The iconic 19th century novel of Mary Shelley has created one of the most memorable nightmares that persisted in the modern world. People would normally call the monster as Frankenstein, but that is actually the scientist who created it. In the novel, the monster was only referred to as the "Creature."
A recently published study shed some more light on the science fiction work and argued that the gothic book is anchored by a fundamental principle of biology. The study's core was directly aimed at a critical part of the story where the Creature asked Victor Frankenstein to create a female counterpart as cure for its loneliness. The monster went on to add that they would tread down to the wilds of South America, which convinced the young scientists as the pair would have few encounters with humans in the region.
"Frankenstein" Novel Predicts Fundamental Concept In Modern Biology
However, Frankenstein reversed his decision when he considered the possibility of the creature's reproduction and how it would ultimately lead to human extinction. This concept is coined as competitive exclusion formally defined in 1930s. Given that the novel was published in 1818, the science fiction essentially predicted this key idea in modern biology.
Frankenstein denying the creature a mate basically saved the human race from extinction; an end that he himself would've ushered in. Scientists then wanted to find out how fast the proliferation of the creature's kind would have been. "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," said professor Nathaniel Dominy, an anthropologist at the Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Frankenstein's Monster Would've Ended Humanity Within 4,000 Years
The study's author then designed a mathematical model based on the density of human population in 1816 factoring in the advantages the creatures possess such as healing factors and its capacity of eating a vast array of food compare to humans, the ABC reported. The study found that the pair would've proliferated in a huge number in South America ultimately driving mankind to extinction in the span of 4,000 years. While the study is merely a thought experiment it bears real-world implications regarding our understanding of invasive species in biology.
Another expert added that previous scholars who dissected the gothic novel "Frankenstein" mainly focused on Mary Shelley's knowledge of resurrection, alchemy, and physiology, Phys reported. The genius of the writer lies in the way she repackaged scientific debates for the invention of the genre of science fiction, according to Justin D. Yeakel. The assistant professor added that their recent published work solidified Shelley's legacy by showing the public that her novel accurately predicted basic concepts in ecology and evolution by several decades.
