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Study 103 - The Man Who Evolved (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-22 20:00:05
Imported:
2024-08
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If you've got the body, we've got the BRAIN! We're examining The Man Who Evolved by Edmond Hamilton and it's truly astounding!

Special thanks to our amazing reader: Ryan Negron!

Peep the cover illustration from Wonder Stories!

Next up: “ALL YOU ZOMBIES—” by Robert A. Heinlein

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Comments

photomatto

Oh yes! I love this story! Can’t wait to listen 😁🎉

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

I'm looking forward to this buT ALSO "ALL YOU ZOMBIES" IS NEXT WOO—

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

...And it is time again for me to recommend y'all cover "The Enchantress of Venus" by Leigh Brackett, a tale of her Black adventurer who was raised by an indigenous tribe on Mercury and travels the spaceways running guns to natives fighting Terran colonialism, combatting slavery, etc. It also has a moment near the climax I NEED to hear Chad and Chris' reactions to.

ESTY

Ryan Negron has a great reading voice

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

His head, after the second round, was the exact inner diameter of a basketball rim: 18 inches. The head could have been separated from his body without much trouble, from the sound of things, but for his friends to then take it to a basketball court and shoot it exactly though the hoop without it touching the sides would have been far beyond their abilities at this stage of our evolution.

Ketus

This story reminded me The Monster of Lametrie with all the wacky brain mad science. Stick your brain in a dinosaur? Sure makes sense, why not. Evolve yourself in a steel cube environment and expect things to not go awry? Sure go ahead there buddy. When the "almighty brain" said it could turn on the machine without them yet it still needed them to turn it on? My brain being still in Conan mode and I wondered- what would punching the big brained jerk do?

Joe Webb

This story is exactly the Twilight Zone episode The Sixth Finger, 'written' by Ellis St. Joseph, from 1963. The tv show feels like a better story, actually, where the super brain guy gets smart enough to go beyond pettiness and revenge. Thankfully his gf reverses the process and brings him back, because he never did get smart enough to put the button inside the booth with him. Per the Wikipedia article, the original script even has him turning into jelly, by reversing him too far - executives said no, concerned that the overt reference to evolution would be offensive (and not him turning into splooge, which is what I thought when I heard your reader).

Jason Thompson

Man!! Chad’s grumpy college professor voice is the greatest! Why can’t I get Google Home to talk like that??! License that stuff!

Richard Horsman

Somehow it got in my head that this was the guy who wrote Lost Horizon (the old novel about westerners visiting Shangri-la). I was surprised that his stories would be so silly, but it made a sort of sense in my head after a while. Turns out that James Hilton was the author of Lost Horizon, but now the two works will forever be the work of one man in my memory. Also: hot damn, All You Zombies! Best thing Heinlein ever did. Can’t wait!

REO Jackwagon

Holy Smokes! Ryan sells the $h!+ out of this dumb-ass story!

Alan Ricks

So his friends really dropped the ball. If evolution is cyclical then when he got to the primordial ooze stage all they had do was not freak out and destroy everything, just turn him on to bake a little bit and circle the process back around. Eventually they’d get their buddy back. Big Brain probably knew that the whole time and thats why he wasn’t worried. His only mistake was relying on small brain humans to keep their cool.

Background Noise Comic

Drunk Professor goes in the utility belt along with Lyin’ Vincent Price. I’m thinking he’s Professor William Dewars of WhiskyTonic University. Maybe I missed something, but did this story have anything to do with the classic Outer Limits Episode “The Sixth Finger”? Also has a guy in a tank being evolved (by sonic waves in this case), future guy insulting all us un-evolveds epically, & it all ends badly. Science fiction & the general public still have the wrong idea about evolution, thinking that it’s just a thing species or individuals would do without the shaping of environment and reproduction. Many think there’s some “ultimate form” of mankind waiting for us in the future. I think, thanks to Hollywood, we’re just going to keep getting cuter. Love you guys! —John Hazard

Jim Cannon

So this is the story that launched an entire genre of Outer Limits episodes.

Ketus

You guys mentioned having Patton on again and I'm so EXCITED. You guys got me into Michael Shea and I've eaten up the Demiurge collection and Color Out of Time! Really dig your coverage on his work.

Elisheba

I have questions about how this would work. Like, how are humans evolving to give birth to giant head babies when the legs and presumably hips are atrophying? This is likely way more thought than the author put into it.

Anne Ominous

Oh! Wow! Like everyone else on this thread, I've spent more time than the author did wondering how any of this could make sense. Perfectly ridiculous read.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

What I love about these stories is they operate on the premise that evolution is a single road the species is traveling. Zap cells with cosmic rays and they will evolve some way to live and reproduce despite the cosmic rays - or go extinct, of course. You could just stick some cells into a relativity machine that would have time go by much faster for the cells than for the observers. No cosmic rays necessary. Mutations would pop up. Some of them would give an advantage to reproduction and/or survival and could be recognized as an evolution. The mutations themselves would be essentially random. So you could really have some fun by putting a million cell samples into a million relativity machines and seeing the vast array of evolutionary paths. Or - let's really do some mad science! - subject each of our million samples to different challenges (cosmic rays, food restriction, temperature changes, predators, toxic chemicals, pressure extremes...) and check out an even cooler array of evolutionary paths. It's even possible that one such path leads to a big ol' brain. But probably only one.

Tiffany Toland-Scott

Combined Windex and fruit cup, all I got was diarrhea, no gold.

Ben A

I have so many thoughts about this one. I'll need a bigger head to hold them all! Let me step into my cosmic ray chamber for a sec... In all seriousness, the "science" in this tale would have been baffling to many biologists when it was written. One of the great debates in biology at the turn of the century was between folks who supported gradual evolution through natural selection and those who thought evolution happened through mutations (the make-a-monster type, not the nearly neutral type you guys mentioned). But by the '30s, people like R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane had realized that incremental changes in the frequencies of variants of genes (alleles) over generations could explain evolution. And different gene variants are the product of mutations, most of which happen through cell duplication errors and not rad-i-ation. I'll also note that this story does repeat another older evolutionary debate of the 1800s. Folks who supported the idea of evolution broadly thought of it as teological. That is, they thought it has an end goal or purpose. It doesn't, but a lot of folks still think this today. But at the end of the 1800s, philosophers and other thinkers became obsessed with the idea of degeneration. This idea invaded evolutionary thought, too, especially about humans. The concern was that humans were doomed to lesser states over time, kinda like how Christians thought about the Fall from original sin. Taken to an extreme, the worry was that humans wouldn't necessarily become protoplasmic goo, but that they would revert to more "primitive" states in the future. It's fun to see this appear in this story, but I also think Harrison's evolutionary ideas would have been better suited to when H.G. Wells was writing The Time Machine! There's much more to unpack here, but I've written long enough. I'm excited to hear Patton Oswalt back on with more He Says, Shea Says! And for time loop mayhem next time!

Ryan Thomas

He created solid gold. Big whoop. Did he ever create a Solid Gold dancer?

Mooncubus

This reminds me of a scene in Pajama Sam of all things. There's an alchemy lab you can brew different potions in and one of them is supposed to make you incredibly smart. It does make Sam super smart and he states how he now has all the world's knowledge, but unfortunately it causes his brain and head to become so massive he can't lift it off the desk. Also, maybe this is the origins of Megamind.

Steven Moore

More Professor Pickled Finger please.

Donny Bliss

I think most people don't get the fact that mutations add complete randomness to an organism that's already working fine. It would be like opening your old grandfather clock that doesn't quite keep the right time and throwing a heavy wrench into its gears. Nine out of ten times the clock might stop working. If it kept working, the wrench would probably messed up the clock even more. BUT if you had a million grandfather clocks and tried this a million times, a few of the hits might knock the right cog in just the right way to make the clock more accurate. That's the way mutations and evolution work. Rarely something goes right and the better changes end up staying around.

ChiveOnOCM

This story of how humans could evolve into unrecognizable creatures has me thinking of that time Chad shared that he was once at a Skinny Bunny concert and using the bathroom with a Dracula Goth used the stall next to him and the Drac Goth just sighed/expressed about the mere thought of existence. Yeah, that’s it, the story had reminded me of that.

Ryan Thomas

All You Zombies -- vague enough not to spoil the audiobook available on YouTube, I will just say this, "Now I know a reason for that one rule often mentioned in sci-fi."

Nic Wassell

I feel like scifi writers today get judged a lot on whether or not they stick to scientific accuracy and feel pressure to do so. I kind of envy the writers and readers of the 30s-50s when you could get away with "what if *this* happened??"

Steve

I'm waiting for your Strange Studies T-shirt, "I'm not a scientist, I'm just a normal guy."

Steve

Hamilton isn't the writer Leigh Bracket was but I still enjoy his brand of jaunty nonsense. He does for SF what Austin Powers does for the spy story.

Drasferatu

Is there a Patreon tier where all of the dialogue is spoken as a drunk professor?

Max Capacity

did anyone else get Looney Toons vibes? like Daffy Duck going into a machine and coming out and his brain is huge and he keeps going into the machine for more? and when he comes out he taunts bugs bunny about how smart he his now and bugs mugs for the camera and points at him like "this guy" and then we all know how it ends

James Anthony

For another take on this cyclical evolution idea you can look at the Conan the Cimerian stories. Conan's own race is described as being recently revolved from apes, who were themselves the descendants of his eras equivalent to the Atlanteans.