The Causes of the Breakdown of Jurassic Park

Question for Discussion: What are the major causes
of the breakdown of Jurassic Park? Could they have
been predicted and avoided?

Readings: Jurassic Park, pp. 181-268

Video: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring;
Jurassic Park: Debate at lunch on the Dinosaur
Park Concept

Response Paper: Based on the reading, class discussion, and the web notes, what do you thinkare the five major design flaws in Jurassic Park? Are some flaws more important than others? (1-2 paper paper due Monday, Sept. 28).

The Precautionary Principle

Wingspread Statement on the
Precautionary Principle (in-class)
The Precautionary Principle is Science-based
Rio Declaration of the Precautionary Approach (1992) (in-class)
World Scientists Statement on the Release
of GMOs (in-class)
World Scientists' conclusions on the danger
of releasing GMOs
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety text (2000)
(in-class)

Chaos Theory and Complexity

Complexity, Complex Systems, and Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory
What is Chaos
Complexity and Chaos Theory
Introduction to Chaos and Non-linear Science
James Gleick on Chaos Theory

Causes of the Jurassic Park Breakdown

What is the "Malcom Effect" and
how has it changed Jurassic Park? (in-class)
Multiple Causes of the Breakdown in Jurassic Park
(in-class)
The larger cause of the Breakdown in Jurassic Park
(in-class)

The Study of Engineering Failures

Examples of Engineering Failures

Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos

The Edge of Chaos is more than just a balance point. It is a point of emergence. When the Edge of Chaos is reached, whole new behaviours can emerge that could not have been perviously predicted. There is a chemical example of the Edge of Chaos system called the Belousov - Zhabotinsky reaction where two chemicals are mixed and at the critical point of the Edge of Chaos, the whole mixture changes rhythmically from one colour to another. That change could not have been predicted just by looking at the original chemicals. Many other complex systems, such as living systems exhibit the quality of emergence. Previously unpredictable levels of complexity suddenly come together that can dramatically improve its ability to operate effectively in its environment.

The Edge of Chaos. also, is found very often in nature; throughout ecosystems, in human dynamics, and in many other places in the world about us. IN an ecosystem there are usually a great number of speciies vying for a share of the resources and the ability to survive into the next generation... Organisms that exist at the Edge of Chaos or near the Edge of Chaos are likely to have an advantage over other creatures with whom they compete which do not extend themselves and take the same level of risk. Being at the Edge of Chaos may be favoured by natural selection, thus driving life forms to becoming increasingly efficent at surviving in their environment.

The Edge of Chaos is also evident in the human world in places like the stock market, organisations, etc.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether natural systems automatically move towards the Edge of Chaos because of the assumption that is the most efficient place to be. While it is an appealing idea with a logic to it, in practice it has been hard to show. It is likely that in real life staying at the Edge of Chaos is just too stressful or risky for a living organism, and that instead, organisms move to the Edge of Chaos for short periods and receive a boost, but are not able to maintain that state, so then drop back until they have integrated the changes before once again approaching the Edge of Chaos.

What is the Malcolm Effect

"Chaos theory treats the behavior of a whole system like a drop of water moving on a complicated propeller surface. The drop may spiral down, or slip outward toward the edge. It may do many different things, depending. But it will always move along the surface of the propeller....Malcolm's models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. [This is also known as the "edge of chaos." Chris Lewis] He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. That it had inherent instability." (246)

"Living systems are not like mechanical systems. Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they're not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse." (247)

["The assumption Malcolm makes is that after a "Malcolm Effect" a system will once again achieve a new balancing point, or equilibrium, and with new perturbations to the system will once again move to the edge of chaos. Thus systems move from equilibrium to the edge of chaos and then move to a new equilibrium point. However, chaos theory says that these equilibrium points are never stable. Complex systems are always moving toward the edge of chaos and towards new equilibrium points. Change and transformation are an inherent part of complex living systems. The breakdown of Jurassic Park is a great example of this movement toward the edge of chaos and then towards a new equilibrium point." Chris Lewis, Ph.D.]

The Precautionary Principle:

"Therefore, it is necessary to implement the Precautionary Principle: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

"The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action." [End of statement.]

Thus, as formulated here, the principle of precautionary action has 4 parts:

1. People have a duty to take anticipatory action to prevent harm. (As one participant at the Wingspread meeting summarized the essence of the precautionary principle, "If you have a reasonable suspicion that something bad might be going to happen, you have an obligation to try to stop it.")

2. The burden of proof of harmlessness of a new technology, process, activity, or chemical lies with the proponents, not with the general public.

3. Before using a new technology, process, or chemical, or starting a new activity, people have an obligation to examine "a full range of alternatives" including the alternative of doing nothing.

4. Decisions applying the precautionary principle must be "open, informed, and democratic" and "must include affected parties."

RIO Declaration on the Precautionary Approach

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

80. Principle 15 codified for the first time at the global level the precautionary approach, which indicates that lack of scientific certainty is no reason to postpone action to avoid potentially serious or irreversible harm to the environment. Central to principle 15 is the element of anticipation, reflecting a requirement that effective environmental measures need to be based upon actions which take a long-term approach and which might anticipate changes on the basis of scientific knowledge.

Examples of the Precautionary Principle Applied:

1. Climate Change. The precautionary principle tells us that in balancing the damage that may result from global warming against the cost of keeping it under control (it is already too late to counter the effects of our actions in the last century), we should take into account the possibility that the increase in temperature may be considerably greater and more rapid than has been estimated, and if so, it will probably be very difficult to bring the temperature down again even by a drastic reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases.

2. GMOs. Genetic modification may offer the opportunity for improving crops at some future time. The precautionary principle does not rule this out, nor does it exclude properly contained research to develop new varieties. It does, however, require that we should not press ahead with commercial crops until we have carried out the research necessary to establish that the technology we are using is safe.

3.BST in Milk. In 1997, the European Union banned the import of products from cattle that have been treated with bovine somatotropin (BST), a hormone that, when given to cattle, increases milk yields by about 10%. The USA immediately appealed to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), claiming that the issue was not really one of safety at all. They argued that there was no known example of humans being affected by BST, and that the EU’s action was merely a device to close their markets to imports from the USA.

In its original decision, the WTO gave the EU a year to provide evidence of harm to humans. If they could not do this, the ban would have to be lifted. This is a clear example of how the precautionary principle can make a real difference, because had the principle been invoked, the WTO would have been very unlikely to make such a ruling. In fact, the WTO was applying what we might call the anti-precautionary principle: it is for society to show that something is dangerous, instead of requiring the perpetrator to show it is safe.

Open Letter from World Scientists to All Governments Concerning Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) 2000

1. The scientists are extremely concerned about the hazards of GMOs to biodiversity, food safety, human and animal health, and demand a moratorium on environmental releases in accordance with the precautionary principle.

2. They are opposed to GMO crops that will intensify corporate monopoly, exacerbate inequality and prevent the essential shift to sustainable agriculture that can provide food security and health around the world.

3. They call for a ban on patents of life-forms and living processes which threaten food security, sanction biopiracy of indigenous knowledge and genetic resources, and violate basic human rights and dignity.

4. They want more support on research and development of non-corporate, sustainable agriculture that can benefit family farmers all over the world.

Conclusion and Warning about GMOs

We, the undersigned scientists, call for the immediate suspension of all environmental releases of GMO crops and products, both commercially and in open field trials, for at least 5 years; for patents on living processes, organisms, seeds, cell lines and genes to be revoked and banned; and for a comprehensive public enquiry into the future of agriculture and food security for all.

The hazards of GMOs to biodiversity and human and animal health are now acknowledged by sources within the UK and US Governments. Particularly serious consequences are associated with the potential for horizontal gene transfer. These include the spread of antibiotic resistance marker genes that would render infectious diseases untreatable, the generation of new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases, and harmful mutations which may lead to cancer.

James Gleick on the Implications of Chaos Theory

Major Books on Chaos and Complexity Theory

"Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the fluctuations of the wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side -- these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities."

-- Jame Gleick in Chaos: Making A New Science

"Now that science is looking, chaos seems to be everywhere. A rising column of cigarette smoke breaks into wild swirls. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind. A dripping faucet goes from a steady pattern to a random one. Chaos appears in the behavior of the weather, the behavior of an airplane in flight, the behavior of cars clustering on an expressway, the behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes. No matter what the medium, the behavior obeys the same newly discovered laws. That realization has begun to change the way business executives make decisions about insurance, the way astronomers look at the solar system, the way political theorists talk about the stresses leading to armed conflict."

-- Jame Gleick in Chaos: Making A New Science

Chaos breaks across the lines that separate scientific disciplines. Because it is a science of the global nature of systems, it has brought together thinkers from fields that had been widely separated. Chaos poses problems that defy accepted ways of working in science. It makes strong claims about the universal behavior of complexity. The first chaos theorists, the scientists who set the discipline in motion, shared certain sensibilities. They had an eye for pattern, especially pattern that appeared on different scales at the same time. They had a taste for randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden leaps. Believers in chaos--and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists--speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts: quarks,chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole. "

-- Jame Gleick in Chaos: Making A New Science

The Causes of the Breakdown of the Park

Throughout Jurassic Park, Hammond keeps re-assuring everyone that the park is under control. Even when the park breaks down, he is confident that in no time at all they will regain control of the dinosaurs and the park. Hammond refuses to accept that the park is not a zoo, but a living, evolving environment with intelligent, adaptive animals--dinosaurs. The larger question that Hammond doesn't consider is that the park has fundamentally changed as a result of the breakdown. Once the dinosaurs have got out, discovered that the fences and the security systems have weaknesses, and begin to hunt and eat humans, the park staff can't return the park back to its original state, because it has transformed and changed by this breakdown. This is what Malcolm means by a "Malcolm effect": Small changes in complex systems can create chain reactions that transform that system from one state of balance to a new state of equilibrium. These transformations, these Malcolm effect, can't be easily predicted and controlled.

But Hammond will have none of this talk about chaos theory and Malcolm effects. Like many engineers and corporations when systems break down, Hammond and others blame human error. Often engineers and designers claim that their systems were designed to work but human error and ignorance can ruin even the safest, well-designed systems. In this case, the designers of Jurassic Park would argue that Dennis Nedry is the real cause of the breakdown. If they had hired a better, more honest, and more trustworthy computer programmer, the park would not have broken down. But is this true? Can we really blame the breakdown of the park on Nedry? And if the park was really well designed shouldn't it have been able to continue to operate despite what Nedry did. The larger question engineers and designers need to answer is whether their systems are designed well if human error can cause breakdowns? Shouldn't we be calculating risk and the costs of system failure that include the real possibility of human error. If the system can't be designed to protect from human error, can we really say that it is safe from breakdown?So is Dennis Nedry the real cause of the breakdown of the park? Without his attempt to steal the dinosaurs embryos for Lewis Dodgson and Biosyn, would the park have continued to run smoothly, under the control of the park wardens? One of the larger causes of the environmental crisis is our assumption that there are only single causes, when in fact the complex interaction between human beings, industrialization, and the environment creates multiple, interdependent causes of environmental problems, such as acid rain, the growing hole in the ozone, and global warming. We can understand the complex, multiple causes of environmental problems by examining the larger, interdependent causes of the breakdown of Jurassic Park. See this website for a brief discussion of necessary and sufficient conditions.

1. The Park was already breaking down before Nedry acted. The escape of the dinosaurs to the mainland proved the park wasn't under the complete control of the park staff.

2. The tropical storm that hit the island played a role in the breakdown of the park.

3. The dinosaurs' ability to test, explore, and adapt to the changing environment on the island allowed them to quickly take advantage when the security systems went down.

4. The overdependence on a few computer programmers helped cause the breakdown in the park. After detecting problems, the staff couldn't quickly regain control because they couldn't reprogram the computer without Nedry.

5. Lewis Dodgson and Biosyn's pressing demands for the dinosaur embryos also played a role in the breakdown of the park.

6. Failure to understand the nature of the dinosaurs and the technology and systems needed to fully control them. Dinosaurs were too fast, intelligent, and independent for easy human control.

7. The lack of oversight by government regulators, scientists, and the public allowed Ingen to design the park without vital feedback that might have provided the information needed to avoid a breakdown.

8. The demand by Ingen investors to quickly build the park, open it up for visitors, and get a good return on their investment.

9. The use of amphibian (frog) DNA in the reconstruction of dinosaurs. This allowed the dinosaurs to breed and further escape the control of the park staff.

10. The failure to understand how the various species of dinosaurs would interact with each other in the park. Dinosaurs are part of complex, natural biological communities whose nature cannot be understood simply as the sum of all the animals in the environment.

11. The belief that the park staff could control, and easily regain control, over the dinosaurs and the park played a role in the park's breakdown.

12. The failure to understand that the living systems--environments--are not like mechanical systems; they are never in equilibrium. Instead living systems and complex environments are always on the edge of change and evolution. We can't easily predict when those changes will be minor or major shifts, like Malcolm effects.

13. The inability of the computer system that runs the park to be shut down and easily turned on again. It can only be turned on manually.

14. The failure of park staff to recognize the limited control they have over the park play a major role in the park's breakdown.

The larger problem that the breakdown of Jurassic Park illustrates is the tendency of governments, engineers, designers, politicians, corporations, and the general public to always assume that environmental and technological catastrophes are caused by simple, easily understood causes that once understood can easily be corrected. The cultural assumption that we have more understanding and control over complex systems and environments continually gets us into trouble. Despite past unpredicted catastrophes, we continue to take serious risk that often cause serious human and environmental disasters. Jurassic Park is a warning about the accelerating development of complex technologies, such as genetic engineering, industrial chemicals, and medical treatments, despite our limited understanding and control of complex human and natural environments. The larger danger, of course, is that when complex systems breakdown, as they often do, human health, well-being, and life is at stake.