Episode 05 - It's Alive!
Jeff and Darron discuss Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein and the way that the cultural conception and meaning of the novel, its eponymous doctor, and his famous monster, have evolved over time. They begin by talking about the images that the name Frankenstein conjures in their minds, then discuss the novel itself and how the nuance of the original is largely lost in today’s popular culture. Darron makes the argument that the modern cultural conception of Frankenstein is anti-science, and potentially contributes to the larger vein of anti-science bias and misconception that runs through our culture. Spoiler alert - the novel is discussed extensively and many plot points are spoiled, so if you’ve never read it, and this matters to you, maybe skip this episode for now and come back after you’ve read.
Notes:
2:15 - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Wikipedia entry on Frankenstein)
2:25 - Google image search for Frankenstein (and for Herman Munster)
4:20 - The movie The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) was the sequel to Frankenstein (1931), and featured Boris Karloff in the now iconic depiction of Frankenstein’s Monster
4:25 - Released in 1994, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein featured Robert DeNiro as “The Creation”
6:04 - See “Frankenstein Reflects the Hopes and Fears of Every Scientific Era” (The Atlantic, 2017) or “The Horror Story that Haunts Science” (Science, 2018)
6:19 - See “How Franken- Lurched It’s Way Into Our Lexicon” (Slate, 2017) and “The Way We Live Now: 8-13-00: On Language; Franken-” (New York Times, 2000) - According to late journalist William Safire, writing in his “On Language” column for the New York Times, the first noted use of the prefix Franken- was in 1992 by Boston College English professor Paul Lewis, who, in a letter to the New York Times commenting on an op-ed piece regarding bioengineered crops, ''If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.'' Since then the prefix- has caught on and become shorthand for human efforts to interfere with nature, especially where genetic modification is concerned, and it is almost always used in a pejorative sense.
7:48 - The creation scene from the 1985 movie Weird Science is a spoof on the Frankenstein monster creation
7:52 - See the famous “It’s Alive” scene from the 1931 version of Frankenstein
8:54 - Victor’s description of the moment his creation is brought to life - “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” (Frankenstein, chapter 5)
12:34 - See “The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science” (The Atlantic, 2017) - “The wider problem, beyond who should have received the prize and who should not, is that the Nobels reward individuals—three at most, for each of the scientific prizes, in any given year. And modern science, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus write in Stat, is “the teamiest of team sports.” Yes, researchers sometimes make solo breakthroughs, but that’s increasingly rare. Even within a single research group, a platoon of postdocs, students, and technicians will typically be involved in a discovery that gets hitched to a single investigator’s name. And more often than not, many groups collaborate on a single project.”
12:48 - Monomania
17:50 - See “The Promise and Challenge of The Age of Artificial Intelligence” (McKinsey & Company, 2018)
18:46 - See for example The Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning or the Centre for the Governance of AI, which is part of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute directed by Nick Bostrom
19:43 - See “AI Has Arrived, And That Really Worries The World’s Brightest Minds” (Wired, 2015) or “An Open Letter: Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence” or “Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence” from the Future of Life Institute
22:15 - British literary critic Chris Baldic as quoted in the The Atlantic article “Frankenstein Reflects the Hopes and Fears of Every Scientific Era”, “That series of adaptations, allusions, accretions, analogues, parodies, and plain misreadings which follows upon Mary Shelley’s novel is not just a supplementary component of the myth; it is the myth.”
25:17 - Cultural memes - “In this broad sense, a meme can be thought of as an idea which often carries symbolic meaning, that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas that can be transmitted from one mind to another through various means, and seem to, for better or for worse, evolve over time. The word meme itself was originally coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.”
28:32 - The Ruins,Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires by Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney is indeed a real book dating back to the late 1700’s
28:50 - “These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.” (Frankenstein, chapter 13)
32:13 - See Atomic Age
32:43 - See The Manhattan Project
32:59 - Perhaps I’m oversimplifying a bit here, as the creation of powerful new weapons was the purpose driving the atomic research of the late 1930’s and early 40’s. This lead directly to the development of the first atomic bombs, the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed somewhere between 130,000 and 230,000 Japanese, most of whom were civilians, and the subsequent surrender of Japan and the end of World War Two. To this day it remains the only time that nuclear weapons were used in an armed conflict and there is still much debate concerning the ethical and legal justification for the bombings.
35:12 - “And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant…I was not even of the same nature as man...When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.” (Frankenstein, chapter 13)
37:28 - See Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
38:18 - 21 Lesson for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
40:25 - See “Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories” (BBC, 2018)
41:04 - See hyperreality
43:29 - See “The Arctic” section of the Mary Shelley Wiki and “Literature’s Arctic Obsession” (The New Yorker, 2017)
46:10 - “Such a monster has, then, really existence! I cannot doubt it, yet I am lost in surprise and admiration. Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation, but on this point he was impenetrable.“Are you mad, my friend?” said he. “Or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.”” (Frankenstein, after CH 24, Walton’s letter dated August 26, 17--)
55:32 - In Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab is the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship Pequod, and his obsessive hunt for the eponymous white whale dooms his ship, most of his crew, and himself.
55:45 - “Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” (Frankenstein, after CH 24, Walton’s letter dated September 12)
57:38 - See “Hollywood's Portrayals of Science and Scientists Are Ridiculous” (Scientific American, 2019), “Hollywood’s War on Science” (Huffington Post, 2014), “The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science” (Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2006), or “What the public thinks it knows about science” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2003)
57:48 - The Terminator
57:50 - According to Discover Magazine, “A survey of more than 1,000 horror films shown in Britain between 1931 and 1984 found that scientists or their creations were the villains in 41 percent of the films and that scientific or psychiatric research had produced 39 percent of the threats. Scientists were heroes in only 11 of the horror movies.” Emory University School of Medicine professor and researcher Carlos Moreno comments it is important that “...science itself be portrayed as a force for good rather than something to be feared. From Frankenstein to The Terminator to The Matrix to Jurassic Park to Spider Man, the antagonists of the films are the result of scientific and technological innovations that have run amok and out of control. This recurring theme is symptomatic of an overall unease or fear of topics that are poorly understood by the general public. People fear and distrust what they don’t understand. And quite often Hollywood inflames and reinforces these fears rather than dispelling them. The negative effects of a public mistrust, misperception, and misunderstanding of science can be very real…” (see “Hollywood’s War on Science” fromHuffington Post, 2014)
59:10 - The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) by Dante Alighieri
59:48 - The Industrial Revolution takes place from roughly 1760 to sometime in between 1820 and 1840 and Frankenstein is first published in 1818
1:00:32 - Quote from The Big Picture by Sean Carroll: “The pressing, human questions we have about our lives depend directly on our attitudes toward the universe at a deeper level. For many people, those attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture, rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation of people doesn’t invent the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas and values that have evolved over vast stretches of time. At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.”