Those who have read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in their childhood will forever remember the nameless monster, a grotesque inhuman creature brought to life by the scientist Victor Frankenstein, in the 1818 novel.
The book, extremely ahead of its time, is considered to be the first science fiction masterpiece of humankind, arguing that death, as much as anything else, can be defeated through science.
A new study published in the journal BioScience explains that the horror of this gothic novel is, actually, rooted in a fundamental principle of biology.
The coauthors of the study take as reference a pivotal scene when the creature encounters its creator and requests a female companion to wash away its loneliness. The monster understands the difference of its dietary needs, very much different from the ones of the world around it, expressing a wish to see the "wilds of South America," pointing toward what we call today as ecological requirements.
Frankenstein ultimately refuses the creature, as he understands the enormous threat of the potential reproduction of the beast and its hypothetical companion. The doctor sees this as a possibility for human life to come to an end, a concept we today know as competitive exclusion, which ultimately means that the doctor's instinct saved humankind.
Given that this principle was only theorized in the 1930s, more than a century after the publication of the novel, the team of scientists believe Shelley's utter understanding and employment of this functional concept is a masterpiece.
"Given Shelley's early command of this foundational concept, we used computational tools developed by ecologists to explore if, and how quickly, an expanding population of creatures would drive humans to extinction," noted Nathaniel J. Dominy, professor of anthropology and biological science at Dartmouth.
The authors of the study took Shelley's ideas a step further. They actually created a mathematical model based on the density of the population in 1816, only to find out that the competitive advantages of the creatures would depend on a number of circumstantial hazards.
The worst case they described implied an increase in the population of creatures in South America, where the human population was smaller, and thus so was the local threat. According to the scientists' calculations, the population of creatures could have made humankind extinct in approximately 4,000 years.
The study aims to be nothing but an experiment trying to analyze the deeper layers of Shelley's creation, but it does give new reasons to understand the horrors in its deeper layers - our extinction. The scientific implications of this study in the real-world concern the way we understand the biology of invasive species.
Unlike the most popular examinations of the book, which focus exclusively on its literary meanings, as well as the then-prevailing perspective on alchemy, resurrection or human psychology, the book is - according to literary criticism - a true work of sci-fi. However, this new perspective gives an entire new light to the idea of scientifically analyzing Shelley's visions back in 1818.
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