Evolution

Evolution appears across Kyle’s reading as both a literary explanatory frame and an unfinished theological problem. In The Time Machine, Charles Darwin’s theory is the lens the Time Traveller uses to read the Eloi/Morlock divergence (“unless biological science is a mass of errors”): with hardship removed, “the too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration.” The book frames evolution as adaptation to conditions, where “strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness” — so comfort breeds decline rather than progress.

In Future Mormon, Adam S. Miller presses Mormonism’s unfinished reckoning with evolution and deep time. He wants Mormons to treat “evolution not just as a local twist in God’s top-down management of a wholly rational real, but as indicative of a fundamental truth about the contingent world to which both we and God find ourselves given.” Miller reads Darwin’s insight that nature’s beauty (the peacock’s tail, autumn maple leaves) serves survival and reproduction rather than human delight — “and yet” it ravishes the human eye, and in that “while,” that “and,” that “but it also,” he locates “the giftedness of life.” For Miller, evolution and contingency are theological data, not embarrassments to explain away.

Context: Evolution is the scientific theory, originating with Charles Darwin’s natural selection, that species change over generations through differential survival and reproduction of heritable variation.

Where this appears

• The Time Machine — evolution (via Darwin) as the explanatory frame for the Eloi/Morlock degeneration, with security producing decline.
• Future Mormon — Adam S. Miller’s call to take biological evolution and deep time as truths about a contingent world, and his reading of Darwin’s “purposeless beauty” as the giftedness of life.