Quotes from The Lost World: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
“Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that’s our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.”
“Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.”
“All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don’t you take it away from yourself.”
“But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost–they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.”
“Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It’s the most important thing that happens, and it’s the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.”
“…Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.
Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media – it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity – our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity.
“Plants have defenses?” Kelly said.
“Of course they do. Plants evolve like every other form of life, and they’ve come up with their own forms of aggression, defense, and so on. In the nineteenth century, most theories concerned animals – nature red in tooth and claw, all that. But now scientists are thinking about nature green in root and stem. We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms to warn other plants, to outright chemical warfare.”
Kelly frowned. “Signaling? Like what?”
“Oh, there are many examples,” Levine said. “In Africa acacia trees evolved very long, sharp thorns – three inches or so, but that only provoked animals like giraffes and antelope to evolve long tongues to get past the thorns. Thorns alone didn’t work. So in the evolutionary arms race, the acacia trees next evolved toxicity. They started to produce large quantities of tannin in their leaves, which sets off a lethal metabolic reaction in the animals that eat them. Literally kills them. At the same time, the acacias also evolved a kind of chemical warning system among themselves. If an antelope begins to eat one tree in a grove, that tree releases the chemical ethylene into the air, which causes other trees in the grove to step up the production of leaf tannin. Within five or ten minutes, the other trees are producing more tannin, making themselves poisonous.
“And then what happens to the antelope? It dies?”
“Well, not any more,” Levine said, “because the evolutionary arms race continued. Eventually, antelopes learned that they could only browse for a short time. Once the trees started to produce more tannin, they had to stop eating it. And the browsers developed new strategies. For example, when a giraffe eats an acacia tree, it then avoids all the trees downwind. Instead, it moves on to another tree that is some distance away. So the animals have adapted to this defense, too.”
“In evolutionary theory, this is called the Red Queen phenomenon,” Malcolm said.” Because in Alice in Wonderland the Red Queen tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. That’s the way evolutionary spirals seem. All the organisms are evolving at a furious pace just to stay in the same balance. To stay where they are.”
“You have to track the theory,” he said, “over a couple of hundred years. Start with Baron Georges Cuvier: the most famous anatomist in the world in his day, living in the intellectual center of the world, Paris. Around 1800, people began digging up old bones, and Cuvier realized that they belonged to animals no longer found on earth. That was a problem, because back in 1800, everybody believed that all the animal species ever created were still alive. The idea seemed reasonable because the earth was thought to be only a few thousand years old. And because God, who had created all the animals, would never let any of his creations become extinct. So extinction was agreed to be impossible. Cuvier agonized over these dug-up bones, but he finally concluded that God or no God, many animals had become extinct – as a result, he thought, of worldwide catastrophes, like Noah’s flood.
So Cuvier reluctantly came to believe in extinction,” Malcolm said, “but he never accepted evolution. In Cuvier’s mind, evolution didn’t occur. Some animals died and some survived, but none evolved. In his view, animals didn’t change. Then along came Darwin, who said that animals did evolve, and that the dug-up bones were actually the extinct predecessors of living animals. The implications of Darwin’s idea upset lots of people. They didn’t like to think of God’s creations changing, and they didn’t like to think of monkeys in their family tree. It was embarrassing and offensive. The debate was fierce. But Darwin amassed a tremendous amount of factual data – he had made an overwhelming case. So gradually his idea of evolution was accepted by scientists, and by the world at large. But the question remained: how does evolution happen? For that, Darwin didn’t have a good answer.”
“Natural selection,” Arby said.
“Yes, that was Darwin’s explanation. The environment exerts pressure which favors certain animals, and they breed more often in subsequent generations, and that’s how evolution occurs. But as many people realized, natural selection isn’t really an explanation. It’s just a definition: if an animal succeeds, it must have been selected for. But what in the animal is favored? And how does natural selection actually operate? Darwin had no idea. And neither did anybody else for another fifty years.”
“But it’s genes,” Kelly said.
“Okay,” Malcolm said, “Fine. We come to the twentieth century. Mendel’s work with plants is rediscovered. Fischer and Wright do population studies. Pretty soon we know genes control heredity-whatever genes are. Remember, through the first half of the century, all during World War I and World War II, nobody had any idea what a gene was. After Watson and Crick in 1953, we knew that genes were nucleotides arranged in a double helix. Great. And we knew about mutation. So by the late twentieth century, we have a theory of natural selection which says that mutations arise spontaneously in genes, that the environment favors the mutations that are beneficial, and out of this selection process evolution occurs. It’s simple and straightforward. God is not at work. No higher organizing principle involved. In the end, evolution is just the result of a bunch of mutations that either survive or die. Right?”
“But there are problems with that idea,” Malcolm said. “First of all, there’s a time problem. A single bacterium – the earliest form of life has two thousand enzymes. Scientists have estimated how long it would take to randomly assemble those enzymes from a primordial soup. Estimates run from forty billion years to one hundred billion years. But the earth is only four billion years old. So, chance alone seems too slow. Particularly since we know bacteria actually appeared only four hundred million years after the earth began. Life appeared very fast – which is why some scientists have decided life on earth must be of extraterrestrial origin. Although I think that’s just evading the issue.
Second, there’s the coordination problem. If you believe the current theory, then all the wonderful complexity of life is nothing but the accumulation of chance events – a bunch of genetic accidents strung together. Yet when we look closely at animals, it appears as if many elements must have evolved simultaneously. Take bats, which have echolocation – they navigate by sound. To do that, many things must evolve. Bats need a specialized apparatus to make sounds, they need specialized ears to hear echoes, they need specialized brains to interpret the sounds, and they need specialized bodies to dive and swoop and catch insects. If all these things don’t evolve simultaneously, there’s no advantage. And to image all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working airplane. It’s very hard to believe.”