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
In the control room, Hammond insists that the shell fragment must belong to a bird. Over the radio, Malcolm suggests a test of that theory and asks Arnold to run a tally of the dinosaurs on the island. The count finds all 238 expected specimens present. But Malcolm asks Arnold to search for 239 animals—and the computer finds 239. When Malcolm asks Arnold to search for 300, the computer slowly tallies up 283 total animals, including extra maiasaurs, compys, othnielia, and raptors. Hammond assumes that a computer bug causes the miscount, but Nedry explains that he programmed the computer to allow the user to enter an expected number of animals to speed up the count. Then Hammond insists that the extra animals must be rodents or birds because, as Wu confirms, the animals can’t breed.
Hammond, like his employees, doesn’t want to look at evidence that contradicts his sense of control over the island and the park. But his denial doesn’t change the facts. Malcolm finally reveals the key oversight in the computer’s count of the animals—because it looks for the expected total, it can only count missing animals, not extra ones. Thus, the proof that the animals couldn’t breed rested on only counting the expected number of animals, creating a feedback loop. Only looking for expected things will yield only the expected things, not the full truth.
Themes
Malcolm then deigns to point out the design flaw: worried only about escapes, the operators failed to consider looking for extra animals, only missing ones. Earlier, when Arnold showed them the compys’ size spread, the graph looked like a normal bell curve. But if the dinosaurs were bred and released in three batches, Malcolm explains, the size distribution should reflect three generations. It would look more like an ascending “m” with each hump corresponding to one generation. The bell curve graph indicated the natural size spread of a breeding population. While a dumbfounded Wu takes in the implications, Hammond attacks him for “screw[ing] up” and allowing animals to breed in the wild.
Malcolm also explains why the earlier bell curve of the compys proved his theory of dinosaur escape. His outsider perspective, unblinded by the park employees’ assumptions and biases, allowed him to critically appraise the data and correctly interpret it. In contrast, the park operators focus exclusively on the details to the point of misunderstanding the big picture. And yet again, Hammond’s response to the possibility that his grand vision is flawed is to attack someone else rather than to admit his own responsibility.
Themes
