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The eponymous Silurians on Doctor Who are a race of reptilian humanoids from Earth's past, making their first appearance in the show in 1970. Frank and Schmidt cite Inherit the Stars, a 1977 novel by J. P. Hogan as containing a similar hypothesis, but also say they were surprised by how rarely the concept was explored in science fiction. [2]
David Hume offers in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that human beings are naturally social: "'Tis utterly impossible for men to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteem'd social. This, however, hinders not, but that philosophers may, if ...
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Traditional religion attributed the origin of life to deities who created the natural world. Spontaneous generation, the first naturalistic theory of abiogenesis, goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy, and continued to have support in Western scholarship until the 19th century. [15]
In 1987, science fiction author Greg Bear explored this concept that he called a "vicious jungle" in his novel The Forge of God. [17] In The Forge of God , humanity is likened to a baby crying in a hostile forest: "There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves."
A scene of a first contact between aliens and humans in Robert Sheckley's 1952 short story "Warrior Race". First contact is a common theme in science fiction about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites.
When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers.
"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content." [13] Basil Davenport. 1955. "Science fiction is fiction based upon some imagined development of science, or upon the extrapolation of a tendency in society." [14] Edmund ...
All women have evolved to be beautiful, in an illustration by Paul Merwart for a 1911 edition of Camille Flammarion's 1894 novel La Fin du Monde.. Evolution has been an important theme in fiction, including speculative evolution in science fiction, since the late 19th century, though it began before Charles Darwin's time, and reflects progressionist and Lamarckist views as well as Darwin's. [1]