The mythology of advances in biotechnology and society’s perceptions of change remain a hot topic as technology continues to evolve.

Priscilla Wald, professor of English and women’s studies at Duke University, explained her views on the subject Thursday night, and explained that science gets distorted in the process of being represented in pop culture.

“It’s not altogether a bad thing,” she said. “The bad thing is that we go to debates about science, and we discuss our own distorted views instead of the actual science. We want to be better able to distinguish the science from the science fiction.”

After a brief discussion of society’s views of the advances in genomic science, which was held in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union, she brought up specific examples of how the mass media views these advances in science relative to its time period, and how it has a tendency to expand them to seem almost like the mythology of ancient times. For example, she used “Frankenstein” as an example of how society reacts to changing definitions of what a human being is.

“When Mary Shelley wrote it, she made sure to say that Frankenstein was a creature, not a monster,” she said. “Its interactions with society made it a monster.”

John Solensten, of Ames, has written several novels about mythology and attended the lecture to see if he could follow in Shelley’s footsteps.

“Writers are predators that are looking for ideas to write about. What interests me about this lecture is that it deals with my writing,” Solensten said.

One of Wald’s main points was that creation of mythology often accompanies a shift in a public paradigm, and that with the advances in technology of recent decades, we are at that point and trying to struggle to define it.

“We don’t like having our social categories messed with, but subjects such as cloning show how unstable those categories really are,” she said. “This is important to deal with because the generation of people in college right now is the most mixed generation ethnically, religiously and socially in human history, and it is messing with our social categories.”

She ended her lecture with a discussion of a few major motion pictures that showed how we like to view these issues, compared with the actual science of these scenarios. For instance, she discussed the movie ‘X-Men’ and said each character has a very specific mutation, or chimera, which would not be the case scientifically.

“The individual mutations are due to imagination on our part,” she said. “They almost seem to be images of the sheer power of human desire; powerful enough that it manifests itself physically. I think this movie represents what we think humans might be in the future.”

Krista Lathen, senior in journalism and mass communication, said the media have a large role in shaping how we see many forms of technology today.

“The mass media really shapes the viewing of certain technologies, and most of the public get their views from what the media shows,” she said.

Wald finished with a statement about the effect that Darwinism would have on us.

“We fear change. Has anybody stopped to think about what we might become?” she said. “We assume that we are the end of evolution, but we aren’t. This concern is at the core of genomic myths. According to Darwin, either we’ll evolve into a new species, or we’ll face mass extinction.”

Wald even made a connection to one of the more popular recent commercial mascots, the GEICO cavemen.

“They are a manifest of what we are afraid of,” she said. “The commercial says, ‘So easy a caveman can do it,’ and they get offended, which makes me think, what will future evolved species think of us? The cavemen are representing the fear that, to future species, we will be second-class citizens.”