EP 05 - It's Alive!

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episode

Selected References:

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 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.7:52 - See the famous “It’s Alive” scene from the 1931 version of Frankenstein19:43 - 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 Institute25:17 - 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.”40:25 - See “Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories” (BBC, 2018)43:29 - See “The Arctic” section of the Mary Shelley Wiki and “Literature’s Arctic Obsession” (The New Yorker, 2017) 57:38 - See “Hollywood's Portrayals of Science and Scientists Are Ridiculous” (Scientific American, 2019), “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)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.”

This episode was recorded in January 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti