How Victor Frankenstein avoided a monster mash of the species

BOSTON // Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein foreshadowed a key concept in evolutionary biology formally defined by scientists a century after the man-made monster lurched across the pages of the 19th century novel, an academic study published on Friday found.

The study, titled Frankenstein and the Horrors of Competitive Exclusion and published in BioScience, takes its inspiration from a pivotal scene in the 1816 gothic story when the monster identified only as the Creature asks its creator, Victor Frankenstein, to create him a mate and allow the two to go live in "the vast wilds of South America".

Unlike in the 1933 movie Bride of Frankenstein, the book’s Dr Victor Frankenstein ultimately decides against repeating his experiment, fearing the two could breed a new race of creatures that would ultimately drive humanity to extinction.

Making a few assumptions about the creature, described in the novel as 2.4 metres, able to eat a wider variety of foods than humans and heal itself after being shot in the shoulder, the study projected that its population would grow sufficiently large to drive humanity to extinction in about 4,000 years.

Frankenstein’s decision anticipated a concept that scientists in the 1930s defined as “competitive exclusion”, which illustrates the limits of life’s expansion when animals or humans need to compete for the same limited resources. The early appearance of the idea in a popular novel illustrates the way that humans readily understand some fundamental scientific concepts, according to Nathaniel Dominy, one of the study’s authors.

“People have a fundamental understanding of concepts like the ecological niche and that species will do well in some habitats and not so well in others,” said Prof Dominy, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Although the human population has grown by seven times to about 7.35 billion people since the publication of Frankenstein, hundreds of species have become extinct, many as a result of competitions with humans or with invasive species moved by humans.

“You take an invasive species, put it in a new place and it starts to compete with what is already occupying the niche,” said Prof Dominy.

* Reuters