For many people in Jurassic Park, seeing isn’t believing. Sometimes external sources cloud the picture, like the literal fog and mist that shroud John Hammond’s island or his attempts to locate the park beyond the sight of his investors, regulatory bodies, and governments. At other times, people see what they want to, ignoring the evident truth when it contradicts their beliefs or hopes. For example, Dr. Guitierrez discounts the observant Tina’s drawing of the lizard that attacked her because it contradicts his expectations, and Dr. Stone refuses to see a dinosaur in the sample he assesses because he believes (reasonably) that dinosaurs are extinct. These examples of willful blindness stand in stark contrast to the insight of people like Drs. Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm, who calmly assess the evidence set before them. The conflict between Hammond’s grand—but incomplete vision—and the clearsighted observations of his consultants shows how true insight requires both accurate vision and unbiased assessment of the available evidence.
Blinded by greed and arrogance, Gennaro, John Hammond, and Dr. Henry Wu overlook evidence that contradicts their expectations. Perhaps the clearest example of this is setting the computer to count only the animals they already expect to be on the island. In contrast, real insight requires adding new evidence to pre-existing paradigms. Sometimes this means being less attached to one’s biases—children and less-invested adults (like Alice Levine) are better at seeing the escaped dinosaur as it is than the so-called experts. But experts can do it too, as when Lewis Dodgson (also a pioneering geneticist) realizes that the odd business decisions EPA lawyer Bob Morris can’t interpret point to InGen cloning dinosaurs. And every time he observes the park’s animals, Grant assimilates his new knowledge with the picture of dinosaur behavior he has built through years of careful paleontological study. In a key moment near the end of the book, Grant tries to force insight on Gennaro by making him participate in the wild-bred raptor count. This requires Gennaro to see and acknowledge the failures of the park—and his complicity in its downfall. In doing so, Grant underlines the importance of keeping an open mind and acting on the available information rather than relying on assumptions or hopes.
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Sight and Insight Quotes in Jurassic Park
Mike Bowman then showed Guitierrez the picture that Tina had drawn. Guitierrez nodded. “I would accept this as a picture of a basilisk lizard,” he said. “A few details are wrong, of course. The neck is much too long, and she has drawn the hind legs with only three toes instead of five. The tail is too thick, and raised too high. But otherwise this is a perfectly serviceable lizard of the kind we are talking about.”
“But Tina specifically said the neck was long,” Ellen Bowman insisted. “And she said there were three toes on the foot.”
“Tina’s pretty observant,” Mike Bowman said.
“I’m sure she is,” Guitierrez said, smiling. “But I still think your daughter was bitten by a common basilisk amoratus,”
Such a new and distinctive pattern led Guitierrez to suspect the presence of a previously unknown species of lizard. This was particularly likely to happen in Costa Rica […because] within its limited space, [it] had a remarkable diversity of biological habitats: seacoasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific; four separate mountain ranges […]; rain forests, cloud forests, temperate zones, swampy marshes, and arid deserts. Such ecological diversity sustained an astonishing diversity of plant and animal life. Costa Rica had three times as many species of birds as all of North America. More than a thousand species of orchids. More than five thousand species of insects.
New species were being discovered all the time at a pace that had increased in recent years, for a sad reason. Costa Rica was becoming deforested, and as jungle species lost their habitats, they moved to other areas, and sometimes changed behavior as well.
Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display at the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)
The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct […] It was a young Procompsognathus.
“It looks kind of distorted,” one of the kids said. “But I don’t think it’s the computer.”
“No,” Grant said. “It’s just time. Lots and lots of time.”
Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years—the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.
In the classroom, Grant tried different comparisons. If you imagined the human lifespan of sixty years was compressed to a day, then eighty million years would still be 3,652 years—older than the pyramids. The velociraptor had been dead a long time.
Gennaro was speechless. He had known all along what to expect—he had known about it for years—but he had somehow never believed it would happen, and now he was shocked into silence. The awesome power of the new genetic technology, which he had formerly considered to be just so many words in an overwrought sales pitch—the power suddenly became clear to him. These animals were so big! They were enormous! Big as a house! And so many of them! Actual damned dinosaurs! Just as real as you could want!
Gennaro thought: We are going to make a fortune on this place. A fortune.
He hoped to God the island was safe.
Look, we’re not fools. We understand these are prehistoric animals. They are part of a vanished ecology—a complex web of life that became extinct millions of years ago. They might have no predators in the contemporary world, no checks on their growth. We don’t want them to survive in the wild. So I’ve made them lysine dependent. I inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. As a result, the animals cannot manufacture the amino acid lysine. They must ingest it from the outside. Unless they get a rich dietary source of exogenous lysine—supplied by us, in tablet form—they’ll go into a coma within twelve hours and expire. These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.
“What you see here,” Arnold said, “is an entirely separate counting procedure. It isn’t based on the tracking data. It’s a fresh look. The whole idea is that the computer can’t make a mistake, because it compares two different ways of gathering the data. If an animal were missing, we’d know it within five minutes.”
“I see,” Malcolm said. “And has that ever actually been tested?”
“Well, in a way,” Arnold said. “We’ve had a few animals die […]”And in each case, once the animal stopped moving, the numbers stopped tallying and the computer signaled an alert.”
Yes […] Look here. The basic event that has happened in Jurassic Park is that the scientists and technicians have tried to make a new, complete biological world. And the scientists in the control room expect to see a natural world. As in the graph they just showed us. Even though a moment’s thought reveals that a nice, normal distribution is terribly worrisome on this island […] Based on what Dr. Wu told us earlier, one should never see a population graph like that […because it] is a graph for a normal biological population. Which is precisely what Jurassic Park is not. Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world. In that sense, it’s a true park, rather like a Japanese formal garden. Nature manipulated to be more than the real thing, if you will.
“Let’s keep it in perspective,” Hammond said. “You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place. After all, they’re trainable.”
From the beginning, this had been one of the core beliefs of the planners. The animals, however exotic, would fundamentally behave like animals in zoos anywhere. They would learn the regularities of their care, and they would respond.
Malcolm’s just another theoretician. […] Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missile, we dealt with something called resonant yaw. Resonant yaw meant that, even though a missile was only slightly unstable off the pad, it was hopeless. It was inevitably going to go out of control, and it couldn’t be brought back. That’s a feature of mechanical systems. A little wobble can get worse until the whole system collapses. But those same little wobbles are essential to a living system. They mean the system is healthy and responsive. Malcolm never understood that. […] Look, the proof is right here. […] In less than an hour, […] the park will all be back online. […] And that’s not theoretical. That’s a fact.
Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”
“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see an immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t’ see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”
Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.”
