The evolution of "Human Evolution"

In 1953, Clarke's *Childhood's End* treats human evolution as a force beyond our comprehension or control—something cosmic that arrives and renders us obsolete in our own story. Dubos in 1968 occupies the pivot point: evolution is biological *and* sociocultural, the past literally incarnated in the present, but he still insists we're the same animal we were in the Paleolithic, just dressed differently. Then the genre splits. One branch—Butler's *Lilith's Brood* (1989), Wilhelm's *Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang* (1976)—treats self-directed evolution as a trap, the species rewriting itself into something that can no longer recognize what it lost. The other branch—Robinson's Mars trilogy, Egan's *Diaspora*, Tchaikovsky's *Children of Time*—treats it as the only game left, evolution as engineering project, but each quietly smuggles in the same anxiety Dubos named: that the Sumerian word for "humanity" started as a noun for the species and became a word for the *behavior* worth preserving. The real mutation across seventy years of these texts isn't biological. It's the slow, unresolved question of whether "human evolution" is a category of science or a category of ethics.