Back to Methuselah is a five-play cycle by George Bernard Shaw, subtitled A Metabiological Pentateuch. It follows humankind from Adam and Eve to a distant future, exploring creative evolution, longevity and society. It is worth listening for Shaw's witty dialogue and bold ideas about evolution and human destiny.
One day early in the eighteen hundred and sixties, I, being then a small boy, was with my nurse, buying something in the shop of a petty newsagent, bookseller, and stationer in Camden Street,
Dublin, when there entered an elderly man, weighty and solemn, who advanced to the counter, and said pompously, “Have you the works of the celebrated Buffoon?”
My own works were at that time unwritten, or it is possible that the shop assistant might have misunderstood me so far as to produce a copy of Man and Superman. As it was, she knew quite well what he wanted; for this was before the Education Act of 1870 had produced shop assistants who know how to read and know nothing else. The celebrated Buffoon was not a humorist, but the famous naturalist Buffoon. Every literate child at that time knew Buffoon’s Natural History as well as Aesop’s Fables. And no living child had heard the name that has since obliterated Buffoon’s in the popular consciousness: the name of Darwin.
Ten years elapsed. The celebrated Buffoon was forgotten; I had doubled my years and my length; and I had discarded the religion of my forefathers. One day the richest and consequently most dogmatic of my uncles came into a restaurant where I was dining, and found himself, much against his will, in conversation with the most questionable of his nephews. By way of making myself agreeable, I spoke of modern thought and Darwin. He said, “Oh, that’s the fellow who wants to make out that we all have tails like monkeys.” I tried to explain that what Darwin had insisted on in this connection was that some monkeys have no tails. But my uncle was as impervious to what Darwin really said as any Neo-Darwinian nowadays. He
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