![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serai.
Is anyone as troubled by this as I am?
How to Hatch a Dinosaur
Paleontologist Jack Horner reveals his childhood dream - owning a pet dinosaur - and his efforts to make that dream a reality. He says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. “But it’s also possible.”
I've written about my fondness for the film Jurassic Park, so I'm sure you know where my doubts are headed. Horner worked as a consultant with Crichton when he wrote the novel, and later on the production of the movie. And yet it seems he never internalized the main point of the story: that there are things that just plain shouldn't be done, no matter how much we may wish to or how easy we make them. As the wonderful character Ian Malcolm said, "The lack of humility in the face of nature that's being displayed here staggers me."
I wrote a comment talking about my thoughts, not just about the basic premise but also about the animals themselves, which no one seems to be thinking about. (Hardly any surprise there; living creatures treated as tinker toys are par for the course in a great many scientific endeavors.)
So the book and movie's idea of dinosaur cloning turns out not to be possible. And yet, despite Horner's work as a consultant on JP, the central message of the story is completely lost on him. To wit: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Let's say Horner's (Hammond's) dream does come true, and we can create dinosaurs out of the birds we have now. What then? What are we going to do with these animals? Sure, a cute little chickensaurus might be fun (if it doesn't turn out to be really dangerous), but who really thinks it would stop there? The technique may be the same, but we could conceivably end up with the JP scenario: a whole set of revived animals that simply cannot co-exist peacefully with the world we live in now.
Plus, there's another issue to think about (which Crichton also tackled in his second JP book) - what about all those animals that will be brought into painful, deformed, horrifying life during the process of reaching Horner's (Hammond's) "dream"? This isn't going to work the first they try it, or the second or the third or the hundredth or the thousandth. It's going to take an enormous number of tries to reach the weird little critter he's dreaming about. It's bad enough we torture the animals we already have. Are we really going to create an entire population of barely living, horribly suffering critters just so some foolish, selfish people want a pet that nature aced out of the picture millions of years ago?
It's funny that the character that supposedly represents Horner in the film - the paleontologist - turns out to be far wiser than the guy in real life, who turns out to have far more in common with the feckless Hammond. Another quote that always struck me from JP: "I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!" Horner may not be thinking of fortunes to be made, but it's absolutely inevitable that somebody will; the lack of responsibility entailed in opening this can of worms is rather staggering.
It's a cute notion - in a science fiction story. In real life, the whole thing is horrifying, and a perfect illustration of the kind of callousness that can be found sometimes in the scientific community. I shall close with a third quote from Ian Malcolm: "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me."
Is anyone as troubled by this as I am?
How to Hatch a Dinosaur
Paleontologist Jack Horner reveals his childhood dream - owning a pet dinosaur - and his efforts to make that dream a reality. He says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. “But it’s also possible.”
I've written about my fondness for the film Jurassic Park, so I'm sure you know where my doubts are headed. Horner worked as a consultant with Crichton when he wrote the novel, and later on the production of the movie. And yet it seems he never internalized the main point of the story: that there are things that just plain shouldn't be done, no matter how much we may wish to or how easy we make them. As the wonderful character Ian Malcolm said, "The lack of humility in the face of nature that's being displayed here staggers me."
I wrote a comment talking about my thoughts, not just about the basic premise but also about the animals themselves, which no one seems to be thinking about. (Hardly any surprise there; living creatures treated as tinker toys are par for the course in a great many scientific endeavors.)
So the book and movie's idea of dinosaur cloning turns out not to be possible. And yet, despite Horner's work as a consultant on JP, the central message of the story is completely lost on him. To wit: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Let's say Horner's (Hammond's) dream does come true, and we can create dinosaurs out of the birds we have now. What then? What are we going to do with these animals? Sure, a cute little chickensaurus might be fun (if it doesn't turn out to be really dangerous), but who really thinks it would stop there? The technique may be the same, but we could conceivably end up with the JP scenario: a whole set of revived animals that simply cannot co-exist peacefully with the world we live in now.
Plus, there's another issue to think about (which Crichton also tackled in his second JP book) - what about all those animals that will be brought into painful, deformed, horrifying life during the process of reaching Horner's (Hammond's) "dream"? This isn't going to work the first they try it, or the second or the third or the hundredth or the thousandth. It's going to take an enormous number of tries to reach the weird little critter he's dreaming about. It's bad enough we torture the animals we already have. Are we really going to create an entire population of barely living, horribly suffering critters just so some foolish, selfish people want a pet that nature aced out of the picture millions of years ago?
It's funny that the character that supposedly represents Horner in the film - the paleontologist - turns out to be far wiser than the guy in real life, who turns out to have far more in common with the feckless Hammond. Another quote that always struck me from JP: "I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!" Horner may not be thinking of fortunes to be made, but it's absolutely inevitable that somebody will; the lack of responsibility entailed in opening this can of worms is rather staggering.
It's a cute notion - in a science fiction story. In real life, the whole thing is horrifying, and a perfect illustration of the kind of callousness that can be found sometimes in the scientific community. I shall close with a third quote from Ian Malcolm: "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me."
