Quote of the day:

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
—Bertrand Russell

I see that James Watson has died at the age of 97.

I’m going to quote from PZ Myers’s blog where he paraphrases an old joke:

So a man walks into a bar, and sits down. He starts a conversation with an old guy next to him. The old guy has obviously had a few. He says to the man:

“You see that lab out there? Built it myself, recruited the staff, and it’s the best lab in town! But do they call me “Watson, the lab builder”? No!”
“And you see that book over there, I wrote that, number one bestseller in the country! But do they call me “Watson the author”? No!”
“And you see that double helix over there? I figured that out, took me years, against the resistance of the establishment, but do they call me “Watson the co-discoverer of DNA? No!”

The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says:

“but you peddle a lot of racist and sexist ideas…”

Speaking of mad scientists, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein has arrived on Netflix. How’s that for a segue?

Over at The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch has some thoughts on it:

Just as Oscar Isaac, playing Victor Frankenstein, comes across as ever-so-slightly insane in his mad pursuit of science that will result in the creation of his horrifying Monster. Man is, of course, the real monster in Frankenstein; more specifically, man’s boundless pursuit of “progress,” be it in war or science. One of the many alterations del Toro makes is to give Victor Frankenstein a wealthy benefactor (Christoph Waltz) hoping to make use of his ability to spark life from mere body parts; this man of means earns his keep via arms dealing. The monster himself (Jacob Elordi) is gentle and misunderstood, roused to passionate anger only at his mistreatment by the cruel world.

And again, this is partly in keeping with Mary Shelley’s original text. But I do find it odd how often the Monster’s own monstrousness is downplayed in these adaptations. The 1931 classic features the Monster killing, yes, but only in self-defense or out of childlike misunderstanding. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation allows for the Monster’s crimes, but frequently obscures them offscreen. Del Toro goes further than both: The Monster is blameless throughout, an almost purely innocent being.

Rereading Shelley’s book this week I was again struck not by the innocence of the creature itself, but by the way man creates evil in his own image. Because the Monster is evil, make no mistake, even if he was driven to it by loneliness and scorn. This is a creature that murders a child and then frames the child’s innocent caretaker for the crime; that innocent woman is executed by the state. And after Victor refuses to give his Monster a partner, a female deformity that can live alongside the hulking beast in the wilds of ice and desert where humanity cannot roam, he kills Victor’s best friend and then Victor’s betrothed.

I read the Mary Shelley novel many years ago, I think when I was still living in State College, and I remember being surprised at how totally different it was from all the movie adaptations that I had seen. As I recall, she doesn’t spend any time at all on the details of how Victor Frankenstein reanimates a non-living body, and I believe the idea that the scientist gathers the parts of many different dead bodies to assemble a new creature is purely an invention of the movies.