A movie monster evolves, fed with fear

It would be a mistake to reject Godzilla: the king of monsters like fantasy pap or fantasy of escape. This is the 35th film in a series until 1954, arguably the longest in the history of world cinema. This alone calls for scientific attention, because icons are always reflective of their time and few have benefited from such longevity.

The franchise was created in direct response to "Castle Bravo," an American thermonuclear weapon test conducted on March 1, 1954 on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Bravo shot produced 15 megatonnes of TNT – about 2.5 times more than expected – and produced dangerous levels of radioactive fallout over hundreds of kilometers. Therefore, contaminated tuna (and its idiom) peoplehi maguro, "Atomic Tuna") entered the Japanese homes and 23 crew members of the Japanese tuna trawler Daigo Fukuryu Marū suffered from acute radiation illness.

In Japan, this incident was perceived as a new American nuclear attack against civilians and strident anti-nuclear peace movements sprang up all over the country. It is in this difficult context and in the midst of a substantial anti-American sentiment that Godzilla was introduced in October 1954.

The film, Gojira-A coat rack of Japanese words Gorira ("Gorilla") and Kujira ("Whale") – describes Godzilla as both a victim and incarnation of the American H bomb test. The tests destroyed the creature's deep-water ecosystem and, in turn, the creature destroyed Tokyo's urban infrastructure. The blind nature of these nocturnal destructions is an obvious and unequivocal reference to the "saturation bombardment" of Japanese cities in the spring and summer of 1945 (1).

In his historical essay, "The Imagination of Disaster" (2), cultural critic Susan Sontag attributes the success of Gojira to the aesthetics of this destruction, the peculiar beauty of Godzilla wreaks havoc and damages. Yet, Godzilla survived in our collective imagination even as other oversized cinematographic monsters of the 1950s faded away.

The cultural historian William Tsutsui (3) attributes this lasting success to Godzilla's ever-changing metaphor and his propensity to overthrow buildings and destroy cities. What began as an antinuclear fable has since evolved into a broader allegory of human folly and irresponsible indifference to the natural environment.

Tellingly, it is left to the deaf paleobiologists of the film – Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura) in Gojira Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) in the next film – to announce the bad news. "Our world is changing," warns Russell in a trailer King of monsters. "The mass extinction we feared has already begun and we are the cause, we are the infection." This elegance to pre-anthropocene biodiversity testifies to the deep temporal perspective that fuels our understanding of Godzilla and deserves to be questioned again.

THE "EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY" OF GODZILLA is a topic of lasting interest among devotees, with many fan pages and forums dedicated to it. If we accept Godzilla as a ceratosaurid dinosaur (4) and the Lazarus taxon (5) – a species that would have disappeared, but will be rediscovered later – represents a sensational example of evolutionary stasis, just behind coelacanths in vertebrates. However, the recent morphological change of the creature has been dramatic.

Godzilla has doubled in size since 1954. This rate of increase far exceeds that of ceratosaurids during the Jurassic, which was exceptional (6). The rate of change excludes genetic drift as the root cause. It is more compatible with a strong natural selection.

The strength of this selective pressure can be estimated using the breeder equation, where the answer to selection "R" is the product of heritability (hr).²) of a given trait and the selection force. If we assume that h² = 0.55 for body size – a reasonable estimate based on quantitative genetic studies of lizards (7, 8) – the observed increase in the size of Godzilla would therefore require a total selection force of 4.89 DS. To put this figure in context, the median value of natural selection documented in more than 2,500 estimates in the wild was 0.16 (9). Godzilla, it seems, has been subjected to a selective pressure 30 times higher than that of typical natural systems.

Of course, all this is just a stupid guess: Godzilla is a commercial venture and the movies are market driven. Yet we were still wondering what natural selection agent could act so quickly and with such a high intensity.

SONTAG ARGUED that our taste for disaster films is constant and immutable. On the contrary, we suggest that Godzilla evolves in response to a spike in the collective anxiety of humanity. Whether they respond to geopolitical instability, the perceived threat of terrorists or simply the fear of 'the other', many democracies elect nationalist leaders, strengthen their borders and reinforce their military presence. in the world.

To make matters worse, a 2003 Pentagon report forecasting the effects of climate change on water and food security predicted increased tensions and international conflict due to forced migration (ten). The idea that climate change is now the "mother of all security problems" (11) has barely dissipated since. Today, the US Department of Defense views climate change as an "accelerator of instability" and a "threat multiplier" (12). If US military spending is used as an indirect indicator of the collective anxieties of humanity, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a positive and solid correlation between the growth of Godzilla and the growth of Godzilla. American army.[Coefficientdedétermination(r[Coefficientofdetermination(r[coefficientdedétermination(r[coefficientofdetermination(r²) = 0.74].

In 1965, Sontag claimed that a rather serious disaster annulled all enmities and called for collective action in the service of self-preservation. Indeed, the almost invincibility of Godzilla almost always leads humanity to realize that it must work together to defeat it (except, of course, when the creature becomes an unlikely ally, but that's another story). The monster is therefore more than a metaphor; it's a fable with a lesson for our time.

The time has come for cooperation – between countries, disciplines and parties. It is our only hope to mitigate the terrible existential threats we face today.