Science and evolution — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Science and evolution
Themes
What you need to know
How Wells explores evolution, natural selection and the limits of human knowledge, from the Martians' superior intelligence to the bacteria that kill them across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'if the nebular hypothesis has any truth', 'life is an incessant struggle for existence', 'It required a certain amount of scientific education to perceive that the grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide', 'much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light', 'how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal', 'an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum', 'the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs', 'There is many a true word written in jest', 'such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence', 'are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out', 'by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases', 'These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things', 'the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous'.
Context: Darwin's natural selection and the struggle for existence, T. H. Huxley, who taught Wells biology, germ theory, and the 1893 essay the narrator recalls, which imagined the human of the future as a brain with hands.
Science as both hope and threat: the Heat-Ray and the Black Smoke as science turned to war, and the 'Secret of Flying' learned from the Martians' machines.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
