The Lost World by Michael Crichton.
Title: The Lost World.
Author: Michael Crichton.
Genre: Fiction, science fiction, genetics.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1995.
Summary: It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end-the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public. But there are rumours that something has survived, and before long chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm reluctantly agrees to help paleontologist Richard Levine find Site B on Isla Sorna, the "production facility" where the now-defunct company InGen hatched and grew the dinosaurs for their Jurassic Park theme park on nearby Isla Nublar. Soon, Ian finds himself plunging back into danger, having to rescue the reckless paleontologist with a crew (and a couple of unwelcome young stowaways) on an island overrun with dinosaurs, while competing with a team that wants to capture the dinosaurs for nefarious purposes.
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ "Consider the numbers," Malcolm said, leaning on the podium, staring forward at his audience. "On our planet there are currently fifty million species of plants and animals. We think that is a remarkable diversity, yet it is nothing compared to what has existed before. We estimate that there have been fifty billion species on this planet since life began. That means that for every thousand species that ever existed on the planet, only one remains today. Thus 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived are extinct. And mass killings account for only five percent of that total. The overwhelming majority of species died one at a time."
The truth, Malcolm said, was that life on earth was marked by a continuous, steady rate of extinction. By and large, the average lifespan of a species was four million years. For mammals, it was a million years. Then the species vanished. So the real pattern was one of species rising, flourishing, and dying out in a few million years. On average, one species a day had become extinct throughout the history of life on the earth.
"But why?" he asked. "What leads to the rise and decline of earth's species in a four-million-year cycle?
"One answer is that we do not recognize how continuously active our planet is. Just in the last fifty thousand years-a geological blink of an eye-the rain forests have severely contracted, then expanded again. Rain forests aren't an ageless feature of the planet; they're actually rather new. As recently as ten thousand years ago, when there were human hunters on the American continent, an ice park extended as far down as New York City. Many animals became extinct during that time.
"So most of earth's history shows animals living and dying against a very active background. That probably explains 90 percent of extinctions. If the seas dry up, or become more salty, then of course ocean plankton will all die. But complex animals like dinosaurs are another matter, because complex animals have insulated themselves-literally and figuratively-against such changes. Why do complex animals die out? Why don't they adjust? Physically, they seem to have the capacity to survive. There appears to be no reason why they should die. And yet they do.
"What I wish to propose is that complex animals become extinct not because of a change in their physical adaptation to their environment, but because of their behavior. I would suggest that the latest thinking in chaos theory or nonlinear dynamics, provides tantalizing hints to how this happens.
"It suggests to us that behavior of complex animals can change very rapidly, and not always for the better. It suggests that behavior can cease to be responsive to the environment, and lead to decline and death. It suggests that animals may stop adapting. Is this what happened to the dinosaurs? Is this the true cause of their disappearance?> We may never know. But it is no accident that human beings are so interested in dinosaur extinction. The decline of the dinosaurs allowed mammals-including us-to flourish. And that leads us to wonder whether the disappearance of the dinosaurs is going to be repeated, sooner or later, by us as well. Whether at the deepest level the fault lies not in blind fate-in some fiery meteor from the skies-but in our own behavior. At the moment, we have no answer."
And then he smiled.
"But I have a few suggestions."
♥ As one questioner had pompously phrased it, "The Cretaceous allowed our own sentient awareness to arise on the planet."
Malcolm's reply was immediate: "What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. 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."
♥ "But absence of proof is not proof of absence. I believe there may well be a locus of these animals, surviving from a past time."
♥ Malcolm sighed. "Are you familiar with the concept of a techno-myth? It was developed by Geller at Princeton. Basic thesis is that we've lost all the old myths, Orpheus and Eurydice and Perseus and Medusa. So we fill the gap with modern techno-myths. Geller listed a dozen or so. One is that an alien's living at a hangar at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Another is that somebody invented a carburetor that gets a hundred and fifty miles t the gallon, but the automobile companies bought the patent and are sitting on it. Then there's the story that the Russians trained children in ESP at a secret base in Siberia and these kids can kill people anywhere in the world with their thoughts. The story that the lines in Nazca, Peru, are an alien spaceport. That the CIA released the AIDS virus to kill homosexuals. That Nikola Tesla discovered an incredible energy source but his notes are lost. That in Istanbul there's a tenth-century drawing that shows the earth from space. That the Stanford Research Institute found a guy whose body glows in the dark. Get the picture?"
♥ Guitierrez shrugged. "I don't know, but the whole attitude toward research has changed, Richard. It's very noticeable here. Costa Rica has one of the riches ecologies in the world. Half a million species in twelve distinct environments; habitats. Five percent of all the species on the planet are represented here. This country has been a biological research center for years, and I can tell you, things have changed. In the old days, the people who came here were dedicated scientists with a passion to learn about something for its own sake-howler monkeys, or polistine wasps, or the sombrilla plant. These people had chosen their field because they cared about it. They certainly weren't going to get rich. But now, everything in the biosphere is potentially valuable. Nobody knows where the next drug is coming from, so drug companies fund all sorts of research. Maybe a bird egg has a protein that makes it waterproof. Maybe a spider produces a peptide that inhibits blood clotting. Maybe the waxy surface of a fern contains a painkiller. It happens often enough that attitudes toward research have changed. People aren't studying the natural world any more, they're mining it. It's a looter mentality. Anything new or unknown is automatically of interest, because it might have value. It might be worth a fortune."
♥ When he was not in class, Thorne often served as an expert witness in legal cases involving materials engineering. He specialized in explosions, crashed airplanes, collapsed buildings, and other disasters. These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because the mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up."
♥ He enjoyed his work thoroughly, but he missed contact with the students, which was why he liked Levine's two youthful assistants. These kids were smart, they were enthusiastic, and they were young enough so that the schools hadn't destroyed all their interest in learning. They could still actually use their brains, which in Thorne's view was a sure sign they hadn't yet completed a formal education.
♥ It was sobering to realize that the most accurate perception of dinosaurs had also been the first. Back in the 1840s, when Richard Owen first described giant bones in England, he named them Dinosauria: terrible lizards. That was still the most accurate description of these creatures, Malcolm thought. They were indeed like lizards, and they were terrible.
But since Owen, the "scientific" view of dinosaurs had undergone many changes. Because the Victorians believed in the inevitability of progress, they insisted that the dinosaurs must necessarily be inferior-why else would they be extinct? So the Victorians made them fat, lethargic, and dumb-big dopes from the past. This perception was elaborated, so that by the early twentieth century, dinosaurs had become so weak that they could not support their own weight. Apotasaurs had to stand belly-deep in water or they would crush their own legs. The whole conception of the ancient world was suffused with these ideas of weak, stupid, slow animals.
That view didn't change until the 1960s, when a few renegade scientists, led by John Ostrom, began to imagine quick, agile, hot-blooded dinosaurs. Because these scientists had the temerity to question dogma, they were brutally criticized for years, even though it now seemed their ideas were correct.
But in the last decade, a growing interest in social behavior had led to still another view. Dinosaurs were now seen as caring creatures, living in groups, raising their little babies. They were good animals, even cute animals. The big sweeties had nothing to do with their terrible fate, which was visited on them by Alvarez's meteor. And that new sappy view produced people like Tim, who were reluctant to look at the other side of the coin, the other face of life. Of course, some dinosaurs had been social and cooperative. But others had been hunters-and killers of unparalleled viciousness. For Malcolm, the truest picture of life in the past incorporated the interplay of all aspects of life, the good and the bad, the strong and the weak. It was no good pretending anything else.
♥ ..Malcolm said, "The essence of verification is multiple lines of reasoning that converge at a single point."
♥ Their behavior was familiar to Sarah Harding, who had become in recent years the foremost expert on hyenas in the world. When she first reported her findings, she was greeted with disbelief and even outrage from colleagues, who disputed her results in very personal terms. She was attacked for being a woman, for being attractive, for having "an overbearing feminist perspective." The university reminded her she was on tenure track. Colleagues shook their heads. But Harding had persisted, and slowly, over time, as more data accumulated, her view of hyenas had come to be accepted.
Still, hyenas would never be appealing creatures, she thought, watching them feed. They were ungainly, heads too big and bodies sloping, coats ragged and mottled, gait awkward, vocalizations too reminiscent of an unpleasant laugh. In an increasingly urban world of concrete skyscrapers, wild animals were romanticized, classified as noble or ignoble, heroes or villains. And in this media-driven world, hyenas were simply not photogenic enough to be admirable. Long since cast as the laughing villains of the African plain, they were hardly thought worth a systematic study until Harding had begun her own research.
What she discovered cast hyenas in a very different light. Brave hunters and attentive parents, they lived in a remarkably complex social structure-and a matriarchy as well. As for their notorious yelping vocalizations, they actually represented an extremely sophisticated form of communication.
She heard a roar, and through her night-vision goggles saw the first of the lions approaching the kill. It was a large female, circling closer. The hyenas barked and snapped at the lioness, guiding their own pups off into the grass. Within a few moments, other lions appeared, and settled down to feed on the hyenas' kill.
Now, lions, she thought. There was a truly nasty animal.
♥ "Yes. They're dinosaurs."
Eddie frowned, stared. "I didn't know they came so small," he said finally.
"Dinosaurs were mostly small," Malcolm said. "People always think they were huge, but the average dinosaur was the size of a sheep, or a small pony."
♥ He came back and sat down on the couch beside Kelly. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head.
"No dessert?"
"Nothing. Not even frozen yogourt. Adults. They never plan right."
"Yeah. That's true."
♥ Thorne said to Malcolm, "You really think you know what this building was for?"
"I know exactly what it was for," Malcolm said. "It's a manufacturing plant for dinosaurs."
"Why," Eddie said, "would anybody want that?"
"Nobody would," Malcolm said. "That's why they kept it a secret."
"I don't get it," Eddie said.
Malcolm smiled. "Long story," he said.
♥ "Hammond actually did it. He built his park on an island called Isla Nubar, north of here, and he planned to open it to the public in late 1989. I went to see the place myself, shortly before it was scheduled to open. But it turned out Hammond had problems," Malcolm said. "The park systems broke down, and the dinosaurs got free. Some visitors were killed. Afterward, the park and all its dinosaurs were destroyed."
They passed a window where they could look out over the plain, at the herds of dinosaurs browsing by the river. Thorne said, "If they were all destroyed, what's this island?"
"This island," Malcolm said, "is Hammond's dirty little secret. It's the dark side of his park."
They continued down the corridor.'
"You see," Malcolm said, "visitors to Hammond's park at Isla Nublar were shown a very impressive genetics lab, with computers and gene sequencers, and all sorts of facilities for hatching and growing your dinosaurs. Visitors were told that the dinosaurs were created right there at the park. And the laboratory tour was entirely convincing.
"But actually, Hammond's tour skipped several steps in the process. In one room, he showed your dinosaur DNA being extracted. In the next room, he showed you eggs about to hatch. It was very dramatic, but how had he gotten from DNA to a viable embryo? You never saw that critical step. It was just presented as having happened, between rooms.
"The fact was, Hammond's whole show was too good to be true. For example, he had a hatchery where the little dinosaurs pecked their way out of the eggs, while you watched in amazement. But there were never any problems in the hatchery. No still births, no deformities, no difficulties of any sort. In Hammond's presentation, this dazzling technology was carried off without a hitch.
"And if you think about it, it couldn't possibly be true. Hammond was claiming to manufacture extinct animals using cutting-edge technology. But with any new manufacturing technology, initial yields are low: on the order of one percent or less. So in fact, Hammond must have been growing thousands of dinosaur embryos to get a single live birth. That implied a giant industrial operation, not the spotless little laboratory we were shown."
"You mean this place," Thorne said.
"Yes. Here, on another island, in secret, away from public scrutiny, Hammond was free to do his research, and deal with the unpleasant truth behind his beautiful little park. Hammond's little genetic zoo was a showcase. But this island was the real thing. This is where the dinosaurs were made."
♥ "These are Dicranopterus cyatheoides. They're mildly toxic and cause a rash in the mouth. In point of fact, there's a theory that their toxicity first evolved back in the Jurassic, as a defense against dinosaur browsers."
"That's not a theory," Malcolm said. "It's just idle speculation."
"There's some logic behind it," Levine said. "Plant life in the Mesozoic must have been severely challenged by the arrival of very large dinosaurs. Herds of giant herbivores, each animal consuming hundreds of pounds of plant matter each day, would have wiped out any plants that didn't evolve some defense-a bad taste, or nettles, or thorns, or chemical toxicity. So perhaps cyatheoides evolved its toxicity back then. And it's very effective, because contemporary animals don't eat these ferns, anywhere on earth. That's why they're so abundant. You may have noticed."
"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 only provoked animals like giraffes and antelopes 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 warming 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 had 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."
Arby said, "And this is common? Even with plants?"
"Oh yes," Levine said. "In their own way, plants are extremely active. Oak trees, for example, produce tannin and phenol as a defense when caterpillars attack them. A whole grove of trees is alerted as soon as one tree is infested. It's a way to protect the entire grove-a kind of cooperation among trees, you might say."
♥ "Most animals on this planet have short necks," Levine said, "because a long neck is, well, a pain in the neck. It causes all sorts of problems. Structural problems: how to arrange muscles and ligaments to support a long neck. Behavioral problems: nerve impulses must travel a long way from the brain to the body. Swallowing problems: food has to go a long way from the mouth to the stomach. Breathing problems: air has to be pulled down a long windpipe. Cardiac problems: blood has to be pumped way up to the head, or the animal faints. In evolutionary terms, all this is very difficult to do."
"But giraffes do it," Arby said.
"Yes, they do. Although giraffe necks are nowhere near this long. Giraffes have evolved large hearts, and very thick fascia around the neck. In effect, the neck of a giraffe is like a blood-pressure cuff, going all the way up. ..We assume apatosaurs have huge hearts, perhaps three hundred pounds or more. But there is another possible solution to the problem of pumping blood in a long neck."
..Arby clapped his hands. "They don't raise their necks!"
"Correct," Levine said. "At least, not very often, or for long periods. Of course, right now the animals are drinking, so their necks are down, but my guess is that if we watch them for an extended period we'll find they don't spend much time with their necks raised high."
"And that's why they don't eat the leaves on the trees!"
..Kelly frowned. "But if their long necks aren't used for eating, then why did they evolve them in the first place?"
Levine smiled. "There must be a good reason," he said. "I believe it has to do with defense."
..Arby looked, and watched the whip-like tails swing back and forth over the younger animals. "I get it!" Arby said. "They use their tails for defense. And they need long necks to counterbalance the long tails. It's like a suspension bridge!"
♥ And then there were his mathematician friends. They were really crazy. Or so they seemed to Sarah. They were so wild-eyed, so wrapped up in their proofs. Pages and pages of proofs, sometimes hundreds of pages. It was all too abstract for her. Sarah Harding liked to touch the dirt, to see the animals, to experience the sounds and the smells. That was real to her. Everything else was just a bunch of theories: possibly right, possibly wrong.
♥ "We're seeing nothing less than inter-species symbiosis. ..The apatosaurs and the parasaurs are together. I saw them together yesterday, too. I'll be that they're always together, when they're out in the open plain. ..The reason," Levine said, "is that the apatosaurs are very strong but weak-sighted, whereas the parasaurs are smaller, but have very sharp vision. So the two species stay together because they provide a mutual defense. Just the way zebras and baboons stay together on the African plain. Zebras have a good sense of smell, and baboons have good eyesight. Together they're more effective against predators than either is alone."
♥ "You realize this is all highly significant," Malcolm said. "For the question of extinction. Already it's obvious that the extinction of the dinosaurs is a far more complex problem than anyone has recognized. ..All extinction theories are based on the fossil record. But the fossil record doesn't slow the sort of behavior we're seeing here. It doesn't record the complexity of groups interacting. ..And bones are not behavior. When you think about it, the fossil record is like a series of photographs: frozen moments from what is really a moving, ongoing reality. Looking at the fossil record is like thumbing through a family photo album. You know that the album isn't complete. You know life happens between the pictures. But you don't have any record of what happens in between, you only have the pictures. So you study them, and study them. And pretty soon, you begin to think of the album not as a series of moments, but as reality itself. And you begin to explain everything in terms of the album, and you forget the underlying reality.
"And the tendency," Malcolm said, "has been to think in terms of physical events. To assume that some external physical event caused the extinctions. A meteor hits the earth, and changes the weather. Or volcanoes erupt, and change the weather. Or a meteor causes the volcanoes to erupt and change the weather. Or vegetation changes, and species starve and become extinct. Or a new disease arises, and species become extinct. Or a new plant arises, and poisons all the dinosaurs. In every case, what is imagined is some external event. But what nobody imagines is that the animals themselves might have changed-not in their bones, but their behavior. Yet wen you look at animals like these, and see how intricately their behavior is interrelated, you realize that a change in group behavior could easily lead to extinction."
"But why would behavior change?" Thorne said. "If there wasn't some external catastrophe to force it, why should the behavior change?"
"Actually," Malcolm said, "behavior is always changing, all the time. Our planet is a dynamic, active environment. Weather is changing. The land is changing. Continents drift. Oceans rise and fall. Mountains thrust up and erode away. All the organisms on the planet are constantly adapting to those changes. The best organisms are the ones that can adapt most rapidly. That's why it's hard to see how a catastrophe that produces a large change could cause extinction, since so much change is occurring all the time, anyway."
"In that case," Thorne said, "what causes extinction?"
"Certainly not rapid change alone," Malcolm said. "The facts tell us that clearly. ..After every major environmental change, a wave of extinctions has usually followed-but not right away. Extinctions only occur thousands, or millions of years later. Take the last glaciation in North America. The glaciers descended, the climate changed severely, but animals didn't die. Only after the glaciers receded, when you'd think things would go back to normal, did lots of species become extinct. That's when giraffes and tigers and mammoths vanished on this continent. And that's the usual pattern. It's almost as if species are weakened by the major change, but die off later. It's a well-recognized phenomenon."
"It's called Softening Up the Beachhead," Levine said.
"And what's the explanation for it?"
.."There is none," Malcolm said. "It's a paleontological mystery. But I believe that complexity theory has a lot to tell us about it. Because if the notion of life at the edge of chaos is true, then major change pushes animals closer to the edge. It destabilizes all sorts of behavior. And when the environment goes back to normal, it's not really a return to normal. In evolutionary terms, it's another big change, and it's just too much to keep up with."
♥ "That," Malcolm said, "is a velociraptor."
Thorne turned to Levine. "That's what chased you up in the tree? It looks ugly."
"Efficient," Levine said. "Those animals are brilliantly constructed killing machines. Arguably the most efficient predators in the history of the planet."
♥ In the end, their differences came down to personalities. Malcolm considered Levine pedantic and fussy, preoccupied with petty details. Levine never saw the big picture. He never looked at the consequences of his actions. For his own part, Levine did not hesitate to call Malcolm imperious and detached, indifferent to details.
"God is in the details," Levine once reminded him.
"Maybe your God," Malcolm shot back. "Not mine. Mine is in the process."
♥ "All this business about evolution," she said. "Darwin wrote his book a long time ago, right?"
"Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859," Malcolm said.
"And by now, everybody believes it, isn't that right?"
"I think it's fair to say that every scientist in the world agrees that evolution is a feature of life on earth," Malcolm said. And that we are descended from animal ancestors. Yes. ..The big deal," he said, "is that everybody agrees evolution occurs, but nobody understands how it works. There are big problems with the theory. And more and more scientists are admitting it."
Malcolm pushed his plate away. "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 trees. 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 god 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. ..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.
.."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 million 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 imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working 747 airplane. It's very hard to believe.
.."Next problem. Evolution doesn't always act like a blind force should. Certain environmental niches don't get filled. Certain plants don't get eaten. And certain animals don't evolve much. Sharks haven't changed for a hundred and sixty million years. Opossums haven't changed since dinosaurs became extinct, sixty-five million years ago. The environments for these animals have changed dramatically, but the animals have remained almost the same. Not exactly the same, but almost. In other words, it appears they haven't responded to their environment."
..Thorne said, "Are you saying evolution is directed?"
"No," Malcolm said. "That's Creationism and it's wrong. Just plain wrong. But I am saying that natural selection acting on genes is probably not the whole story. It's too simple. Other forces are also at work. The hemoglobin molecule is a protein that is folded like a sandwich around a central iron atom that binds oxygen. Hemoglobin expands and contacts when it takes on and gives up oxygen-like a tiny molecular lung. Now, we know the sequence of amino acids that make up hemoglobin. But we don't know how to fold it. Fortunately, we don't need to know that, because if you make the molecule, it folds all by itself. It organizes itself. And it tuns out, again and again, that living things seem to have a self-organizing quality. Proteins fold. Enzymes interact. Cells arrange themselves to form organs and the organs arrange themselves to form a coherent individual. Individuals organize themselves to make a population. And populations organize themselves to make a coherent biosphere. From complexity theory, we're starting to have a sense of how this self-organization may happen, and what it means. And it implies a major change in how we view evolution.
.."About three million years ago," Malcolm said, "some African apes that had been living in trees came down to the ground. There was nothing special about these apes. Their brains were small and they weren't especially smart. They didn't have claws or sharp teeth for weapons. They weren't particularly strong, or fast. They were certainly no match for a leopard. But because they were short, they started standing upright on their hind legs, to see over the tall African grass. That's how it began. Just some ordinary apes, looking out over the grass.
.."As time went on, the apes stood upright more and more of the time. That left their hands free to do things. Like all apes, they were tool-users. Chimps, for example, use twigs to fish for termites. That sot of thing. As time went on, our ape ancestors developed more complex tools. That stimulated their brains to grow in size and complexity. It began a spiral: more complex tools provoked more complex brains which provoked more complex tools. Our brains more than doubled in size in about a million years. And that caused problems for us. ..Like getting born, for one thing. Big brains can't pass through the birth canal-which means that both mother and child die in childbirth. That's no good. What's the evolutionary response? To make human infants born very early in development, when their brains are still small enough to pass through the pelvis. It's the marsupial solution-most of the growth occurs outside the mother's body. A human child's brain doubles during the first year of life. That's a good solution to the problem of birth, but it creates other problems. It means that human children will be helpless long after birth. The infants of many mammals can walk minutes after they're born. Others walk in a few days, or weeks. But human infants can't walk for a full year. They can't feed themselves for even longer. So one price of big brains was that our ancestors had to evolve new, stable social organizations to permit long-term child care, lasting many years. These big-brained, totally helpless children changed society. But that's not the most important consequence.
.."Being born in an immature state means that human infants have unformed brains. They don't arrive with a lot of built-in, instinctive behavior. Instinctively, a newborn infant can suck and grasp, but that's about all. Complex human behavior is not instinctive at all. So human societies had to develop education to train the brains of their children. To teach them how to act. Every human society expends tremendous time and energy teaching its children the right way to behave. You look at a simpler society, in the rain forest somewhere, and you find that every child is born into a network of adults responsible for helping to raise the child. Not only parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents and tribal elders. Some teach the child to hunt or gather food or weave; some teach them about sex or war. But the responsibilities are clearly defined, and if a child does not have, say, a mother's brother's sister to do a specific teaching job, the people get together and appoint a substitute. Because 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. And eventually, a few million years later, we have kids using computers.
"Now,, if this picture makes sense, where does natural selection act? Does it act on the body, enlarging the brain? Does it act on the developmental sequence, pushing the kids out early? Does it act on social behavior, provoking cooperation and child-caring? Or does it act everywhere all at once-on bodies, on development, and on social behavior?
"Everywhere at once," Arby said.
"I think so," Malcolm said. "But there may also be parts of this story that happen automatically, the result of self-organization. For example, infants of all species have a characteristic appearance. Big eyes, big heads, small faces, uncoordinated movements. That's true of kids and puppies and baby birds. And it seems to provoke adults off all species to act tenderly toward them. In a sense, you might say infant appearance seem to self-organize adult behavior. And in our case, a good thing, too. ..Self-organizing principles can act for better or worse. Just as self-organization can coordinate change, it can also lead a population into decline, and cause it to lose its edge. On this island, my hope is we'll see self-organizing adaptations in the behavior of real dinosaurs-and it'll tell us why they became extinct."
♥ "The basic situation is simple enough." He shifted in his seat. "Dinosaurs arose in the Triassic, about two hundred and twenty-eight million years ago. They proliferated throughout the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods that followed. They were the dominant life form on this planet for about a hundred and fifty million years-which is a very long time."
"Considering we've been here for only three million," Eddie said.
"Let's not put on airs," Malcolm said. "Some puny apes have been here for three million years. We haven't. Recognizable human beings have only been on this planet for thirty-five thousand years," he said. "That's how long it's been since our ancestors painted caves in France and Spain, drawing pictures of game to invoke success in the hunt. Thirty-five thousand years. In the history of the earth, that's nothing at all. We've just arrived. ..And of course, even thirty-five thousand years ago, we were already making species extinct. Cavemen killed so much game that animals became extinct on several continents. There used to be lions and tigers in Europe. There used to be giraffes and rhinos in Los Angeles. Hell, ten thousand years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction. This is nothing new, this human tendency-"
"Ian."
"Well, it's a fact, although your modern airheads think it's all so brand-new-"
"Ian. You were talking about dinosaurs."
"Right. Dinosaurs. Anyway, during a hundred and fifty million years on this planet, dinosaurs were so successful that by the Cretaceous there were twenty-one major groups of them. A few groups, like the camarasaurs and fabrosaurs, had died out. But the overwhelming majority of dinosaur groups were still active through the Cretaceous. And then, suddenly, about sixty-five million years ago, every single group became extinct. And only the birds remained."
♥ Maiasaurs had been named by paleontologist Jack Horner. Before Horner, scientists assumed that dinosaurs abandoned their eggs, as most replies did. Those assumptions fitted the old picture of dinosaurs as cold-blooded, reptilian creatures. Like reptiles, they were thought to be solitary; murals on museum walls rarely showed more than one example from each species-a brontosaurus here, a stegosaurus or a triceratops there, wading through the swamps. But Horner's excavations in the badlands of Montana provided clear, unambiguous evidence that at least one species of hadrousaurs has engaged in complex nesting and parenting behavior. Horner incorporated that behavior in the name he gave these creatures: maiasaur meant "good-mother lizard."
♥ "What did you mean, girls aren't good at mathematics?"
"Well, that's what everybody says."
"Everybody like who?"
"My teachers."
Sarah sighed. "Great," she said, shaking her head. "Your teachers..."
"And the other kids call me a brainer. Stuff like that. You know."
..Sarah just smiled cheerfully. "Well, if they say that, you must be pretty good at math, huh?"
"I guess."
She smiled. "That's wonderful, Kelly."
"But the thing is, boys don't like girls who are too smart."
Sarah's eyebrows went up. "Is that so?"
"Well, that's what everybody says..."
"Like who?"
"Like my mom."
"Uh-huh. And she provably knows what she's talking about. ..Well, in my experience, some men like smart women, and some don't. It's like everything else in the world." She stood up. "You know about George Schaller?"
"Sure. He studied pandas."
"Right. Pandas, and before that, snow leopards and lions and gorillas. He's the most important animal researcher in the twentieth century-and you know how he works? ..Before he goes into the field, George reads everything that's ever been written about the animal he's going to study. Popular books, newspaper accounts, scientific papers, everything. Then he goes out and observes the animal for himself. And you know what he usually finds? ..That nearly everything that's been written or said is wrong. Like the gorilla. George studied mountain gorillas ten years before Dian Fossey ever thought of it. And he found that what was believed about gorillas was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or just plain fantasy-like the idea that you couldn't take women on gorilla expeditions, because the gorillas would rape them. Wrong. Everything... just... wrong. ..So, Kelly, even at your young age, there's something you might as well learn now. All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong. ..It's a fact of life," Sara said. "Human beings are just stuffed full of misinformation. So it's hard to know who to believe."
♥ "Roxton," Levine said, "believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn't see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defense of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger, and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could."
Over the radio, Levine snorted with disgust. "It's just kike the other idiotic theory put forth by Grant a few years back that a tyrannosaur could be confused by a driving rainstorm, because it was not adapted to wet climates. That's equally absurd. The Cretaceous wasn't particularly dry. And in any case, tyrannosaurs are North American animals-they've only been found in the U.S. or Canada. Tyrannosaurus rex lived on the shores of the great inland sea, east of the Rocky Mountains. There are lots of thunderstorms on mountain slopes. I'm quite sure tyrannosaurs saw plenty of rain, and they evolved to deal with it."
"So is there any reason why a tyrannosaur might not attack somebody?" Malcolm said.
"Yes, of course. The most obvious one," Levine said. .."If it wasn't hungry."
♥ Sarah Harding smelled the familiar sour odor of rotting flesh and excrement that always marked a carnivore nesting site.
♥ "That's the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can't study anything without changing it."
Since Galileo, scientists had adopted the view that they were objective observers of the natural world. That was implicit in every aspect of their behavior, even the way they wrote scientific papers, saying things like "It was observed..." As if nobody had observed it. For three hundred years, that impersonal quality was the hallmark of science. Science was objective, and the observer had no influence on the results he or she described.
This objectivity made science different from the humanities, or from religion-fields where the observer's point of view was integral, where the observer was inextricably mixed up in the results observed.
But in the twentieth century, that difference had vanished. Scientific objectivity was gone, even at the most fundamental levels. Physicists now knew you couldn't even measure a single subatomic particle without affecting it totally. If you stuck your instruments in to measure a particle's position, you changed its velocity. If you measured its velocity, you changed its position. That basic truth became the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed. In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.
♥ Gambler's Run was a notorious and much-debated statistical phenomenon that had major consequences both for evolution, and for everyday life. "Let's say you're a gambler," he said. "And you're playing a coin-toss game. Every time the coin comes up heads, you win a dollar. Every time it comes up tails, you lose a dollar. ..What happens over time?"
Harding shrugged. "The chances of getting either heads or tails is even. So maybe you win, maybe you lose. But in the end, you'll come out at zero."
"Unfortunately, you don't," Malcolm said. "If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose-the gambler is always ruined. That's why casinos stay in business. But the question is, what happens over time? What happens in the period before the gambler is finally ruined? ..If you chart the gambler's fortunes over time, what you find is the gambler wins for a period, or loses for a period. In other words, everything in the world goes in streaks. It's a real phenomenon, and you see it everywhere: in weather, in river flooding, in baseball, in heart rhythms, in stock markets. Once things go bad, they tend to stay bad. Like the old folk saying that bad things come in threes. Complexity theory tells us the folk wisdom is right. Bad things cluster. Things go to hell together. That's the real world."
♥ "In general, predator studies-whether tigers in India, or lions in Africa-all seem to show that you can support one predator for every two hundred prey animals. That means to support twenty-five predators here, you need at least five thousand prey on this island."
♥ "Because if I was growing baby dinosaurs, I'd wonder. What do they eat? Milk, I suppose, but-"
"Milk, yes," Malcolm said, reading the screens. "First six weeks, goat's milk."
"That's the logical choice," she said. "Goat's milk is what they always use in zoos, because it's so hypoallergenic."
♥ He shook his head, defeated. She had seen that gesture before in her life, that futile shake, giving up. She hated to see it. Harding never gave up. Not ever.
♥ "I'm just sad that the experiment is over. And it was such a good experiment, too. So elegant. So unique. Darwin never knew."
"..What didn't Darwin know, Ian?"
"That life is a complex system," he said, "and everything that goes along with that. Fitness landscapes. Adaptive walks. Boolean nets. Self-organizing behavior. ..That life is so unbelievably complex," Malcolm said. "Nobody realizes it. I mean, a single fertilized egg has a hundred thousand genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell into a complete living creature. That one cell starts to divide, but the subsequent cells are different. They specialize. Some are nerve. Some are gut. Some are limb. Each set of cells begins to follow its own program, developing, interacting. Eventually there are two hundred and fifty different kinds of cells, all developing together, at exactly the right time. Just when the organism needs a circulatory system, the heart starts pumping. Just when hormones are needed, the adrenals start to make them. Week after week, this unimaginably complex development proceeds perfectly-perfect. It's incredible. No human activity comes close.
"I mean, you ever built a house? A house is simple in comparison. But even so, workmen build that stairs wrong, they put the sink in backward, the tile man doesn't show up when he's supposed to. All kinds of things go wrong. And yet the fly that lands on the workman's lunch is perfect. ..But the point," Malcolm said, "is that this intricate developmental process in the cell is something we can barely describe, let alone understand. Do you realize the limits of our understanding? Mathematically, we can describe two things interacting, like two planets in space. Three things interacting-three planets in space-well, that becomes a problem. Four or five things interacting, we can't really do it. And inside the cell, there's one hundred thousands things interacting. You have to throw up your hands. It's so complex-how is it even possible that life ever happens at all? Some people think the answer is that living forms organize themselves. Life creates its own order, the way crystallization creates order. Some people think life crystallizes intro being, and that's how the complexity is managed.
"Because, if you didn't know any physical chemistry, you could look at a crystal and ask all the same questions. You'd see those beautiful spars, those perfect geometric facets, and you could ask, What's controlling this process? How does the crystal end up so perfectly formed-and looking so much like other crystals? But it turns out a crystal is just the way molecular forces arrange themselves in solid form. No one controls it. It happens on its own. To ask a lot of questions about a crystal means you don't understand the fundamental nature of the processes that led to its creation.
"So maybe living forms are a kind of crystallization. Maybe life just happens. And maybe, like crystals, there's a characteristic order to living things that is generated by their interacting elements. Okay. Well, one of the things that crystals teach us is that order can arise very fast. One minute you have a liquid, with all the molecules moving randomly. The next minute, a crystal forms, and all the molecules are locked in order. ..Now. Think of the interaction of life forms on the planet to make an ecosystem. That's even more complex than a single animal. All the arrangements are very complicated. Like the yucca plant.
.."The yucca plant depends on a particular moth which gathers pollen into a ball, and carries the ball to a different plant-not a different flower on the same plant-where it rubs the ball on the plant, fertilizing it. Only then does the moth lay its eggs. The yucca plant can't survive without the moth. The moth can't survive without the plant. Complex interactions like that make you think maybe behavior is a kind of crystallization, too. ..I'm talking about all the order in the natural world," Malcolm said. "And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Change can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it's a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. 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 behavior. We innovate new behavior 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 a less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. 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 bullion 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.
.."And believe me, it'll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape. you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn't require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It's just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs-being complex creatures-might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction. ..It just takes a few," Malcolm said. "Some dinosaur roots in the swamps around the inland sea, changes the water circulation, and destroys the plant ecology that twenty other species depend on. Bang! They're gone. That causes still more dislocations. A predator dies off, and its prey grow unchecked. The ecosystem becomes unbalanced. More things go wrong. More species die. And suddenly it's over. It could have happened that way."
♥ In darkness, Malcolm sank back into morphine dreams. Images floated in front of his eyes: fitness landscapes, the multi-colored computer images now employed to think about evolution. In this mathematical world of peaks and valleys, populations of organisms were seen to climb the fitness peaks, or slide down into the valleys of nonadaptation. Stu Kauffman and his coworkers had shown that advanced organisms had complex internal constraints which made them more likely to fall off the fitness optima, and descend into the valleys. Yet, at the same time complex creatures were themselves selected by evolution. Because complex creatures were able to adapt on their own. With tools, with learning, with cooperation.
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. Chimpanzees taught their young to collect termites with a stick. Such actions implied at least the rudiments of a culture, a structured social life. But animals raised in isolation, without parents, without guidance, were not fully functional. Zoo animals frequently would not care for their offspring, because they had never seen it done. They would ignore their infants, or roll over and crush them, or simply become annoyed with them and kill them.
The velociraptors were among the most intelligent dinosaurs, and the most ferocious. Both traits demanded behavioral control. Millions of years ago, in the now-vanished Cretaceous world, their behavior would have been socially determined, passed on from older to younger animals. Genes controlled the capacity to make such patterns, but not the patterns themselves. Adaptive behavior was a kind of morality; it as behavior that had evolved over many generations because it was found to succeed-behavior that allowed members of the species to cooperate, to live together, to hunt, to raise young.
But on this island, the velociraptors had been re-created in it genetics laboratory. Although their physical bodies were genetically determined, their behavior was not. These newly created raptors came into the world with no older animals to guide them, to show the proper raptor behavior. They were on their own, and that was just how they behaved-in a society without structure, without rules, without cooperation. They lived in an uncontrolled, every-creature-for-himself world where the meanest and the nastiest survived, and all the others died.
♥ "That's very good," Harding said. "I think these people owe you their lives."
"Not really," Kelly said, with a little shrug.
Sarah shot her a look. "All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself."
♥ "Richard," she said. "Ian and I checked the records. They made a mistake on that island, many years ago. Back when the lab was still in production."
"What mistake?"
"They were manufacturing infant dinosaurs, and they didn't know what to feed them. For a while they gave them goat's milk, which was fine. It's very hypoallergenic. But as the carnivores grew, they fed them a special animal-protein extract. And the extract was made from ground-up sheep. ..In a zoo, they never use sheep extract," she said. "Because of the danger of infection."
"Infection," Levine repeated, in a low voice. "What kind of infection?"
.."Prions," Harding said, "are the simplest disease-causing entities known, even simpler than viruses. They're just protein fragments. They're so simple, they can't even invade a body-they have to be passively ingested. But once eaten, they cause disease: scrapie, in sheep; mad-cow disease; and kuru, a brain disease in human beings. And the dinosaurs developed a prion-disease called DX, from a bad batch of sheep protein extract. The lab battled it for years, trying to get rid of it."
♥ "But the point," she said, "is that I doubt this island will be able to tell you very much about extinction."
Malcolm stared back at the dark cliffs for a moment, and then began to speak. "Maybe that's the way it should be," he said. "Because extinction has always been a great mystery. It's happened five major times on this planet, and not always because of an asteroid. Everyone's interested in the Cretaceous die-out that killed the dinosaurs, but there were die-outs at the end of the Jurassic and the Triassic as well. They were severe, but they were nothing compared to the Permian extinction, which killed ninety percent of all life on the planet, on the seas and on the land. No one knows why that catastrophe happened. But I wonder if we are the cause of the next one."
"How is that?" Kelly said.
"Human beings are so destructive," Malcolm said. "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."
Kelly shook her head. She turned away from Malcolm and moved up the boat, to sit alongside Thorne.
"Are you listening to all that?" Thorne said. "I wouldn't take any of it too seriously. It's just theories. Human beings can't help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. And they change. When America was a new country, people believed in something called phlogiston. You know what that is? No? Well, it doesn't matter, because it wasn't real anyways. They also believed that four humors controlled behavior. And they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Now we believe the earth is four billion years old, and we believe in protons and electrons, and we think human behavior is controlled by things like ego and self-esteem. We think those beliefs are more scientific and better."
"Aren't they?"
Thorne shrugged. "They're still just fantasies. They're not real. Have yuou ever seen a self-esteem? Can you bring me one on a plane? How about a photon? Can you bring me one of those?"
Kelly shook her head. "No, but..."
"And you never will, because those things don't exist. No matter how seriously people take them," Thorne said. "A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies." Thorne shook his head. "And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. You see all of us together? That's real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else."