The Design Flaws of Jurassic Park

Question for Discussion: What are some of the major
flaws in the design of Jurassic Park?

Readings: Jurassic Park, pp. 83-177;
Saunders, "The Precautionary Principle is
Science-Based" ; Carman, "U.S. leaders flunking
Disasters 101"

Video: Nerve Gas Weapons Arsenal Storage (parts 1 & 2);
Soviet Scientists on Bioweapons Program;

Response Paper: Based on the reading, class discussion, and the web notes,
what do you think are 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

The Precautionary Principle (in-class)
The Precautionary Principle is Science-based
(in-class)
See this website for the application of the
Precautionary Principle to GMOs, Climate
Change, and BGH.
World Scientists Statement on the Release
of GMOs (in-class)

Chaos Theory and Complexity

Complexity, Complex Systems, and Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory (in-class)
What is Chaos
James Gleick on Chaos Theory (in-class)

The Science of Complexity

Chemical Weapons in the U.S.

(See CU National Hazards Center ) (in-class)
Chemical Weapons: United States (in-class)
Nerve Gas Weapons Problems (in-class)
Possible Leak Detected at Chemical
Weapons Facility
Chemical Weapons Elimination (in-class)
GAO: Report on Chemical Weapons Disposal
Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility
(in-class)

Biological Weapons in the former
Soviet Union

Red Lies: Bioweapons in the Soviet Union (in-class)
Nuclear Blindness
Interview with Soviet scientist Ken Alibeck (in-class)
Efforts to reduce Soviet Bioweapon threat

Three Questions to Consider when Designing
a system as complex as Jurassic Park
Understanding the Precautionary Principle
Climate Change and the Precautionary
Principle
GMOs and the Precautionary Principle
Malcolm Explains Chaos Theory
Climate Change Brings Risks of More Extinction
Chemical Weapons in the U.S.
Nerve Gas Weapons Problems
Biological Weapons in the
former U.S.S.R
What are the Major Design Flaws
in the Design of Jurassic Park

Three questions to consider when designing a system as complex as
Jurassic Park:

1. What do we know about the environment and its complex systems?

2. Given that knowledge, how do we design technology to control and profit from that environment?

3. Given our knowledge, technology, and science, how can we be sure our use and development of the environment is safe--that it won't hurt us in the present or in the future?

The Precautionary Principle (The Wingspread Statement):

"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 precautionary principle is simply a statement that we should not go ahead with a new technology, or persist with an old one, unless we are convinced it is safe. This sounds such an obviously sensible idea that we might expect it to be accepted by almost everyone and without question. Yet many objections have been raised against it."
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The Precautionary Principle defined :

" While we realize that human activities may involve hazards, people must proceed more carefully than has been the case in recent history. Corporations, government entities, organizations, communities, scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to all human endeavors.

"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 principle of precautionary action
has 4 parts:

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.")
The burden of proof of harmlessness of a new technology, process, activity, or chemical lies with the proponents, not with the general public.
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.
Decisions applying the precautionary principle must be "open, informed, and democratic" and "must include affected parties."

See this website for the application of the Precautionary Principle to GMOs, Climate Change, and BGH.

Saunders: The Precautionary Principle
is Science-Based

"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."

This immediately deals with two of the common objections raised. First, the principle does not support unscientific prejudice. To say that the potential hazards do not have to be fully established scientifically makes it clear that the principle is about cases where there is scientific evidence. The European Commission states this explicitly in its Communication on the Precautionary Principle [3], writing that it applies "where preliminary objective scientific evaluation indicates that there are reasonable grounds for concern …"

"Now it is true that there is no known example of humans being affected by BST. But it does not follow that there is no danger. First of all, many harmful effects take a long time to become obvious. The harmful effects of tobacco, for example, became evident only after many years of smoking. Besides, even if BST is harmful to humans, it will be very difficult to establish this because there is no control group. The original work on lung cancer was possible only because there were people who smoked and others who did not, and the researchers knew which were which. That is not possible with something that everyone, apart from vegetarians, consumes."

Precautionary Principle and Climate-Change:

"Climate change may not appear to come under the scope of the precautionary principle because hardly anyone doubts that our planet is getting warmer, and that the chief cause of this is the burning of fossil fuels. The global climate will change. Areas that are now fertile will become dry. The polar ice caps will melt, the sea level will rise and flood a great deal of land that is now inhabited. Northern Europe may become much colder if the influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic stops the Gulf Stream."

"That much is well established. There is, however, a further possibility. The Earth’s climate is a large, complex non-linear dynamical system, and it is well known that when such systems are perturbed, they can undergo changes that are big, abrupt or catastrophic, and, at least in the short term, irreversible [7].

We know such changes have occurred in the past on the Earth. We also know that we are at present perturbing the climate by causing a large increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This has already led to a significant warming and there seems hardly any doubt that the average global temperature will rise still further, with estimates ranging from 1.5C to 6C over the next century. What we do not know is whether we are about to trigger a much bigger, catastrophic increase.

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. "

GMOs and the Precautionary Principle

"We are often told that GM foods must be safe because Americans have been eating them for years. But if there have been harmful effects, how would we know? As in the case of BST, there is no control group. If all Americans are eating GM foods, none but the most immediate harmful effects are likely to be recognised. "

There is evidence strongly suggesting that GMOs are hazardous. First, transgenic DNA is not, as is so often claimed, "just the same as natural breeding." It is different. For example, when researchers created mutants for herbicide tolerance both by genetic engineering and by conventional mutagenesis, they found that the transgenes were up to 30 times more likely to spread to wild-type plants [10]. The more rapid spreading of transgenes is a potential hazard in itself, but what is crucial here is the demonstration that the transgene was different. Genetic engineering is not merely reproducing what happens in nature, and it is creating new combinations of genes that have never existed.

Transgenic DNA can also be transferred (horizontally) to unrelated species, to bacteria in the soil or in the gut and to cells of all animals including humans [11]. When mice were fed viral or transgenic DNA, not only was the DNA not completely degraded in the gut (as we used to be assured it would be), it passed through the wall of the intestine into the blood stream and even became incorporated in the genome of some mouse cells [12]. When fed to pregnant mice, the foreign DNA was found in some cells of the foetuses and newborn, showing it had gone through the placenta [13].

"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."

"The precautionary principle is neither so weak that it is empty nor so strong that it would halt all progress in technology. Far from being unscientific, it is based on science and it generally requires that more good science, not less, be undertaken so that sweeping assurances of safety can be replaced by solid evidence. The principle does, however, place more of the responsibility for safety on those who stand to profit if the technology goes ahead, rather than on those who will have to bear the costs if things go wrong.

Malcolm Explains Chaos Theory

"The behavior of this big complicated system (such as the weather) always defied understanding. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn't predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitvely dependent on initial conditions. .....That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplied." (p. 74)

"What we call 'nature' is in fact a complex system of far greater subtlety that we are willing to accept. We make a simplified image of nautre and then we botch it up. I'm no environmentalist, but you have to understand what you don't understand. How many times must the point be made? How many times must we see the evidence."(91)

"You're going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island. Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won't go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is....Broadly speaking, the ability of the park to control the spread of life-forms. Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way." (159)

"It's the only way to look at things. At least the only way that is true to reality.... [E]vents are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly, and without warning.... But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabrice of existence....Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way....That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true." (p. 170)

Chaos Theory: Small changes in complex systems can lead to large, unpredictable results.

Chaotic systems are unstable since they tend not to resist any outside disturbances but instead react in significant ways..... Small changes in initial conditions can be amplified to create large, unpredictable changes in complex systems. Thus, complex dynamic systems, such as the weather, are inherently unpredictable. Thus, Chaos theory is qualitative in that it seeks to know the general character of a system's long-term behavior, rather than seeking numerical predictions about a future state. What characteristics will all solutions of a system exhibit? How does this system change from exhibiting one behavior to another?

"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."

James Gleick on Chaos Theory

"A very popular saying that is related to chaos theory is "a butterly that flaps its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world". The saying is often used in many slightly different ways, but the meaning is the same: a very small change in a complex system can have huge consequences. Although this saying sounds exagerated. It is literally true. The weather is "sensitively dependant on initial conditions".
The Butterfly effect

"Chaos theory posits that complex systems such as the weather, or the stock market, are difficult to predict due to their sensitivity to small changes. The cumulative effect of these small changes, and their timing, makes it very difficult or impossible to predict future conditions with a high degree of certainty. "

Instability in Chaotic Systems: "But until the time of Poincaré, the assumption was that if you could shrink the uncertainty in the initial conditions then any imprecision in the prediction would shrink in the same way. In reality, a tiny imprecision in the initial conditions will grow at an enormous rate. Two nearly indistinguishable sets of initial conditions for the same system will result in two final situations that differ greatly from each other. This extreme sensitivity to initial conditions is called chaos. Equilibrium is very rare, and the more complex a system is, there are more disturbances that can threaten stability, but conditions must be right to have an upheaval."

Nerve Gas Weapons Storage Problems: CBS and NBC reports:

What are the major flaws in Nerve Gas Weapons Storage?

(See CU National Hazards Center )

1. They built one of the arsenals that stores
thousands of nerve gas shells on an earthquake fault.

2. The chemicals inside the shells are becoming
unstable due to age.

3. The shells are leaking and threaten to cause a chain
reaction that will cause other shells to ignite.

4. The incinerator plant designed to burn the shells and chemicals within them has 2,000 safety flaws. The company fired the safety engineer who charged that it was unsafe.

5. We can't be sure that while trying to burn the shells, the kiln oven and the shells themselves won't explode.

6. We don't know whether the smoke and soot from burning the shells is safe to release into the atmosphere.

7. There isn't enough warning systems to protect nearby towns if a major accident occurs.

8. The surrounding towns do not have a major evacuation plan in case the nerve gas arsenal explodes.

9. The people in the nearby town don't have gas masks to protect them from an being exposed to nerve gas if there was an explosion.

10. The nerve gas arsenal is only monitored 40 hours a week, leaving 120 hours a week when it is not monitored.

11. When the nerve gas shells were made we thought we understood how to make them, use them in war, how to store them, and how to dispose of them. We clearly don't.

12. Instead of leaving the nerve gas arsenal dispersed throughout the country, thousands of shells have been concentrated in four main storage sites. This concentration could lead to a mass explosion that could kill tens of thousands of people.

13. The people living nearby these arsenals were not
properly informed of the dangers presented to them by nerve gas weapons storage.

These flaws in the nerve gas weapons storage arsenal are, in many ways, similar to the flaws in the design of Jurassic Park. The engineers and designers thought they understood how to build, control, and store dangerous chemicals, but have now discovered that they have limited knowledge about how the chemicals in the shells age, how to use them, how to store them, and how to dispose of them. This limited knowledge now poses serious risks to human populations.

Jurassic Park, pp. 83-177

What are the major flaws in the design
of Jurassic Park?

(See CU National Hazards Center )

1. They had limited knowledge about the nature of dinosaurs and the environment they need to live in.

2. They assumed that the dinosaurs couldn't reproduce because they were all females.

3. They assumed that the dinosaurs could only survive by being fed by the park-keepers because the dinosaurs need lysine in their foods to survive.

4. They assumed that the dinosaurs would act like zoo animals, and be passive, docile, and easily controllable.

5. They assumed that dinosaurs would be slow and awkward, and would be unintelligent and totally dependent on the park-keepers to survive.

6. They assumed that the dinosaurs couldn't escape out of their enclosures, and then couldn't get off the island and travel to the mainland.

7. They assumed that a centralized computer system, with very little human imput and support, could control and run the entire park.

8. They didn't understand the nature of the prehistoric plants and vegetation that they are growing in the park.

9. They assumed that they could control the dinosaurs and the park environment.

10. They assumed they understood the DNA fragments they inserted into the incomplete dinosaur DNA strands. But these fragments gave the dinosaurs properties that the engineers couldn't predict.

11. They assumed that the dinosaurs, as all living organisms will naturally do, wouldn't try to test, learn from, and adapt to their changing park environment.

12. They didn't realize that some of the predator dinosaurs were intelligent and hunted in packs, and that these dinosaurs if given the chance would hunt humans.

13. They assumed that they could prevent outside governments, corporations, and other organizations from learning about and interfering with the running of Jurassic Park.

14. They designed the security system to work only when the main power grid is on. With backup generator power, the security system doesn't work. What happens if the power goes out?

15. They wanted to create "real dinosaurs," which would be a lot harder to control than more domesticated dinosaurs. It would be like choosing a pack of wolves over a group of domesticated dogs because wolves are the real dog! Of course, wolves will not long allow themselves to be controlled by humans

16. They didn't design their security systems and weapons to take into account that many of the dinosaurs were fast and agile.

17. They didn't consider that the dinosaurs would try to escape the controls placed upon their movements and behavior by the park. They didn't understand that every attempt by humans to control the dinosaurs would be met by efforts by the dinosaurs to escape and overcome that control.

18. The security cameras do not cover the entire island. So the dinosaurs could be escaping the control and the watchful eye of the park staff.

19. They didn't program their computers to count the actual number of dinosaurs in the park, but only count for the expected number of dinosaurs that had been created and placed in the park by the park staff.

20. They made the computer systems too dependent on a small number of programmers and operators. What would happen if these operators died or decided to cause trouble for the park?

21. They didn't understand the nocturnal nature of many of these dinosaurs. The fact that they came out at night, with limited light for the security cameras to see and limited park personnel to observe them, could cause major problems for the park.

22. They put too much faith in the park's personnel to do their jobs and always work to keep the park under control.

Despite this long list of flaws in the park's design, engineers and corporate heads like Hammond would say they are just minor problems that can easily and quickly be taken care of. They would argue that all we need is more knowledge, more understanding, more information, and more experience and we can control Jurassic park just like a zoo. But the larger question is what are the risks involved during this period of learning to run the park? Can we ever be sure that we have the complete knowledge and understanding we need to prevent a terrible accident? Who should decide how to weigh the risks involved in developing complex technology, in manipulating the environment, and in controlling nature? These are all very important questions that Hammond and Ingen have ignored to their great peril.