THE AMBIGUOUS ANIMAL: EVOLUTION OF THE BEAST-MAN IN SCIENTIFIC CREATION MYTHS (WELLS; ENGLAND, SIMAK; UNITED STATES, BOULLE; FRANCE, CROWLEY)

This dissertation is an examination of the scientific, ethical, philosophic, and social implications of the depiction of the mythic beast-man composite character in post-Darwinian science fiction. Included in this study are works both of science fiction and of speculative science written by scientists who extrapolate from scientific models and discoveries concerning human-animal relationships to draw conclusions about the nature and destiny of humanity. The primary thesis of the dissertation is that both scientists and science fiction writers invent scientific myths of origin and metamorphosis which are reformulations of pre-scientific creation narratives.;The role of the scientist as modern mythmaker is explored in analyses of ethologist Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression (1963) and exobiologist and astronomer Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Intelligence (1977), with a focus on the ways in which these narratives provide unifying structures for scientific speculations about the origin and destiny of the human species based on an evolutionary model underlying and informing scientific interpretations of animal and human behaviors.;Four science fiction works, written over a period of eighty years--(H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Clifford Simak's City (1952), Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes (1963) and John Crowley's Beasts (1976) have been selected to exemplify not only the continuity between ancient and scientific beast-man fables, but also the effects of Darwinian theory and subsequent scientific discoveries on the metaphorical function of the beast-man. Analyses of these texts focus on the dialectical oppositions of human and non-human characteristics which inform the figure of the beast-man in both myth and science fiction, as well as the reformulation of associated themes and motifs--including metamorphosis, animal folklore, and creation myths--by the extrapolation of evolutionary theory. The conclusion of this study is that the beast-man presents a compressed myth, the product of a metaphorical process, which embodies humanity's continuing search for self-identity, recapitulates perennial uncertainties regarding humanity's relationship with nature, and perpetuates ambiguous perceptions of human nature.