What did Samuel Butler argue in 'Darwin among the Machines'?

Four years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, a young English sheep farmer in New Zealand asked a strange question: if living things evolve, why not machines? His answer appeared as a letter to the editor of a Christchurch newspaper, The Press, on Saturday, 13 June 1863, under the title "Darwin among the Machines."

The letter was signed "Cellarius," but the author was Samuel Butler, the English writer best known today for his novels and criticism. It is one of the earliest pieces of writing to suggest that machines might develop their own kind of life and eventually overtake the people who build them.

Who wrote it, and where

Butler was born on 4 December 1835 in Nottinghamshire, England, the son and grandson of clergymen. After Cambridge he was expected to become a priest, but doubts about his faith and quarrels with his father pushed him in another direction. He sailed for New Zealand in October 1859 and arrived in January 1860. There he ran a sheep station called Mesopotamia in the Canterbury region of the South Island, and wrote about his first year as a settler.

Years afterwards, Butler recalled that he wrote the letter in the Upper Rangitata district, high in the Canterbury back country. The colony was young, the newspaper was young, and Darwin's book was the most talked-about idea of the day.

What the letter says

The letter opens with pride in the "wonderful improvements" of modern machinery, then turns uneasy. Butler treats machines as a new kingdom of life, just as plants arose from minerals and animals from plants. The lever, the wedge, the screw and the pulley are its simplest ancestors. A giant steamship like the Great Eastern shows how far the family has come, and how much faster than any animal or plant species.

He then applies Darwin's vocabulary to machinery, half playfully:

Darwin's idea	Butler's machine version
Species and family trees	Machines could be sorted into genera, species and varieties, with links between them
Natural selection	Usefulness to people decides which machines survive and spread
Rudimentary organs	Some machines keep useless leftover parts that hint at their ancestors
Evolution toward smaller forms	The pocket watch descends from big medieval clocks and may replace them
Reproduction	Machines already help make other machines, though people still do the "breeding"

From there the letter reaches its central claim. People, Butler writes, are creating their own successors. Every year we give machines more power and more of the "self-regulating, self-acting" ability that would be for them what intellect is for us. In time, he suggests, humans may stand to machines as horses and dogs stand to humans: cared for, perhaps even well treated, but no longer in charge.

The conclusion is a deliberate jolt. The writer declares that every machine should be destroyed at once, with no exceptions. Then he admits that this is impossible, and draws the darker lesson: if we cannot give machines up, the dependence has already begun. He ends by offering the whole subject, free of charge, to the local Philosophical Society.

Try it: Pick one device you use every day, such as a phone or a kettle, and trace its "family tree" in Butler's style. What were its ancestors, which features have shrunk or vanished, and which leftover parts hint at its past?

Why it matters

Butler kept working on the idea. A second letter on machines followed in The Press. In 1865, back in London, he rewrote and expanded the first one for a paper called the Reasoner under the title "The Mechanical Creation." Rewritten again, it became "The Book of the Machines," three chapters of his 1872 novel Erewhon, which imagines a country that has banned most machines.

The letter also gave a lasting name to a line of thought. In 1998 the writer George Dyson borrowed its title for his book Darwin Among the Machines, which treats computer networks as a kind of evolving intelligence. In 2019, as researchers and writers debate whether AI systems could one day outpace their makers, Butler's letter is often cited as one of the earliest versions of that worry. It contains no computers at all. Its point is about direction: tools that keep improving, and people who keep relying on them more.

Was Butler serious about machines taking over?

Probably only partly, and readers have argued about it ever since. The tone is mock-scientific. Butler signs with a pen name, pretends to regret that his knowledge is too small to classify all machines, and closes by handing the topic to a local society as a gift. The call to destroy every machine is so sweeping that it reads as a jab at anyone who follows an argument to an absurd end.

Later, when reviewers of Erewhon claimed he was mocking Darwin, Butler denied it firmly. He told Darwin privately that his real target was a different book, Joseph Butler's 1736 The Analogy of Religion, which leans heavily on reasoning by analogy. On that reading, "Darwin among the Machines" shows how easily a clever comparison between living things and machines can run away with you.

Even so, scholars note that Butler seems genuinely curious about whether living bodies are a kind of mechanism. The philosopher Louis Flaccus described the machine writings as "a mixture of fun, satire, and thoughtful speculation." That mixture is why the letter still works today: it is funny, and it also asks a real question about where our tools are heading.