Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic
Park is an allegation against the unreasonable use of science.
In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, one of the characters in the book:
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 ga me in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an
aggressive, penetrative act... Discovery is always a rape of the natural world.
Always.
This problem arises especially in the
scientific field that serves as the basis for Crichton's novel, genetic
engineering, which poses many important ethical problems. There are
many things that we can already do, or are close to achieving, but should they
be done? I will mention a few:
• Human cloning.
• Obtaining hybrids or chimeras between humans and
animals. I mentioned
this in another
post in this blog.
• The resurrection of extinct species. Some experts think that
it would be better to use our efforts to conserve existing species; that it is
not clear that the extinction won’t happen again; and that the benefits obtained
from the conservation of those species are debatable. The problem has been
raised recently with regard to the possible recovery of species of frogs that
have disappeared in recent decades.
To give strength to his allegation, Crichton
introduces alleged scientific arguments through his character (Ian Malcolm),
who is supposed to be a mathematician expert in chaos theory. Let us look at some
of those arguments:
•
[In a complex system,] inevitably, underlying
instabilities begin to appear.
•
Flaws in the system will now become severe.
•
System recovery may prove impossible.
•
Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage
to face its implications.
It is easy to see that, while trying to give
scientific basis to his novel, Crichton has confused two different theories:
- The theory of chaos. Created by Edward Lorenz in
the nineteen fifties, during his studies on meteorological predictions,
applies to nonlinear systems where an infinitesimal difference in initial
conditions leads to huge differences after a certain time, which
can be very long. Lorenz introduced the concept of strange
attractors, which have a fractal structure, and the butterfly effect, the fact that very
small causes can give rise to enormous effects, which is usually expressed
as follows: When a butterfly flaps its wings in
Australia, this movement can give place much later to a tornado in the
United States. Of course, thus expressed, it is an
exaggeration, which was probably suggested by the appearance of the
strange attractor that emerges from Lorenz’s meteorological equations (see
the attached figure), which bears a certain resemblance to the wings of a
butterfly.
Lorenz attractor - The theory of
catastrophes.
Created by René Thom in the nineteen sxties, it is applied to non-linear
systems where a very small change in the parameters of the system can lead in
certain situations to abrupt changes in its behavior. They differ
from chaotic systems, which are very sensitive to initial conditions after
a sufficiently long time, while catastrophic systems are immediately sensitive
to changes in their parameters, in certain circumstances. It is curious
that in catastrophic systems we also speak of butterflies and other
animals. Thus, the swallowtail catastrophes (see
the attached figure) are due to the aspect of the three-dimensional
representation of the state surface of the system defined by the equation V=x5+ax3+bx2+cx,
while the butterfly catastrophes correspond to the equation V=x6+ax4+bx3+cx2+dx.
Swallowtail catastrophic system
It is evident that the system in Jurassic Park, which collapses abruptly as a consequence
of an apparently small change (the action of a saboteur, who disconnects for a
certain time the security systems) is a catastrophic system, not a chaotic
system, as the author says many times through his character Ian
Malcolm. And the successive iterations in the generation of a fractal curve,
which serve as a framework for the different sections of the novel, have no
relation at all to what is happening.
Anyway, despite the various additional scientific
errors of the book, which are related to genetic engineering and have often
been pointed out, the plot is attractive and the novel is easy to read, probably
due to the morbid fascination at seeing people persecuted and sometimes
devoured by dinosaurs.The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Mathematics: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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