"Gould discusses iconographies like the “great chain of being” and the “march of progress” as influencing our perceptions of evolution. Today “family tree”-style pictures are beginning to replace the traditional image of the “march of progress” in biology textbooks. However, outside academia, there are still countless visual representations of evolution that maintain the fiction that evolution inevitably follows a certain predetermined linear progression and that that trajectory moves towards humanoid bodies and human or superhuman brains. Science fiction movies, TV shows, and comic books are powerful iconographies in today’s society, continuing to perpetuate the myth of trajectory-based evolution. According to the sci-fi genre, evolution follows an internal “blueprint,” a preset trajectory that takes organisms from simplicity to complexity for complexity’s sake."
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Jocelyn D. Pickreign, “Science Fiction and the Myth of Trajectory Evolution”, The Macalester Review, Vol. 3 [2013], Iss. 2, Art. 1, (6-2-2013), p. 2.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Evolution
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Evolution
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