Is Science Merely an Arbitrary Conception of the Universe?

[Terralthra]

Nedry's betrayal was more understandable in the book, too. The film mentions that he has financial issues and that Hammond "got cheap on him", but the novel outright says that InGen demanded a ton of last-minute revisions that required a lot more work by his team, but refused to pay extra for them (forcing Nedry to eat the costs). To make matters worse, they combined that demand with hinted blackmail by threatening his reputation back at the university he was based from IIRC.

Yep. And that was on top of the fact that they didn't give him a proper specification for the system he built, telling him only generic things (because they didn't want to say, "hey, can you build us software for controlling a dinosaur park?"), and then once the system was running, it didn't work properly, which Hammond et al. blamed on him. The same pattern continues with Hammond ignoring his chief scientist (Wu), his ranger (Muldoon), and his systems engineer (Arnold). Whenever there's a technical problem, it is always reflected on that this is something that was anticipated during earlier construction, but budget or PR required such-and-so, so it wasn't addressed. Profit over good design and engineering, from start to finish.

I'm ~70% through the novel now. Malcolm is on morphine and dying, and there's an ongoing meta-debate between him and Arnold, the systems engineer, about stability/instability in mechanical and living systems. Arnold holds that the instability which Malcolm predicted is inherent to living systems, and can be taken into account when performing proper design, while Malcolm holds that the underlying instability will inevitably result in an accelerating out-of-control scenario, regardless of the safety margins and engineering work.

Still nothing about "irreducible complexity of the eye." Malcolm does rant a bit about "science can tell us how to build a nuclear reactor, but it can't tell us not to build one. It can tell us how to make pesticide, but cannot tell us not use it."

[Terralthra]

Just finished Jurassic Park. Absolutely no mention of "irreducible complexity", of the eye or any other such evolutionary trait, and even in his morphine-fueled ranting, Malcolm is quite obviously arguing in favor of the power of evolution and nature. Though under the influence of narcotics, and thus suspect, his main point appears to be more that the iterative nature of science allows profiteers and other such individuals and corporations to create and sell things which can be dangerous without truly understanding the danger or difficulty in predicting the outcome.

A scientist stands on the shoulders of generations who came before, and relies on their hard-won expertise and knowledge, building slightly on it, and then in the modern age, sells the results without understanding the process of iteration by which it was achieved; unlike (his analogy, not mine) a martial artist, for example, who by the time he acquires the ability to be lethally dangerous while unarmed has also (hopefully) learned the self-discipline to control the lethality he is capable of, scientists are frequently in control of much more dangerous capabilities that they have inherited, rather than earned. By analogy with those who inherit wealth, the corporate interests controlling InGen (and committing espionage against them) have immense power, but no concept of the work it took to achieve that power or the dangers said power represent, other than as profit centers, things to be rented or sold.

I think it's a bit much to say that Malcolm represents Crichton's view on the subject, inasmuch as Crichton seems to have lent an equal weight to the opinions of Arnold, the systems engineer and designer of the park. He has Hammond ignore both repeatedly when they point out problems with the design, command them to do things in a profitable or aesthetically pleasing way (no moats between the paddocks and the fenceline separating the paddocks from the tour road, for example), rather than allowing them to engineer for truly fail-secure design.

On to The Lost World...

[Guardsman Bass]

I don't remember Malcolm ever bringing up irreducible complexity, but he did bring up the "Junkyard 747" analogy in Lost World. That wasn't in defense of creationism, though - he was making an argument for self-organization and chaos theory in relation to how life originated.

[K. A. Pital]

Still nothing about "irreducible complexity of the eye." Malcolm does rant a bit about "science can tell us how to build a nuclear reactor, but it can't tell us not to build one. It can tell us how to make pesticide, but cannot tell us not use it."

That's a bit idiotic on the author's part. I mean... Science doesn't tell you not to use pesticides? It was scientific evidence of ecological damage which led to the bans on the use of some pesticides, not anything else.

[Vaporous]

I suppose what he means is that science wouldn't create a moral standard where you would judge ecological damage right or wrong. it's a completely rhetorical statement, because no one thinks that's what science is intended to do.

[TheFeniX]

Still nothing about "irreducible complexity of the eye." Malcolm does rant a bit about "science can tell us how to build a nuclear reactor, but it can't tell us not to build one. It can tell us how to make pesticide, but cannot tell us not use it."

That's a bit idiotic on the author's part. I mean... Science doesn't tell you not to use pesticides? It was scientific evidence of ecological damage which led to the bans on the use of some pesticides, not anything else.

I think it's unfair to automatically label Malcolm as some kind of mouth-piece for the author. He could be, or Malcolm could just be a character with some stupid ideas or just bullshitting like his character seems prone to do. Malcolm seems to be proven right a lot in the novel, but he's really just pointing out the obvious half the time and drawing dumb conclusions from it with shit like "Animals are breaking out of their poorly designed cages: It's the universe at work more so than poor design."

I never got the feeling Crichton was using any of his characters to preach at the reader. I will say though that Ian Malcolm is the reason I didn't read "Lost World."

[Terralthra]

Sorry, but the "complex systems" angle is completely irrelevant to the design problems of the park. The design failures were due not to unpredictability, but to the logical and foreseeable consequences of completely predictable events, such as the fact that power failures do occasionally happen.

There were other events not related to the power failure that contributed to the eventual problems. The dinosaurs breeding, despite steps being taken to prevent that. Dinosaurs turning out to be venomous. Several species of dinosaur had illnesses related to them being in a different environment (up to and including different air composition in the modern world); one could predict that "dinosaurs would have problems adapting to the modern world," and "as creatures restored from hundreds of millions of years' extinction, dinosaurs will have various behavioral and physiological quirks that we can't know ahead of time," but not any one problem of adaption or quirk.

That's more or less what Malcolm was arguing using "chaos theory,": that the minor changes in starting conditions (unknown effects of DNA resequencing to fill in gaps, e.g.) would lead to individual outcomes which aren't predictable in detail, but the overall shape of the curve is such that one could predict "there will be complications you haven't thought of, which will tend to occur in such-and-so sorts of areas." At least, until the morphine kicked in, but he was pretty clearly high as balls during those rants.


His prediction that the park would inevitably fail or have to be shut down, that it was an accident waiting to happen, was, I think, more based on his knowledge of Hammond's combination of enthusiasm for dinosaurs and ignorance of engineering, than saying "inevitably, no matter what you do, JURASSIC PARK WILL FAIL!" As mentioned, Wu, Muldoon, Arnold, Nedry, Sattler, and Grant (all scientists, technicians, engineers, and/or those with firsthand experience of wild animals) repeatedly point out various things about the design and implementation of the park which are at best less safe than they could be, and usually outright dangeous. They are continually overruled, ignored, or even insulted by Hammond (rich businessman, no scientific credentials whatsoever) when they do so.

It is particularly amusing that at one point, when Wu and Hammond are talking, there is a flashback to when Hammond first recruited Wu to work for him, right out of graduate school. Hammond argues that none of the exciting science done in the past 40 years was done at a university, it was all done in the private sector. He gives examples like the polio vaccine (developed by Dr. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh), the LASER (developed by several places independently, including two universities and one government-funded research group), MRI (developed at several universities across the world, not least Rutgers, SUNY, and University of Nottingham), holograms (University of Michigan), and the CAT scan (UCLA).

I find it hard to believe that Crichton (who held a BA in Anthropology and an MD) would be so wrongly informed on the origin of so many medical techniques (and to be wrong in exactly the same way about all of them). I think it's more likely that he was putting these obviously-wrong words in the mouth of the (good-natured) ultimate antagonist of the story.

Is the stupid line "Lord help us, we're in the hands of engineers" in Crichton's original book, or was it added to the screenplay independently?

Nowhere in the book.

[Academia Nut]

This analysis by a biologist does a far better job than I can at ripping apart both the movie and the book on a philosophical level

Also, I went to the very last page of Lost World and found the passage about electrons and it was far worse than I remembered.

"Are you listening to all that?" Thorne said. "I wouldn't take any of it too seriously. It's just theories. Human beings can't help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. And they change. When America was a new country, people believed in something called phlogiston. You know what that is? No? Well, it doesn't matter, because it wasn't real anyway. They also believed that four humors controlled behavior. And they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Now we believe the earth is four billion years old, and we believe in photons and electrons, and we think human behavior is controlled by things like ego and self-esteem. We think those beliefs are more scientific and better."

"Aren't they?"

Thorne shrugged. "They're still just fantasies. They're not real. Have you ever seen a self-esteem? Can you bring me one on a plate? How about a photon? Can you bring me one of those?"

Kelly shook her head. "No, but..."

"And you never will, because those things don't exist. No matter how seriously people take them.," Thorne said. "A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine something so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies." Thorne shook his head. "And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else. Now look at that compass, and tell me where south is. I want to go to Puerto Cortes. It's time for us to all go home."

Thorne is incidentally supposed to be a materials engineer (and should therefore know better otherwise he wouldn't be any better than a technician) and Kelly is a teenager, and Thorne was rebutting Malcolm's drugged out ramblings about how humanity was so good at destroying. And that is how the book ends. I would call that a pretty massive anti-science message right there.

[Terralthra]

That "analysis" may be perfectly accurate when it comes to the film, but its analysis of the novel is flat-out wrong in many places. I'm guessing he saw the movie and skimmed the book, because several of the "questions" he poses of the novel are answered in the novel in as many words (because some of the characters pose the same questions he does, and are answered in the exposition!), let alone his character analysis, which is highly biased in the Spielberg film's anti-science direction. I can give you examples of each in that "analysis," if you really want.

I haven't finished The Lost World yet, so I'm not going to comment on that quote yet. I note that you are carefully pretending that you never brought up your "specific memory" of the irreducible complexity quote you attributed to Jurassic Park.

[Academia Nut]

I knew where the quote on photons and electrons was, I have to go through the whole rest of the book to be able to figure out if I was misremembering Malcolm or not. Or rather, at least the parts after Malcolm gets attacked.

[Terralthra]

I knew where the quote on photons and electrons was, I have to go through the whole rest of the book to be able to figure out if I was misremembering Malcolm or not. Or rather, at least the parts after Malcolm gets attacked.

I just read the whole book, in the past 6 hours. It isn't there.

[Academia Nut]

I knew where the quote on photons and electrons was, I have to go through the whole rest of the book to be able to figure out if I was misremembering Malcolm or not. Or rather, at least the parts after Malcolm gets attacked.

I just read the whole book, in the past 6 hours. It isn't there.

I read it over, and it appears that I was mistaken. I'm not sure where the idea came from precisely. My memory probably mixed a bunch of his material together with other woo-woo I've read in the past.

That said, Ian Malcolm's rants in both books are appalling in their ludicrous anti-science bent and the way he is never really shot down philosophically (although the fact that he is dying [at least in the first book] and high as a kite on morphine probably contributes to that in the story). Probably the most infuriating is saying that scientists have no apprenticeship and therefore are spoiled brats, as if the ten years of post-secondary education required to get a doctorate are somehow inadequate in comparison to the learning of a martial art. Or how he blames the scientists for corporate behaviour and that they are in it for the money and fame. If Crichton were still alive I would sentence him to a year of filling out grant applications for his food supply.

The big problem with the majority of Crichton's work was that he was a Scientific American researcher, taking news of the latest cutting edge discoveries before they were complete and then he spun a Frankenstein story out of it. Crichton just stapled on chaos theory because it was something in the popular science news at the time of the book, despite the fact that it really adds nothing to the story because the disasters were predictable from first order examinations. Where those fractal images there for any reason other than to look cool? I mean, I was rereading the part where they forgot to switch from axillary power to main power after rebooting the system. The fact that there wasn't a big fucking alarm and repeated, obvious warnings was an oversight that should have had the engineers choking Hammond to death. And Crichton then has the balls to call engineers short sighted when a fresh out of school engineer would have screamed that a system where you can run on a back-up and think you are on the primary of a mission critical system would be outright illegal. The fact that he lays Hammond's greed at the feet of the scientists working for him is a slap in the face to every researcher just trying to make the world a better place. And the only reason I'm not letting the engineers off the hook is that they should have told him that his design plans violated every safety and sanity principle possible and were ethically obliged to tell him to go shove his demands up his ass. Especially since something like an elevated roadway and moats would have given a better view of the animals and would probably have been cheaper in the long run than maintenance and powering of electrical fences.

[amigocabal]

I knew where the quote on photons and electrons was, I have to go through the whole rest of the book to be able to figure out if I was misremembering Malcolm or not. Or rather, at least the parts after Malcolm gets attacked.

I just read the whole book, in the past 6 hours. It isn't there.

I read it over, and it appears that I was mistaken. I'm not sure where the idea came from precisely. My memory probably mixed a bunch of his material together with other woo-woo I've read in the past.

That said, Ian Malcolm's rants in both books are appalling in their ludicrous anti-science bent and the way he is never really shot down philosophically (although the fact that he is dying [at least in the first book] and high as a kite on morphine probably contributes to that in the story). Probably the most infuriating is saying that scientists have no apprenticeship and therefore are spoiled brats, as if the ten years of post-secondary education required to get a doctorate are somehow inadequate in comparison to the learning of a martial art. Or how he blames the scientists for corporate behaviour and that they are in it for the money and fame. If Crichton were still alive I would sentence him to a year of filling out grant applications for his food supply.

The big problem with the majority of Crichton's work was that he was a Scientific American researcher, taking news of the latest cutting edge discoveries before they were complete and then he spun a Frankenstein story out of it. Crichton just stapled on chaos theory because it was something in the popular science news at the time of the book, despite the fact that it really adds nothing to the story because the disasters were predictable from first order examinations. Where those fractal images there for any reason other than to look cool? I mean, I was rereading the part where they forgot to switch from axillary power to main power after rebooting the system. The fact that there wasn't a big fucking alarm and repeated, obvious warnings was an oversight that should have had the engineers choking Hammond to death. And Crichton then has the balls to call engineers short sighted when a fresh out of school engineer would have screamed that a system where you can run on a back-up and think you are on the primary of a mission critical system would be outright illegal. The fact that he lays Hammond's greed at the feet of the scientists working for him is a slap in the face to every researcher just trying to make the world a better place. And the only reason I'm not letting the engineers off the hook is that they should have told him that his design plans violated every safety and sanity principle possible and were ethically obliged to tell him to go shove his demands up his ass. Especially since something like an elevated roadway and moats would have given a better view of the animals and would probably have been cheaper in the long run than maintenance and powering of electrical fences.

From what I read, the people who were trying to track the T-Rex did not even check to see if they were running on main power or auxiliary power until it was too late.

Of course, the people in that room should have been trained to check to see if main power was running or not.

[Academia Nut]

From what I read, the people who were trying to track the T-Rex did not even check to see if they were running on main power or auxiliary power until it was too late.

Of course, the people in that room should have been trained to check to see if main power was running or not.

No, no, see, that's the problem. Proper engineering and design means that if you have a mission critical system (the power for the fences), you can't run on backups like they are primaries. This was actually brought up in the Challenger disaster, they knew about the problem with the O-rings well ahead of time: there were two O-rings and when the boosters were recovered they noticed on some of them that the primary had burned out. Since the loss of the O-rings would result in the destruction of the shuttle, it was in fact illegal to use the second O-ring (AKA the backup) as if it was the primary. The engineers at the company that made the boosters told management that they had to scrap the launch or there would be a disaster, and the managers at NASA pressured the company into withdrawing their objection because it would delay the launch too much.

Anyway, back to the fences. Nedry had disabled them, and the cure essentially rebooted the system, but that put it into auxillary power mode because the primaries couldn't get online without a boosting charge. Okay, fair enough. Here is where the bad design (other than requiring a constant power supply as your only line of defense against eight ton superpredators getting out, which would have been thrown out by any competent design team) comes in. There should have been no possible way to dismiss the alert. The only way to have been running on auxiliary power and the fence power be down for hours is if the operators willfully ignored the alarms stating "YOU ARE IN AUX. POWER MODE", not just neglected them. Especially since a main power start up can be assumed to be a stressful task even under normal circumstances, let alone the much more likely event of an emergency (because the power cannot fail you should have little need to turn the power on and off, so the planned for scenario under which you are starting up the power should be under emergency conditions). A reboot scenario should have everything but the bare essentials either shut off or in reduced power mode and lots of obvious alarms going off to inform people of the fact that the system is not working properly. Hell, the motion sensors that let them track the dinos and waste hours rounding them up should have been considered a non-essential system, especially in comparison to the fences and thus refused to boot until there was a full system charge in place. Basically, the only reason that Jurassic Park was a disaster was because the author had no idea how the people he was criticizing do their jobs, which kind of sucks the strength out of his argument.

In fact, as was pointed out by And You Call Yourself a Scientist, the thesis of Jurassic Park was supposed to have been that you can't resurrect dinosaurs without unintended consequences, but instead it was "Dinosaurs are awesome and its totally possible to bring them back, just don't act like these clowns". Particularly hilarious is the fact that Ian Malcolm claims that the power failing was inevitable despite the fact that the whole point of "chaos theory" is the inherent divergence of complex systems when fed in different starting conditions. The only way he could have predicted the disaster was if he knew absolutely all the starting conditions, and thus he could have pointed out the points of failure.

[Terralthra]

As an aside, this is a big divergent from the thread OP, and might reasonably be split.

In fact, as was pointed out by And You Call Yourself a Scientist, the thesis of Jurassic Park was supposed to have been that you can't resurrect dinosaurs without unintended consequences, but instead it was "Dinosaurs are awesome and its totally possible to bring them back, just don't act like these clowns". Particularly hilarious is the fact that Ian Malcolm claims that the power failing was inevitable despite the fact that the whole point of "chaos theory" is the inherent divergence of complex systems when fed in different starting conditions. The only way he could have predicted the disaster was if he knew absolutely all the starting conditions, and thus he could have pointed out the points of failure.

See, here's what I don't get. Both you, I, and the (again, inaccurate) review you linked all agree that, more or less, the moral "ends up being" something like "If you act like these assholes when trying to bring back dinosaurs, you'll probably end up getting your face eaten." Right?

I come to that conclusion because there's numerous evidence throughout that the person in charge ignored experts, hired only people who would do what he wanted instead of those who would insist on more precautions, had a park designed to his specifications (without explaining to the designers what exactly they were designing), ignored them again when they started pointing out problems, had duct-tape and chewing-gum "solutions" haphazardly added on to the original design, ignored his designers again when they told him those solutions wouldn't work out, and then as the park's shitty design failed in numerous points, he blamed the people who had warned him all along, and then died as a result of his own ignorance, along with a bunch of his employees. This is what's in the book.

Now, I come to the conclusion that all that means that the message of the book was "don't act like this asshole." You, and the reviewer you linked, come to the conclusion that Crichton intended the message to be something else, based on the narcotic-induced ravings of one character, who dies (at least in the original novel) largely due to his own thoughtlessness, and is repeatedly referred to as arrogant and glib when it comes to his application of his theories to real life when sober, let alone on morphine. You insist that the obvious moral - that we all came away with - wasn't the author's intent, he must have intended MAN SHOULD NOT DO SCIENCE, and fucked it up when writing.

Why? There's loads of evidence throughout the book that Crichton was painting Hammond as the arrogant villain of the piece, ignorant of how things should have been done to the end, even as people are dying around him. Why can't the moral - which again, we all agree on as the effective message - be the one he intended?

You're fixated on Malcolm and his predictions, but he tells us early on (before everything goes wrong) what they are, and they do not include the power failing. When the fences doesn't come back on because the park software was designed poorly, and Malcolm claims to have predicted it, he's talking out of his ass, because he's a self-obsessed ass high on morphine.

[Academia Nut]

You're fixated on Malcolm and his predictions, but he tells us early on (before everything goes wrong) what they are, and they do not include the power failing. When the fences doesn't come back on because the park software was designed poorly, and Malcolm claims to have predicted it, he's talking out of his ass, because he's a self-obsessed ass high on morphine.

The problem is that the morphine addled ramblings of a pompous ass don't add anything to the story. About the only good point Malcolm ever makes to Hammond is that the world will keep on spinning even without humans and that he's an arrogant ass to think that he could have some effect on the planet. Other than that, all the bullshit about "life finding a way" and "scientists are undisciplined" adds absolutely nothing to the story, unless Ian is acting as a really unsubtle author mouthpiece. Basically Ian Malcolm spends too much time heaping blame on science rather than the corporations abusing science for there to be anything but an anti-science message in the work. Especially since the thought of trying again, but better, is treated as being an intrinsically bad idea.

The fact that Michael Crichton wrote a critic into a book as a toddler rapist with a little dick because the critic dared to point out that the science used in State of Fear was bad indicates that the man was not above being an unsubtle hack willing to add unnecessary elements to push his views.

Also, I too was ruminating on the fact that the topic has rather drifted, although then again the initial question posed by Sphere was so bad that it kind of had to tie into Michael Crichton's larger body of work to properly address. For the mods to decide I guess.

[Darth Tedious]

Dennis Nedry was not the only guy in the IT department. His name is first introduced as "IT Project Supervisor," which implies he had people working under him.

Not neccesarily- small companies may have people nominated as a 'supervisor' just because they're head of their department, even when they're not in charge of anyone. My dad was Maintenance Supervisor for a hotel for about 8 years, most of that time he had noone working under him (he eventually got a gardener).

Having Nedry be the only IT guy works better for the story- it makes everything a shit-ton harder to fix when he sabotages it all, also shows more corners being cut to keep costs down (why get a second IT guy when one can do it by himself?).

There are repeated references to him having a team of programmers under him, and he uses communicating with them (transferring data) to work through bugs as an excuse to tie up the phone lines during his espionage attempt. He's not the only IT guy.

Concession given.

You could have just said that it was explicitly mentioned, instead of saying it was implied, y'know.

[Terralthra]

There are repeated references to him having a team of programmers under him, and he uses communicating with them (transferring data) to work through bugs as an excuse to tie up the phone lines during his espionage attempt. He's not the only IT guy.

Concession given.

You could have just said that it was explicitly mentioned, instead of saying it was implied, y'know.

I was only ~20% of the way into the book at that point. Up until where I'd read, it was only implied.

[Guardsman Bass]

If it were just Malcolm, I could buy that Crichton was just writing him as an arrogant ass with some useful insights. But Crichton always seemed to include a character just like him in so many of his books (Sphere, State of Fear), and he is always given tons of space to exposit away. It always gave me the sneaking suspicion that Crichton was using them for mouthpiece purposes, something that was more or less confirmed in State of Fear when he wrote the author's note after the end describing his skepticism and beliefs on climate change - which more or less matched the Cynical Smart Guy's beliefs.

[mr friendly guy]

Crichton might or may not be anti evolution (he is an MD from memory), but he has some anti science views. For example his views on climate change where he wrote one of his critics in a novel as a pointless paedophile cameo. That is he wrote a character with almost the same name, going to the same university and mentioned in one line as a paedophile. Class act by Crichton.

[K. A. Pital]

Photons are a fantasy same as young earth creationism? Good that I never read any Crichton. I guess that might've been really painful.

[Terralthra]

If it were just Malcolm, I could buy that Crichton was just writing him as an arrogant ass with some useful insights. But Crichton always seemed to include a character just like him in so many of his books (Sphere, State of Fear), and he is always given tons of space to exposit away. It always gave me the sneaking suspicion that Crichton was using them for mouthpiece purposes, something that was more or less confirmed in State of Fear when he wrote the author's note after the end describing his skepticism and beliefs on climate change - which more or less matched the Cynical Smart Guy's beliefs.

I've not read State of Fear, so can't comment on that directly. He had gone on record as saying that the science behind catastrophic climate change was shaky and speculative, and that devoting massive resources to it when there are other issues (starvation and poverty are ones he cites a lot) that are less speculative and could be addressed with those resources. I don't really agree with his priorities, but I can see where he was coming from. It's important (I think) to note that he never rejected the base claims of anthropogenic climate change, only the severity of the projected outcome.

[Academia Nut]

Photons are a fantasy same as young earth creationism? Good that I never read any Crichton. I guess that might've been really painful.

The sad thing is that you can more or less track his decline in quality through time. I believe that the last book of his that I read was Prey, which was basically Jurassic Park but with nanotechnology instead of biotechnology, and a much less compelling read in general. And you've got people talking about evolution working on despite humanity in one breath and then railing against science's misguided belief that they can rationally understand the world in the next. And it gets worse as the books go along.

And the journalist raping the toddler is in Next, Crichton's last book, and is in response to criticism of State of Fear.

[Darth Wong]

Photons are a fantasy same as young earth creationism? Good that I never read any Crichton. I guess that might've been really painful.

The sad thing is that you can more or less track his decline in quality through time. I believe that the last book of his that I read was Prey, which was basically Jurassic Park but with nanotechnology instead of biotechnology, and a much less compelling read in general. And you've got people talking about evolution working on despite humanity in one breath and then railing against science's misguided belief that they can rationally understand the world in the next. And it gets worse as the books go along.

And the journalist raping the toddler is in Next, Crichton's last book, and is in response to criticism of State of Fear.

I imagine that financial success tends to go to one's head, and fill him with false confidence about the inerrancy of his views.

[Terralthra]

So, I'm getting into the meat of The Lost World, and...this book is retarded.

Thorne, the aforementioned "photons and self-esteem are fantasies" dude, is the single most inconsistent character of Crichton's that I've ever read. He's a Ph.D in Materials Engineering and taught at Stanford until retiring. He "hates theory," because it's not based in reality, but only a page or two away from where Crichton describes him hating theory, he talks to his team of construction dudes working on the electric car and RV they're building about all the crash-test simulations and computer modeling they did on the design before constructing it. How the fuck do you get a crash-test simulator without passing through a theory at some point?

Also, he goes on about how he used to quote (at length) passages from various (sometimes real, sometimes not) philosophers in his engineering classes at Stanford, and retired early when a colleague said something along the lines of "a mythical chinese dude has fuckall to do with engineering," and he took offense.

This character pisses me off to no end, and reading this, I can understand how people think of Crichton as "anti-science." Theories are based heavily on evidence, and are only called theories if they fit with all (well, the vast majority) of it! I have a hard time imagining someone getting a Ph.D in an engineering field, let alone TEACHING engineering, while disdaining "theory."

Also, Malcolm somehow surviving is utter bullshit. At the end of Jurassic Park, the survivors were evacuated by helicopter (at which point Malcolm was described as having slipped into a coma) and they were quarantined together. The helicopters explicitly refused to go get Hammond's or Malcolm's bodies to bury them (this is explicit: body, bury, these are the words used), and then the island was bombed until the island was a burnt-out shell. Then at the beginning of The Lost World, here's Malcolm, walking with a limp and a cane, but alive and well, with absolutely no explanation of how he survived being left to die, in a coma, on an island that was bombed to bedrock.

The characters (Thorne aside) are also all retreads of JP characters, with minor alterations. The male, computer-gifted teenager is black, instead of white. The female teenager now likes dinosaurs instead of the male. The way they enter and stay in the story is even more contrived.

All told, this is a bad novel so far, and I think it's pretty directly due to the fact that this is the first sequel Crichton ever wrote, and he didn't even want to write one, until the success of the film based on the first novel got people (including Spielberg) demanding one. Other than Thorne's ranting, it's not really anti-science (yet), but it's just...bad. Poor exposition, poor characters, poor writing.