Is Science Merely an Arbitrary Conception of the Universe?

[Terralthra]

In fact, "Ian Malcolm survives because Jeff Goldblum played him in the movie" is the best logic I can come up with.

[Wing Commander MAD]

In fact, "Ian Malcolm survives because Jeff Goldblum played him in the movie" is the best logic I can come up with.

Works for me.

The Lost World is definitely worse than Jurassic Park. I'm pretty sure the movie version has even greater differences from the book than Jurassic Park did. I can remember stuff from Jurassic Park (book and fim), and The Lost World film. It's telling that I can even remember stuff from Jurassic Park 3, terrible movie that it was, yet I can't remember anything about the novel The Lost World save that it was bad, the overall plot was similar to the movie version's and that somehow Ian Malcolm (probably the most annoying character from the book/movie) survived*. If I didn't know better, I'd think I made a concerted effort in the past to forget everything in the book that was humanly possible after the first and only time I read it.

Now that I think of it, maybe we should just dismiss the The Lost World and Jurassic Park 3 as the deranged imagination of a dying Ian Malcolm at some point in time before he dies "offpage" in the first book. Why couldn't he die in your film too Mr. Spielberg? I've a feeling that the worlds of literature and cinema would be better off if Jurassic Park was a self contained story. I'm willing to give the various video games a pass as they tended to be fun, and hold a fond place in my memory, no need to have them stricken from the record as it were.

*: Wasn't it something along the lines of Malcolm saying reports of his death were greatly exaggerated or something at the beginning of the book with no further mention of it ever again?

[mr friendly guy]

Theory is not based in reality? Sounds pretty anti science since theories are created to describe reality.

[Darth Wong]

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?

I wonder if he's ever known an actual engineer.

A lot of novelists and Hollywood screenwriters seem to think that "engineer" is another word for "handyman", or "mechanic". They have trouble reconciling this with the fact that engineers are highly educated professionals, and it seems like each one comes up with his own way to solve that conundrum. In Crichton's case, he apparently just makes the person two separate characters in one body. A a solution, I suppose it has the benefit of not requiring a lot of mental effort on Crichton's part.

[Guardsman Bass]

I did like that Lost World gave us some closure on the unresolved fate of Dr. Grant and others at the end of the Jurassic Park novel, where Grant and friends are being quarantined in Costa Rica for the foreseeable future. We find out at the beginning of Lost World that Grant and Sattler eventually got paid off to sign non-disclosure agreements and went back to Paleontology/Paleobotany, while Malcolm was the only one who went public.

[Darth Wong]

The idea that they would carpet-bomb the island to stop the dangerous dinosaurs strikes me as incredibly stupid.

[Imperial Overlord]

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.

That might be true, but you've got to go back pretty early for that. Eaters of the Dead was fairly good, but I read Congo in the fifth grade and my not quite teenage self recognized it as laughably bad then. I didn't bother finishing Jurassic Park.

[Simon_Jester]

The idea that they would carpet-bomb the island to stop the dangerous dinosaurs strikes me as incredibly stupid.

Possibly, but it's a tropical jungle and some of the dinosaurs are relatively small- like velociraptors.

Hunting them from the air with choppers with rifles might work over time, but I can see the "holy shit evil dinosaurs" factor causing a government overreaction.

[Guardsman Bass]

They were also worried about more of them getting to the mainland in the mean time, something that had already happened in the novel before Grant and friends even went to Jurassic Park. The novel mentions that they had reported sightings of compies in Costa Rica's rain forests.

[Terralthra]

I did like that Lost World gave us some closure on the unresolved fate of Dr. Grant and others at the end of the Jurassic Park novel, where Grant and friends are being quarantined in Costa Rica for the foreseeable future. We find out at the beginning of Lost World that Grant and Sattler eventually got paid off to sign non-disclosure agreements and went back to Paleontology/Paleobotany, while Malcolm was the only one who went public.

Malcolm accepts the NDA as well, at least as of the beginning of TLW. Maybe he goes public by the end of this novel, but at the beginning, it's simply that he was injured "on vacation in Costa Rica."

I've actually noticed that Michael Crichton kinda blows at writing endings. Even in his earlier novels, his endings kinda suck. Andromeda Strain: And then the virus mutates and the problem goes away, sorta! Rising Sun: Ishiguro kills himself and no other consequences ensue! Congo: And than a volcano buries the city and no one ever tries to go there again or research the intelligent language-using apes that live nearby! Sphere: And then they all forgot about it, maybe!

JP continues this trend of having a climax, but no satisfactory denouement.

[Darth Wong]

The idea that they would carpet-bomb the island to stop the dangerous dinosaurs strikes me as incredibly stupid.

Possibly, but it's a tropical jungle and some of the dinosaurs are relatively small- like velociraptors.

Hunting them from the air with choppers with rifles might work over time, but I can see the "holy shit evil dinosaurs" factor causing a government overreaction.

No, that's not what I was getting at. I was getting at the idea that the dinosaurs are so dangerous that they would be an OMIGOD UNSTOPPABLE HORDE SPREADING OVER THE EARTH, hence the panic and the desire to destroy them at all costs.

Realistically, they would be studied, they would probably not spread far because of their lousy aerobic performance in our low-oxygen atmosphere (not to mention the fact that they're stuck on an island), and they're not really that extraordinarily dangerous compared to other predators. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are given the zombie treatment, ie- they are presumed to be a mortal threat to mankind for reasons which just don't hold up under scrutiny.

[Sea Skimmer]

The idea that they would carpet-bomb the island to stop the dangerous dinosaurs strikes me as incredibly stupid.

Its clearly some kind of super military earth anyway in which Costa Rica is able to operate enough bombing planes to even think about launching such an attack. Seriously the last combat planes they owned were a handful of P-51 Mustangs.. and doesn't the book say they are dropping nerve gas too? I think that may have eaten the animal control budget for the next couple centuries.

Really though, the threat to earth's biodiversity could be pretty damn serious, and it would make sense to just wipe the things out, though its the small rather then the large ones which are the serious problem. Big ones we can just shoot, small ones might infest the jungles beyond any possible erradication and natural predators like Jaguars are already heavily in decline.

[Terralthra]

The idea that they would carpet-bomb the island to stop the dangerous dinosaurs strikes me as incredibly stupid.

Its clearly some kind of super military earth anyway in which Costa Rica is able to operate enough bombing planes to even think about launching such an attack. Seriously the last combat planes they owned were a handful of P-51 Mustangs.. and doesn't the book say they are dropping nerve gas too? I think that may have eaten the animal control budget for the next couple centuries.

The nerve gas was something Muldoon bought "just in case," and was almost used by the survivors on the velociraptor nest.

Description of the bombing:

Somewhere behind them they heard explosions, and then ahead they saw another helicopter wheeling through the mist over the visitor center, and a moment later the building burst in a bright orange fireball, and Lex began to cry, and Ellie put her arm around her and tried to get her not to look.

Grant was staring down at the ground, and he had a last glimpse of the hypsilophodonts, leaping gracefully as gazelles, moments before another explosion flared bright beneath them. Their helicopter gained altitude, and then moved east, out over the ocean.
[...]
The helicopter gained speed as it headed toward the mainland. It was cold now, and the soldiers muscled the door closed. As they did, Grant looked back just once, and saw the island against a deep purple sky and sea, cloaked in a deep mist that blurred the white-hot explosions that burst rapidly, one after another, until it seemed the entire island was glowing, a diminishing bright spot in the darkening night.

[Guardsman Bass]

I think the problem is that the explosions might not wipe out hardier small dinosaurs, like the Compys who had already escaped to Costa Rica. Those are the dinosaurs that could pretty much do the equivalent of riding a log adrift in the sea to the mainland, sort of like how many of the Pacific Islands got their indigenous species. Fire-bombing the island mostly kills the big ones that can't escape anyways, and which would be easily caught and/or hunted once they start growing.

[Terralthra]

Roughly halfway through The Lost World now. Just read through the portion where Malcolm uses the 747 metaphor. He explains that the protein/enzyme structure of even a bacterium is fairly complex, and the chances of it arising from random chance are extremely low, estimated at hundreds of billions of years. Thorne asks if that means Malcolm thinks that evolution was directed (ID, though not named explicitly).

Malcolm immediately responds with "No. That's Creationism, and it's wrong. Just plain wrong. But I am saying that natural selection acting on genes is probably not the whole story. It's too simple. Other forces are also at work. The hemoglobin molecule is a protein that is folded like a sandwich around a central iron atom that binds oxygen. Hemoglobin expands and contracts when it takes on and gives up oxygen - like a tiny molecular lung. Now, we know the sequence of amino acids that make up hemoglobin. But we don't know how to fold it. Fortunately, we don't need to know that, because if you make the molecule, it folds all by itself. It organizes itself. And it turns out, again and again, that living things seem to have a self-organizing quality. Proteins fold. Enzymes interact. Cells arrange themselves to form organs and the organs arrange themselves to form a coherent individual. Individuals organize themselves to make a population. And populations organize themselves to make a coherent biosphere. From complexity theory, we're starting to have a sense of how this self-organization may happen and what it means. And it implies a major change in how we view evolution."

I can see how reading that debate may prompt one to think it's anti-science, but I don't think it really is. Malcolm is pointing out that there are unanswered questions (which there certainly are), and that answering those questions will probably change the view we have of the theory of evolution and how it works. I don't really see that as objectionable.

[Vaporous]

It reads like a sort of lamarck inspired vitalism on a molecular level, as if a molecule has a will or desire to advance in some way. It's not necessarily anti-science, it's just stupid.

[Terralthra]

He revisits the subject later, when he's high on morphine (again!). He compares the "self-organizing" quality that he earlier noted about life to the organization of a crystal. That to someone utterly uninformed about the structures, one might see a crystal form and be immediately convinced it was created with such a uniform and repeating organization. When one learns more about it, one discovers that it organizes itself that way as it forms, but be amazed at how/why, and attribute great complexity (or intelligent design) to crystalline structures. Only when one examines the structure down to the atomic and subatomic levels does one become capable of knowing that the apparent organization and complex structure of the crystal is due entirely to the properties of the particles making it up.

"But it turns out a crystal is just the way molecular forces arrange themselves in solid form. No one controls it. It happens on its own. To ask a lot of questions about a crystal means you don't understand the fundamental nature of the processes that led to its creation.

So maybe living forms are a kind of crystallization. Maybe life just happens. And maybe, like crystals, there's a characteristic order to living things that is generated by their interacting elements."

As for Thorne, his inconsistency continues throughout the book. The diatribe quoted previously is right after Malcolm is waxing (still narcotically) about how perhaps humans are an ecological response to a stagnant biosphere; that maybe previous idiopathic extinction events weren't external disasters, but some lifeform that evolved and adapted particularly well to destroy existing life that wasn't progressing and allow evolutionary processes to kick into higher gear. Such an obviously unfalsifiable and untestable theory pisses off Thorne, so he rants about "real" and "theory" to the 13 year-old kid (both kids obviously survive, because Michael Crichton).

[Channel72]

So maybe living forms are a kind of crystallization. Maybe life just happens. And maybe, like crystals, there's a characteristic order to living things that is generated by their interacting elements.

What does he mean maybe here? What he's describing basically is exactly what happens - it's not some sort of profound anti-establishment insight that Malcolm came up with. The self-organizing properties of the molecular structure of DNA is very analagous to crystallization, and it's all a result of fundamental physical properties.

[Terralthra]

So maybe living forms are a kind of crystallization. Maybe life just happens. And maybe, like crystals, there's a characteristic order to living things that is generated by their interacting elements.

What does he mean maybe here? What he's describing basically is exactly what happens - it's not some sort of profound anti-establishment insight that Malcolm came up with. The self-organizing properties of the molecular structure of DNA is very analagous to crystallization, and it's all a result of fundamental physical properties.

How long ago was this widely known? Because the book was published 15 years ago, meaning it was written 16-18 years ago (1995-1996). Crichton has a habit of trying to put whatever science is fairly new and cutting edge into his novels as insights of the protagonists that occur to them during the book.

[Ziggy Stardust]

What does he mean maybe here? What he's describing basically is exactly what happens - it's not some sort of profound anti-establishment insight that Malcolm came up with. The self-organizing properties of the molecular structure of DNA is very analagous to crystallization, and it's all a result of fundamental physical properties.

Even today, many of the self-organizing properties of DNA are poorly understood. Smugly poking at Crichton's semantics in a passage with the very obvious message of, "We don't 100% understand everything yet" seems pretty counter-productive to me, especially when he is largely correct.

[Channel72]

Shrug. I guess I find the way it's presented to the reader as some kind of insight on the part of Malcolm to be a little bizarre. Malcolm says: "But I am saying that natural selection acting on genes is probably not the whole story. It's too simple. Other forces are also at work." Okay, so he's saying that the traditional mechanisms of natural selection and random mutation are not enough to explain the complexity of life at the molecular level. Usually, whenever someone says something like that you brace yourself for the inevitable upcoming Bible quotations. But Malcolm goes on to say that in order to explain the complexity of life, you also need... physics.

Yeah... thanks, Malcolm.

I'm not trying to be smug here; I think the analogy to crystallization is very important, and I'm glad Crichton included it. But having Malcolm present it as something potentially controversial which might shake our understanding of evolution is just weird. Saying that you need physics to explain evolution is a bit redundant - every mechanism comes down to fundamental forces interacting at the atomic level. It's like a criminal prosecutor saying something like, "well the murder weapon, confession, and forensic evidence alone doesn't prove the defendant is guilty. To truly understand how this murder was committed, we need... physics!"

[Terralthra]

I'd say that when you have a large amount of people (50% or so, in the US) who point to the self-organization and complexity of life and say, "It must have been GOD!", then it's valid to say, repeatedly, "No, it's caused by the interactions inherent to the constituent parts." Making analogies to more well-understood self-organizers (like crystals) is also useful.

[Tomzilla]

I actually liked Ian Malcolm. Not necessarily because I agreed with him, but because I thought he was a very interesting character, and his inclusion added a nice dynamic to the plot as a whole. Was Michael Crichton channeling a bit of himself when conceiving this character? Perhaps. All authors do. But that doesn't mean Crichton personally believes most of the nonsense we read about in his books.

I don't think any of his books were anti-Science; however, I do think some of his books, namely some of his characters, were anti-Scientists. I don't think he should be criticized for this, unless he's confirmed these are his personal beliefs. If he has and is a supporter of Intelligent Design, I'd be very interested in reading about it and why that is the case.


As for the main topic, I don't know if any historians of science ever thought that. Now is it possible for an alien species to perceive the universe differently than our own? Sure. We're limited by our senses and the tools we use to enhance our senses. While we've made great discoveries and will continue to do so, we're not gods. There could be a species that perceives the universe differently and constructed a scientific method that correlates with that perception. That doesn't mean it's not science, however. It still is science.

I always thought our definition of science was a universal method. Even if it's conducted in a different way, be it in a different spectrum or a different color or on a different planet, we're still pursuing the same thing: truth. That's what science helps us do.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I'm not trying to be smug here; I think the analogy to crystallization is very important, and I'm glad Crichton included it. But having Malcolm present it as something potentially controversial which might shake our understanding of evolution is just weird. Saying that you need physics to explain evolution is a bit redundant - every mechanism comes down to fundamental forces interacting at the atomic level. It's like a criminal prosecutor saying something like, "well the murder weapon, confession, and forensic evidence alone doesn't prove the defendant is guilty. To truly understand how this murder was committed, we need... physics!"

Yeah, I understand your argument, and with Crichton's history of presenting established scientific theories as something novel and profound you could be right, but just from the excerpts quoted in this thread I am ready to give Malcolm/Crichton the benefit of the doubt. I haven't read any of the books since I was a little kid, and I love the movies for reasons that have more to do with nostalgia (and the quality of the filmmaking itself, plot aside) than the rhetoric.

I actually liked Ian Malcolm. Not necessarily because I agreed with him, but because I thought he was a very interesting character, and his inclusion added a nice dynamic to the plot as a whole. Was Michael Crichton channeling a bit of himself when conceiving this character? Perhaps. All authors do. But that doesn't mean Crichton personally believes most of the nonsense we read about in his books.

I agree. I thought Malcolm was a great character; whether or not it was intended this way is irrelevant, but he really is a perfect parody of a certain type of pseudo-intellectual. I have met lots of people (usually out of some liberal arts institution) that act and think that way, and I always viewed him as more of a satire of that group.

Then again, I always found the message of Jurassic Park to be anti-hubris, not anti-science, even in the movie, but that's just me.