concept of 'biotopia,' revealing how fiction writers like H.G. Wells reimagined biological futures. He also highlights the role of early sci-fi fandom in shaping scientific ideas and examines the influence of feminist and socialist narratives on evolving viewpoints about heredity.

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ANECDOTE

How a Lost Plant Sparked the Book

Jim Endersby traced the book's origin to his guinea-pig-themed research and a discovery about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.
Finding Gilman's reference to the 'law of mutation' sparked a deep dive into mutation's public afterlife.

INSIGHT

Mutation Theory Reframes Evolutionary Novelty

De Vries's mutation theory answered how radically new forms might appear suddenly rather than via slow selection.
That promise of rapid, controllable evolution excited scientists and the public as a precursor to experimental genetic engineering.

INSIGHT

Biotopia: Shaping Nature As Raw Material

Biotopias reimagine nature, including human nature, as malleable material for science to shape.
These futures blend utopian and dystopian possibilities, making biological futures morally ambiguous.

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The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900–1935 by Jim Endersby

In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.
In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us.

Jim Endersby is professor of the history of science at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Orchid: A Cultural History, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, and A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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