In the novel, the nameless Time Traveler rides in a time machine to the year 802,700, only to find that this world deep into the future looks nothing like the world he once knew. While this world is completely alien to him and to the reader, it does resemble contemporary views of the Time Traveler’s old world, aspects of biological processes that Darwin hypothesized. After viewing both an ‘upper-world’ of small, unintimidating beings and then a completely different nocturnal ape-like creature below, the Time Traveler realizes that both are descendants of humans. “…Gradually, the truth dawned on me:” the Traveler says. “that man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children on the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing…was also heir to the ages” (58, Wells). In other words, over time, a single species can give rise to new species, Darwin’s concept of speciation, a key aspect of his ultimate general concept of evolution, which is the change throughout a population over successive generations as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals. Wells clearly shows an up-to-date view of this bold and increasingly accepted Darwinian hypothesis. At the same time though, Wells shows through these two different and unimpressive species, his contentions in another increasingly popular belief, the idea of social Darwinism.
Conceived by British Philosopher Herbert Spencer, social Darwinism describes a scientific belief that emerged from evolution and natural selection in a way that Darwin never intended, trying to apply natural selection as a social process. According to this theory, the social environment closely resembled the competitive, natural environment, and those individuals who succeeded were biologically destined to do so and to continue to progress forward as a group. This idea was especially appealing to many Europeans and Americans because it catered to an ethnocentric belief in the inevitable caucasian dominance over other groups, such as Africans, whose countries had been under white imperialist rule.
Wells makes it clear in The Time Machine that he does not subscribe to social Darwinism by the relationship he creates between the Elois and the Morlocks, which reverses over time. While the Time Traveler had initially assumed that the ‘beautiful’ but ‘frail’ Elois were the dominant species, essentially biologically destined to rule over the lesser Morlocks, he ultimately realizes that the relationship he had assumed existed was anything but the reality. “The Upper-world people might once have been the favored aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi…had decayed to a mere beautiful futility” (71, Wells). To Wells, the idea of a social Darwinism is a fantasy. There is no predetermined formula for who will survive.
Another common belief during the late 19th century was the idea of progress, and that since evolution implies that life becomes more complex and fit over time, a surviving species should continually improve and progress. But by the turn of the century, there was a sharp cultural shift against progressivism and towards the belief in a more unpredictable progression. In fact, advancements in physics concepts directly related to the progression of biology and life. In the mid to late 19th century, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics—the concept of entropy—began to be understood. Entropy is essentially the opposite of progress, saying that systems naturally tend towards disorder and chaos. While it is a physics term, Wells seems to support this concept in a biological context. Wells creates a world in which our Time Traveler is able to see the entropy of life. After beginning as a member of the Victorian elite in England, he then time travels to a significantly more primitive world with the “physical slightness of the [Eloi’s] and their “lack of intelligence” (39, Wells) and the subterranean, nocturnal Morlocks. And finally, our Time Traveler jumps forward even further to see little more than monster crabs, riding even further, “watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away” (104, Wells). Wells suggests that entropy, the gradual dissipation of energy within an increasingly chaotic system, is the fate of the universe.