Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jurassic Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chaos, Change, and Control
Sight and Insight
Flawed Human Nature
Technology
Summary
Analysis
As the group walks back to the control room, Malcolm asks Wu how many species they’ve made thus far. Wu thinks it’s 15, but he looks to Regis for confirmation, explaining that he can’t keep track because some of the attempts didn’t work out and they had to start over. They’ve hatched more like 20 species, but only 15 have thrived.
Wu’s answer points to the instabilities in the Jurassic Park system: how can park operators hope to control a population of animals if they don’t know how many or which ones they have? It also seems to acknowledge how novel—and unpredictable—their dinosaur cloning success is.
Themes
Malcolm wants to know if compys—like the animal allegedly recovered in Costa Rica—are one of the successful species. Wu confirms that the park has dozens of these scavengers, which help to clean up the droppings of the larger herbivores. Malcolm then asks how the park can possibly keep track of fifty small, roaming dinosaurs, insinuating that some may have escaped. This, Wu tells him, cannot have happened. He's engineered the dinosaurs to be incapable of producing lysine, an enzyme necessary for life. Unless they receive it as a dietary supplement (as they do on the island), they will quickly fall into a coma and die. Given how foreign dinosaurs are to modern ecosystems, the park wants to prevent dinosaurs surviving in—and possibly overrunning—the world.
Wu has such confidence in his ability to manipulate the animals he creates—by making them female, by making them dependent on dietary supplementation for survival—that he refuses to reexamine his assumptions in light of new evidence, specifically the potential discovery of a compy on the mainland. This demonstrates a stunning lack of insight and arrogance—ignoring evidence that his efforts have failed doesn’t change the fact that they have failed.
Themes
The tour group waits outside of the control room while the operations team talks a supply ship through the process of docking and unloading. Ellie takes the opportunity to press Wu for more details about what happens when the dinosaur development process fails. Grant wants to know how they measure success, since no living person has seen a real dinosaur. Wu smiles and expresses the hope that paleontologists will eventually compare his animals to the fossil record to verify their development.
Just moments after he asserted his ability to control the development and physiological functioning of the park’s dinosaurs, Wu admits the limitations of his knowledge to Ellie and Grant. Unable to account for or control all the variables in a creature’s growth and development, Wu must wait for evidence of problems to arise before he can try to fix what’s wrong. And he has no way to know how much his dinosaurs reflect their ancient forbears, compared to the imported DNA the computer generated to fill in gaps in the genetic code.
Themes
Grant asks if the park already has adult raptors. They do, Wu and Regis tell him, but they’re not yet “integrated into the park setting.” In the meantime, they invite Grant to visit their temporary enclosure, near the visitor center. While they wait for the control room to open, Lex and Regis play catch on the lawn while Grant, Ellie, Malcolm, and Tim go to see the raptors.
Again, the trouble getting the raptors “integrated into the park setting”—which implies an ability to safely contain and manage them—hints that Hammond and the park operators don’t have as much control over the animals as they would like their guests to believe.
Themes
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Grant likes kids—especially the way so many of them seem fascinated by dinosaurs—so he asks Tim questions about raptors while they walk. Tim knows that raptors are pack hunters. Grant adds that they were “larger-brained, more intelligent than most dinosaurs.” The visitors pass a giant generator system—way bigger than a normal resort would need—then a pen of goats before arriving at the raptor enclosure. They can hear animals moving in the brush, but they must stand still and silent for several minutes before Ellie catches sight of one and points it out to the others. Grant instinctively recognizes the animal’s hunting behavior, but it still surprises him when three animals burst through the growth and make a high-speed charge at the fence. Grant updates his assessment of raptors to include ambush hunting as well as pack behavior.
Grant’s conversation with Tim allows the book to introduce the raptors as a species to readers. Since they represent nature’s ability to evade human control, their speed, intelligence, and pack instincts pose a particularly dire threat to humanity. The technology used to recreate them is undoubtedly impressive. But the motivations of its operators, for good or ill, determines the outcomes of its use. And their poor decision to keep lethal animals in the park reveals their arrogant assumption of human domination over nature. Unlike the park operators, who want to make the dinosaurs conform to their expectations, Grant allows his observations of the living animals to increase and update his knowledge—and predictions—about the species.
Themes
Returning to the visitor center, Malcolm and Grant discuss the speed of the attack, judging that the raptors reached speeds of at least 60 or 70 miles an hour. Malcolm expresses surprise over the raptors’ bird-like movements and intelligence. As Grant explains, due to the nature of its work with fossilized records, paleontology has cycled through many theories about dinosaurs; the raptors’ behavior conforms with most up-to-date theories. And then Malcolm wonders aloud whether the raptors attacked the fence because they had learned, at some point, that humans make easy prey.
Some elements of dinosaur behavior—like the speed and coordination of the attack—would have been impossible to predict based on fossilized remains alone. But through assiduous observation, paleontologists have had the insight to adjust their theories about dinosaurs many times. As outside observers, Malcolm and Grant both pay attention to details that park creators ignore, downplay, or cover up; this allows Malcolm to correctly suppose that the raptors have already attacked people, even though he doesn’t know about the history of worker fatalities.
Themes
