Fictional Science Can Be Wrong Science

Let me start this one with a quick disclaimer: I know that the movie is fictional.

    I understand that the technology used in the movie isn't supoosed to be the same type of technology in the real world - and that isn't what this is about. I can accept dinosaur clones for the sake of the movie regardless of whether they're realistic or not.

    What I object to, and what this post is about is the "scientists" themselves, and I use sarcastic quotation marks because these people do absolutely nothing in the entire movie to justify that title.

They don't even wear lab-coats!

    The main plot of the movie basically starts with man-scientist showing how charmingly inept he is at dealing with children, apparently he just happens to carry around a velociraptors claw with him for the sake of terrorising small boys who laugh at his theories.

    After listening to his main reasons for believing that dinosaurs are now birds, it not actually too difficult to imagine why he'd need to carry some kind of anti-bullying protection around with him at all times:

    "Look at the pubic bone, turned backward just like a bird.
Look at the vertebrae, full of airsacs and hollows just like a bird.
And even the word 'Raptor' means 'Bird of Prey'"

    The bone stuff, yeah fair enough maybe, I'm no expert in that field. But as far as I'm concerned that last line alone is enough to immediately discredit someone claiming to be a scientist. He argument seems to be that the ancient Greeks were so good at naming things, that when a bunch of people took one of their words as a metaphor thousands of years later - that's enough evidence to conclude that the two things are actually the same thing.

    I watched this with a fellow linguist, and we both audibly groaned when he was only halfway through the sentence. By the time he'd finished it we were ready to throw things at the TV.

    But the main premise of the movie isn't about dinosaurs being birds, I can almost forgive someone for not realising that words aren't the same thing as reality (almost), it's about an amusement park - an amusement park that's about to be shut down because one of its rides ate one of the workers (or at least gave him a decent mauling). So Colonel Saunders calls in the "scientists" to show them around, and get them to tell everybody how awesome it all is, because if there's one thing that world respects, it's sexy scientists being paid to endorse a product.

He could have at least worn an open lab-coat over that bare chest.

    So these scientists come to the island and it takes them until their first meal to decide that they don't like it. This is actually fair enough and pretty much the only smart thing they do the whole movie - up until this point they've been in a helicopter which doesn't have working seatbelts, almost been trampled by the opening attraction, and gotten off a ride they were supposedly fastened into by simply pushing at the locks and walking through the door into the main lab.

    Does any of this come up? Not one of them thinks "Well, I could get behind this, but maybe make it so that 3 children working in unison couldn't overide your entire security".

    Instead, the object to the fact that the Colenel is "cheating" evolution:

Gee, the lack of humilty before nature that's being displayed here staggers me...
don't you see the danger inherent in what your doing here. Genetic power's the most
awesome force the world has ever seen but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun...
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any
discipline to attain it, you read what others had done and you took the next step,
you didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it.
 You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could
and before you even knew it you had...
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they "could" they stop to think about whether they "should".

    What pisses me off most about this speech is the bastardised quotation of "we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants", which Wikipedia handily paraphrases as "One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past."

    So yeah, not only did the writers of this little speech not understand the very purpose of science, but they butchered a beautiful line which actually summarises everything that scientific progress is about.

    

    Unfortunately, that was only sexy-scientist warming up his complete lack of understanding. He's angry at the Colonel for not earning the science for himself, because if there's one thing that scientists do on a regular basis, is discover a field that no one ever has investigated before and take the experimentation to such a level that it's theoretical and practical implications are so well understood that no one ever needs to bother with it again.

  But then he goes on:

Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction...

What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars.
What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.

    That little spark of rhetoric is what I hate the most about the film. True, it was only one man's opinion but the others didn't exactly shoot him down; lady-scientist just nodded her head and moved the conversation onto the eco-system. None of these people are fit to wear the lab-coats they're so desperately avoiding.

    Sexy-scientist literally compares the scientific method to rape - not even subtly so, he actually uses the word "rape". The Colonel is trying to augment the natural world, to bring about a new stage of life that we didn't think could have even been possible only years previously. He makes the point himself: sure, dinosaurs are what's gonna bring the crowds in, but the profits can go to wildlife preservation or saving the countless animal and plant species that have been wiped from the planet by mankind. He only goes so far as to talk about condors, but think what we could learn from a cloned neandrathal, a being with the same capabilities of sentienty as humans, but with a radically different interpretation of the world.

    Dinosaurs are the first step, and sure he'd have probably been safer with a nice Dodo petting-zoo, but that wouldn't bring in the money to give them the lee-way to turn the attention onto the practical implications of this kind of discovery could have for mankind.

    And what really gets me, what pisses me off so much more than the fact that a man who calls himself a scientist can have those opinions of "discovery", is that in the Jurassic Park world, he's right!

    This is a man who repeatedly states that "life will find a way", and that the problems in the movie are the Colonel's fault for "angering evolution". These are the people that the world turns to when death itself has been redefined, and the limitations of what it means to be alive have been infintely expanded, and yet none of them can tell the difference between "life", "evolution" and "karma". And to make it worse, they seem to believe that all three of them are conscious, self-aware and petty forces who like to kill people that annoy them.

   

    If the movie makers are going to sacrifice education for entertainment, then that's fine, I object, but it's their perogative - but this movie replaced it with miseducation. There's already enough fear and misunderstanding regarding what evolution actually is - children don't need to be afraid that it's actually going to send dinosaurs after them when they're sitting in the bathroom.

Pictured: NOT evolution

And that's why I hate this movie.