Doctor Who and Cultural Evolution

This past week, I decided that I would undertake the herculean task of rewatching one of my favourite childhood and current shows, Doctor Who.  So where exactly does one begin when rewatching a fifty-year running television show with some seven hundred episodes?  At the beginning.  Classic Doctor Who (or Doctor Who prior to the 2005 reboot) is divided into seasons, and each season is divided into serials, or mini arcs that last for three or four episodes.

The first and second serials aired in 1963, and they are “And Unearthly Child” and “The Daleks,” respectively, the first focusing on the titular character and the second on a low-budget villain that would eventually become an icon of the franchise.  And it was as I was watching these two serials that I was struck by the incredible example they both provide of cultural (and basic human) evolution.

In the second episode of the first serial, the TARDIS (which is the blue time-machine-turned-police-box in which the Doctor travels the universe) lands in a barren waste inhabited by a tribe of “savages,” the tribe of Gum.  While the members of the tribe are named, they are presented with no capacity for speech, limited intelligence, an innate sense of violence, and a strong penchant for wearing loincloths made from animal skins.  While it is never stated that the tribe of Gum represents Neanderthals, their characterization (or lack thereof) does lend itself to the idea of early hominids popular in the early 1960’s.

In the next serial, the Doctor encounters what he calls a more “advanced” society, the humanoid Thals of the planet Skaro.  These people practice animal husbandry and farming, have developed an advanced language and religion, and seem in all respects to be the classic fit for the barbarian on the evolutionary ladder.  The Doctor does, however, openly admit that the Thals are not as “advanced” as a technologically-driven race that also inhabits the planet, the Daleks.

The Daleks thrive in the midst of great accomplishment and a complex social and political structure headed by a war leader and a council.  The system does not seem to be too different from that of England, the country from which Doctor Who hails.  The Daleks have, most importantly, developed a writing system, which the tribe of Gum and the Thals both lacked.  The Daleks are a prime example of a “civilization.”

The tribe of Gum, the Thals, and the Daleks all appear within the first two serials of Doctor Who, and they perfectly represent the perfect Morganian model of cultural evolution, showing how societies technically graduate from one rung of development through certain advances to the next.

By contrast, and as a fun fact, twenty-five years after the first serial exhibiting Neanderthals, the show aired a new serial (the last Classic Who serial filmed) with a Neanderthal named Nimrod.  Rather than one of the dumb, “primitive” creatures that had been portrayed years before, Nimrod was given a higher intelligence and higher capabilities associated with “advanced” homo sapiens.  This is, of course, very reflective of the popular view of human evolution at the time.