It was in an 1818 novel, 'Frankenstein' that author Mary Shelley created a monster, and also realised how fatal it could have been to the human world.
She made it ask its creator, Dr Frankenstein for a mate. The monster gives a promise that he and his mate would retire into a far-off corner of South America, without bothering humankind. At first, the doctor agrees, but soon he changes his mind.
This was a great move, as two scientists point out in a "perfect-for-Halloween study" in BioScience. If Dr. Frankenstein had not made this monster retire into a remote jungle, it would have spelt the end of humankind. This was based on a principle of Biology called competitive exclusion. Hence, even one century before being defined, Mary Shelley seemed to understand this concept.
Shelley writes what the doctor surmises: "A race of devils would be propagated upon Earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror."
This just hit the nail on the head, writes Nathaniel Dominy of Dartmouth and Justin Yeakel of the University of California, Merced. "We calculated that a founding population of two creatures could drive us to extinction in as little as 4,000 years," explains Dominy.
If you count the factors such as population densities and competitive advantages of the creatures as against humans, you can see that its request to retire into South America was important. The area was "relatively sparsely populated" and would have allowed its descendants to live on.
"...the genius of Mary Shelley lies in how she combined and repackaged existing scientific debates to invent the genre of science fiction," as she "accurately anticipated fundamental concepts in ecology and evolution by many decades," writes Yeakel in a post at Phy.org
