The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

[Peelee]

Not the Lysine Contingency, there was an earlier part. One of the bugs Nedry was supposed to fix was

Oh, right. No, that's not addressed in the movie. Practically nothing about Nedry is, other than that he was unhappy with the terms and Hammond scolding him. Which is a shame, because it really made him a little sympathetic and fleshed out why he did what he did. "A little" being the key words there, he was still a huge tool, it's just Hammond was an even bigger one.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The movie probably needed another half-hour of set up for the pay offs they were expecting. And maybe they could have worked in that bit with the automated census system and how f+++ed that was.

[Darth Ultron]

I think the Jurassic Parks have a Bigger problem then the ''bizarre morality'', and it's just he Hollywood Way.

First off, the Jurassic Park movies exist for one reason and one reason only: To show Dinosaurs eating People. To put it simply: they are Classic Hollywood Monsters Movies.

And monster moves follow a formula: Introduce people, Introduce monsters, have monsters eat people....and end movie.

So, Once Upon A Time, someone saw the book Jurassic Park. They skimmed the back cover and said ''wow, wicked cool awesome! Lets make a movie about dinosaurs eating people! It will be super awesome 4ever...oh, and make us tons of money!"

So cool Hollywood writer comes in and writes a dozen or so ''dino eats person'' bits. Then they hire the other guy to make a flimsy ''sort of story plot'' to ''sort of kind of'' link all the Dino Death together to ''sort of'' make a movie.

And that is what you get: Introduce people, Introduce monsters, have monsters eat people, with some fluff in between.

And, like good modern monster movies you want lots of ''not scary'' and ''adventure like'' chase bits where the Dinos chase and ''almost'' eat people(though they won't eat all the Stars..wink wink...and there is no way ever, ever, ever they will eat a kidz).

And so you get the Jurassic Park Movies....

[Peelee]

The movie probably needed another half-hour of set up for the pay offs they were expecting. And maybe they could have worked in that bit with the automated census system and how f+++ed that was.

Seriously, the book was absolutely terrifying, again that census system made for a really awesome "holy crap" moment.

ISo, Once Upon A Time, someone saw the book Jurassic Park. They skimmed the back cover and said ''wow, wicked cool awesome! Lets make a movie about dinosaurs eating people! It will be super awesome 4ever...oh, and make us tons of money!"

Or, once upon a time Michael Crichton told Steven Spielberg that he was writing a book called Jurassic Park and they both started discussing the movie rights and how to proceed and really dude this isn't even obscure knowledge, I'm pretty sure it's in the foreword to one of the printings. Despite what you always seem to think, the world is not entirely made of 14-year-ods.

[LaZodiac]

Seriously, the book was absolutely terrifying, again that census system made for a really awesome "holy crap" moment.

I don't remember the numbers anymore but yeah that was such a good scene and I do kind of wish they made the first Jurassic Park more cerebral in how it approached the material.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The specific numbers didn't (don't?) really matter. The census system was told to look for X number of dinos, it said their were X number of dinos. Grant suggested looking for X+1, computer said there were X+1. They upped the number sought by like 100, and nearly got that.

For some years I used that as an example of how not to approach a problem. Don't assume everything is all right if an arbitrary benchmark is met. Put another way, Verify, then Trust.

[McStabbington]

The specific numbers didn't (don't?) really matter. The census system was told to look for X number of dinos, it said their were X number of dinos. Grant suggested looking for X+1, computer said there were X+1. They upped the number sought by like 100, and nearly got that.

For some years I used that as an example of how not to approach a problem. Don't assume everything is all right if an arbitrary benchmark is met. Put another way, Verify, then Trust.

True enough, though looking back on it now 20-some years later, the primary effect of that scene now is to make Ian Malcolm look like an even bigger tool, because he actually recognized the problem before things went haywire. Then he only pointed it out once Nedry had fubared the security grid, and there were both resulting fatalities, and actual people, including children, stuck out in the park. Cool reveal or no, it was a downright sociopathic thing to do not to point out the problem immediately, rather than waiting until after everything went to pot.

On the overall point, I largely agree, though I suspect it's more because the writers aren't really given a lot of time to work, and the producers involved in the series haven't really concerned themselves with overarching themes since the original. The first JP film, was, IMO, an upgrade over the books largely because Spielberg is a very humanistic director. You can quibble here and there with whether or not a paleobotonist was the best choice for an "expert evaluation", but you can't argue that the film had a pretty clear theme about not tampering with nature, a classic theme for monster films that goes all the way back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and it provided us with a fairly richly-textured cast that broadly seemed quite sympathetic. Gennaro and Nedry aside, nobody was really a villain, which fit with the movie's idea that it's not so much evil that was the problem, as simple unpredictability in systems with lots of moving parts.

The ones that follow up on that? Yeah, those tend to have a pretty grim, nigh-malevolent tone towards humans generally. They're pretty unpleasant, to be honest.

[LaZodiac]

The specific numbers didn't (don't?) really matter. The census system was told to look for X number of dinos, it said their were X number of dinos. Grant suggested looking for X+1, computer said there were X+1. They upped the number sought by like 100, and nearly got that.

For some years I used that as an example of how not to approach a problem. Don't assume everything is all right if an arbitrary benchmark is met. Put another way, Verify, then Trust.

I am aware they don't matter but I remember the baseline "this is what we want" number being way way way under the number that they were actually at, and that being a really good, smart horror moment. That's what I'm getting at.

[Rogar Demonblud]

No quibbles on that, cousin. They had that moment in the movie, just in a different place. The impact tremors in the cup of water. Best slow build up to the human-eating force of nature since the Jaws theme.

[Bavarian itP]

I couldn't even make it through the first act of the first movie before my suspension of disbelief crumbled. Even as a kid back then, I knew the modern atmosphere was too low a concentration of O2 for dinos (it was 33-35% oxygen back then, and it looks like the carbon dioxide level was half what it is now). They should have been slowly suffocating.

As for the rest, it's just another survival horror series, arguably still with zombies (creatures brought back from the dead).

And then the book drops the ball when they encounter 2-foot-dragonflies ... and Grant "explains" that insects that big existed in the Jurassic ... except that these need the high concentration of oxygen even more than the dinosaurs.

[Ramza00]

The Lysine Contigency is something that always super bothered me. So we have 20 amino acids which all animals need to live, for how the building blocks work is DNA=>Amino Acid=>Proteins where each of these being 3 different types of blueprints and one blueprint creates another blueprint. Aka DNA can not make Proteins without the 20 amino acids, they are necessary building materials. Lysine is one of these 20 amino acids.

Now with Amino Acids we have 3 groups of them.

• 5 Amino Acids are considered non-essential amino acids for our bodies can create them and create them easily.
• 6 Amino Acids which the body of animals can make but only under certain conditions and it is better to get these amino acids through diet. These are the conditionally essential amino acids.
• 9 Amino Acids that no animal, literally nothing with a Spinal Chord can make, and these are called the essential amino acids for you must get these amino acids from your diet.

So Lysine is of the 3rd category, Lysine is an essential amino acid and it is stated the Dinosaurs are bred in a way that they can't make Lysine. Well that is the case for all animals, literally everything with a spinal chord must get Lysine through diet. That is because Plants can make Lysine and thus you must eat plants to get Lysine or eat something else that eats plants (aka meat.)

So yeah this Lysine Contigency makes no sense on the face of it. All animals acquire Lysine through diet, if the plan is to have an amino acid contingency you should have one where you can't get it through diet for normally you get it via producing it yourself and you disrupt this producing it yourself. But yeah all the dinosaurs were going to eat other food and get Lysine so turning off the Lysine pills was never going to work. Aka you picked the wrong Amino Acid to put in your Book, Mr. Crichton

[LaZodiac]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

(dinosaurs are birds you **** frog dna would not work like that at all oh my god)

[Mechalich]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

(dinosaurs are birds you **** frog dna would not work like that at all oh my god)

In fairness, the original novel was published in 1990, using popular science understanding of Dinosaur paleontology from the 1980s. The 'birds are dinosaurs' (and it needs to be written that way, clade Aves is nested within the Theropods) understanding was still controversial at that time and the cladistics analysis underpinning it was both recent and not yet widely accepted - because the cladistics revolution was still in the early stages. For instance, Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould, was published in 1989 and completely fails to incorporate cladistics. So Crichton - and Jack Horner who was consulting on the first film - can be forgiven for their more traditionally saurian approach to the material, the absence of feathers, and other mistakes. In a strange way the Jurassic Park franchise is an amusing time capsule about our knowledge of dinosaurs from the 1980s (now the failure to update the franchise for the reboot, that was just willful absurdity). That's not to say there aren't piles of scientific errors in the initial book, or that frog DNA ever made sense as an option - even if you posit the bird connection as being false, you'd then go to the next nearest living relative, the crocodiles.

[Rater202]

1: Jurassic World wasn't a reboot, it's a sequel.

Presumably, the reason why the Dinosaurs don't have feathers there is because some of them are reused from the original park(Rexey is explicitly the same T-Rex from Jurassic Park 1) and because the new ones have to at least convincingly pass as being the same animals as the old ones for consistency's sake.

I mean, I don't think it's ever been stated conclusively that the Park is meant to be scientifically accurate in-universe and the animals are explicitly said to not be "real" Dinosaurs at least once.

Also, in the very first movie, Dr. Grant is in Arizona and refers to what is clearly a Deinonychus skeleton as Velociraptor mongolius, a species that is 1: Not found on the North American continent or even this hemisphere and 2: Nowhere near that big.(A proper Velociraptor is roughly the size of a turkey, albeit significantly more vicious.) so them big ass raptors in the movies are scientifically accurate in-universe, so who knows what else is differant?

(Also, It's my understandings that most examples of dinosaurs with feathers or proto-feathers where 1: therapods and 2: found in colder climes than a Tropical island in the southern hemisphere. If the frog DNA doesn't explain it, then that might.)

[Mightymosy]

Certain things about the Jurassic Park movies have bothered me for a long time, and with a new one on the way I feel like getting some opinions.

These movies seem to exist in a world where the fates have a sense of right and wrong that somehow crosses sappy Disney family flicks with extreme vindictiveness towards anyone who doesn't toe a very particular line. "Crapsaccharine" I believe TVtropes calls it.

The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?

There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?

Spoiler: The Lost World

Show

The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "heroes" are complete morons who object strongly to the "bad guys" rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.

But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.

The "heroes" are then saved some more by the "bad guys", which I find phenomenally gracious of them, all things considered. They then get attacked by velociraptors and a whole lot of people die, all because the "heroes" caused their vehicles and equipment to be stempeded into junk.

Later on a T-Rex attacks the "bad guys", and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.

I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil actions by the main heroes. But no.

Spoiler: Jurassic Park III

Show

Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.

A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?

Spoiler: Jurassic World

Show

Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

The movie treats this as SO bad that Chris Pratt punches the dude while surrounded by the guy's armed men. Genius, Chris. Just genius. Later he just lets the guy get eaten by a raptor, rather than shoot it with his damn gun.

Speaking of guns, when Pratt's character finds that injured herbivore slowly dying his reaction is NOT to do the humane thing and press his rifle against its head... no, he just does the sappy thing and pets it while it expires in agony.

This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

What the hell?

Animals aren't our magical friends. They aren't evil, it's true. But they aren't good either. To quote Werner Herzog:

"And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

What do you guys think?

Bolded and underlined by me -> I'm soo happy I'm not the only one after all who finds this disturbing.
When I watched the movie no one seemed to care.

Unfortunately, it's not just Jurassic Park genre, it's all of Hollywood (and probably European movie as well).

A lady not into kids? -> antagonist or cannon fodder
In horror movies? -> GRUESOME DEATH AHEAD!

True story: When I watched Jurassic World and saw that girl playing with her phone and showing disinterest in the kids, I immediately knew she was gone get murdered. I even called it in the cinema (not earning much praise, I'll admit :-D)


It's just so.......Arghh. :facepalm:
Can't they just get out of this rut for once? Jesus

[Bavarian itP]

In fairness, the original novel was published in 1990, using popular science understanding of Dinosaur paleontology from the 1980s. The 'birds are dinosaurs' (and it needs to be written that way, clade Aves is nested within the Theropods) understanding was still controversial at that time and the cladistics analysis underpinning it was both recent and not yet widely accepted - because the cladistics revolution was still in the early stages. For instance, Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould, was published in 1989 and completely fails to incorporate cladistics. So Crichton - and Jack Horner who was consulting on the first film - can be forgiven for their more traditionally saurian approach to the material, the absence of feathers, and other mistakes. In a strange way the Jurassic Park franchise is an amusing time capsule about our knowledge of dinosaurs from the 1980s (now the failure to update the franchise for the reboot, that was just willful absurdity). That's not to say there aren't piles of scientific errors in the initial book, or that frog DNA ever made sense as an option - even if you posit the bird connection as being false, you'd then go to the next nearest living relative, the crocodiles.

In even more fairness, the novel clearly states that dinosaurs are more like birds than like reptiles. Wu contemplates about this, because it made his job harder (because birds, like mammals, don't have DNA in their red blood cells, so they needed white ones, which are rarer). Also, the frog connection was never meant to be about a close relation between frogs and dinosaurs - they just used anything to "fix" the genetic material, it's just meant to further illustrate what a lazy job they did with the dino dna, and by extension, with the park as a whole.

Aka you picked the wrong Amino Acid to put in your Book, Mr. Crichton

That, also, was an in-universe mistake of the park creators. Because the book ends with escaped dinosaurs searching out lysin-rich food. So Crichton was clearly aware that you can get it through your diet.

[dps]

Certain things about the Jurassic Park movies have bothered me for a long time, and with a new one on the way I feel like getting some opinions.

These movies seem to exist in a world where the fates have a sense of right and wrong that somehow crosses sappy Disney family flicks with extreme vindictiveness towards anyone who doesn't toe a very particular line. "Crapsaccharine" I believe TVtropes calls it.

The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?

There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?

Spoiler: The Lost World

Show

The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "heroes" are complete morons who object strongly to the "bad guys" rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.

But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.

The "heroes" are then saved some more by the "bad guys", which I find phenomenally gracious of them, all things considered. They then get attacked by velociraptors and a whole lot of people die, all because the "heroes" caused their vehicles and equipment to be stempeded into junk.

Later on a T-Rex attacks the "bad guys", and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.

I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil actions by the main heroes. But no.

Spoiler: Jurassic Park III

Show

Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.

A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?

Spoiler: Jurassic World

Show

Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

The movie treats this as SO bad that Chris Pratt punches the dude while surrounded by the guy's armed men. Genius, Chris. Just genius. Later he just lets the guy get eaten by a raptor, rather than shoot it with his damn gun.

Speaking of guns, when Pratt's character finds that injured herbivore slowly dying his reaction is NOT to do the humane thing and press his rifle against its head... no, he just does the sappy thing and pets it while it expires in agony.

This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

What the hell?

Animals aren't our magical friends. They aren't evil, it's true. But they aren't good either. To quote Werner Herzog:

"And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

What do you guys think?

I pretty much agree. Another thing that bothered me is that the movies present an essentially binary either/or choice that doesn't make sense--either you exhibit the dinos for profit as the centerpiece of a zoo park, or you just leave them alone on the island. The possibility of using the island as a research center not open to the public is never really seriously addressed, at least in the first 3 movies (I haven't seen any of the movies in a long time and haven't seen the latest one at all; in the first 3 IIRC it's mentioned in a couple of throw-away lines, but not really dealt with).

[Strigon]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

Personally, I've always thought he had a gift for talking complete nonsense and sounding like an authority.

When I first read his books, I was frankly blown away by his attention to detail with the science compared to other authors (and especially Hollywood).
It wasn't until after I had finished, and thought more critically, that I realized how ridiculous he had been.

[Peelee]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

Personally, I've always thought he had a gift for talking complete nonsense and sounding like an authority.

When I first read his books, I was frankly blown away by his attention to detail with the science compared to other authors (and especially Hollywood).
It wasn't until after I had finished, and thought more critically, that I realized how ridiculous he had been.

Seconded wholeheartedly. I don't have a problem turning my brain off when it's at least fairly well-written.

Presumably, the reason why the Dinosaurs don't have feathers there is because some of them are reused from the original park(Rexey is explicitly the same T-Rex from Jurassic Park 1) and because the new ones have to at least convincingly pass as being the same animals as the old ones for consistency's sake.

I mean, I don't think it's ever been stated conclusively that the Park is meant to be scientifically accurate in-universe and the animals are explicitly said to not be "real" Dinosaurs at least once.

Yep! Wu has a throwaway line in Jurassic World about how nothing in the park is real, everything is altered to look like what the public expected. Which is their way or explaining away the "no feathers back when we didn't know about feathers."

Nothing in Jurassic World is natural, we have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals. And if the genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different. But you didn't ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.

In even more fairness, the novel clearly states that dinosaurs are more like birds than like reptiles. Wu contemplates about this, because it made his job harder (because birds, like mammals, don't have DNA in their red blood cells, so they needed white ones, which are rarer). Also, the frog connection was never meant to be about a close relation between frogs and dinosaurs - they just used anything to "fix" the genetic material, it's just meant to further illustrate what a lazy job they did with the dino dna, and by extension, with the park as a whole.

Bolding mine, because I cannot agree with this hard enough. Again, Hammond was a con-man. He was a very very good one, and he used his skills to actually accomplish things - he totally was able to innovate genetic cloning, for instance. On the surface, everything was polished and impeccable - Richard Kiley narrating the tour, electric vehicles, King Kong-esque gates, five-star chefs, lots and lots of grandeur - but underneath the surface, it was a festering pot of ugly. He grabbed the most brilliant geneticists he could find, which was great, and got them right out of school so he could get them as cheap as possible and with little real-world experience. He strong-armed his computer expert, he tried to strong-arm his animal control expert, he threw tantrums when things didn't go the way he thought they should... The guy was Steve Jobs, except a lot more shady.

[LaZodiac]

In fairness, the original novel was published in 1990, using popular science understanding of Dinosaur paleontology from the 1980s. The 'birds are dinosaurs' (and it needs to be written that way, clade Aves is nested within the Theropods) understanding was still controversial at that time and the cladistics analysis underpinning it was both recent and not yet widely accepted - because the cladistics revolution was still in the early stages. For instance, Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould, was published in 1989 and completely fails to incorporate cladistics. So Crichton - and Jack Horner who was consulting on the first film - can be forgiven for their more traditionally saurian approach to the material, the absence of feathers, and other mistakes. In a strange way the Jurassic Park franchise is an amusing time capsule about our knowledge of dinosaurs from the 1980s (now the failure to update the franchise for the reboot, that was just willful absurdity). That's not to say there aren't piles of scientific errors in the initial book, or that frog DNA ever made sense as an option - even if you posit the bird connection as being false, you'd then go to the next nearest living relative, the crocodiles.

To be honest, a small part of me actually likes Jurassic World's decision to make them scaly. They mention in universe that yeah no dinosaurs don't look like that they had feathers, but people still refuse to believe that and it's just way more marketable as terrible lizards. I like that because it feeds into the themes of the movies and books.

I very much wish they did feathered dinosaurs though because we need more people to understand that bird and dinosaur is the same. I want parents to tell their budding children who are just growing that they're eating dinosaurs when being fed chicken nuggets so that they can grow up knowing that the world, while it looks mundane, has a lot of amazing stuff in it just below the surface. Which is what Sci Fi basically is, when you get down to it. I want people to accept that birds are dinosaurs so we can point at them and go "dinosaurs still exist" and when people doubt it show them pictures of a butcher bird's nest and go "imagine this but you sized".

That's way more frightening than taking a raptor claw and teasingly rubbing it on some fat kids tummy.

Personally, I've always thought he had a gift for talking complete nonsense and sounding like an authority.

When I first read his books, I was frankly blown away by his attention to detail with the science compared to other authors (and especially Hollywood).
It wasn't until after I had finished, and thought more critically, that I realized how ridiculous he had been.

Still a really good entry into sci fi though!

[Ramza00]

That, also, was an in-universe mistake of the park creators. Because the book ends with escaped dinosaurs searching out lysin-rich food. So Crichton was clearly aware that you can get it through your diet.

You are not getting why this is weird. No animal, literally none has an ability to process Lyseine so how was Wu and the other researchers supposed to knock out a gene that isn't there. It is like trying to remove the ability to see when an animal does not have eyes.

And then the researchers, Hammond, etc are shocked that animals which always required in Nature to eat Lysine so that they can use Lysine, decided to eat Lysine in order to use it. So to continue the metaphor of removing the ability of sight for an eyeless animal imagine this animal to have some other way to hunt such as echolocation or smell. Of course these animals would have ways to acquire Lysine for all animals need it. It is a fundamental for life on this planet as much as oxygen is necessary for life and thus creatures have ways such as lungs (and other methods) so they can acquire oxygen but also get rid of too much oxygen.

Yes the book explained the animals ate Lysine rich foods, but all animals need to eat Lysine rich foods.

----

Nods with LaZodiac and her opinion that we need parents to teach kids that Dinosaurs in the movies are not the same as real life and birds are like Dinosaurs.

Based off some 2014 research which mapped over 200 different types of Birds DNA wise we now know there are 4 common ancestors of current Birds from the Dinosaurs. (Depends on how you count and put the cut off point with species you can argue 5 common ancestors of birds.)



The Water Fowl, the Land Fowl, the Ostriches, the 5th Type (Tinamou order of birds which has 47 species which are native to South America, Central America, and Mexico) and the Neoaves with the Neoaves being the common grouping and thus a common ancestor for almost all modern birds..

But since Neoaves is so huge we have to further subdivide this classification of birds into smaller parts. This 2014 genetic study revealed many interesting tidbits. For example Peregrine Falcons are more closely related to Parrots even though one eats fruit and the other eats meat, where previously people thought Falcons were more closely related to Eagles, Hawks, Owls, etc. (in the picture above the Falcons and Parrots are in the upper right corner, while the Eagles / Hawks are in the middle right and are both Accipitriformes and Owls are nearby and are Strigiformes)

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But yeah many Dinosaurs have feathers but not all Dinosaurs have feathers. Furthermore many dinosaurs had feathers on some parts of their bodies but not other parts of their bodies. Lastly Dinosaurs are the ancestors of modern birds. I agree with LaZodiac that parents / teachers need to teach these generalities to their children and you can't expect a movie to do this for you. You have to have active participation with education, and education never ends for this stuff I mentioned is new stuff from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

[Mightymosy]

To be honest, a small part of me actually likes Jurassic World's decision to make them scaly. They mention in universe that yeah no dinosaurs don't look like that they had feathers, but people still refuse to believe that and it's just way more marketable as terrible lizards. I like that because it feeds into the themes of the movies and books.

I very much wish they did feathered dinosaurs though because we need more people to understand that bird and dinosaur is the same. I want parents to tell their budding children who are just growing that they're eating dinosaurs when being fed chicken nuggets so that they can grow up knowing that the world, while it looks mundane, has a lot of amazing stuff in it just below the surface. Which is what Sci Fi basically is, when you get down to it. I want people to accept that birds are dinosaurs so we can point at them and go "dinosaurs still exist" and when people doubt it show them pictures of a butcher bird's nest and go "imagine this but you sized".

That's way more frightening than taking a raptor claw and teasingly rubbing it on some fat kids tummy.



Still a really good entry into sci fi though!

This is something Magic the Gathering has actually done reasonably well:
https://magiccards.info/query?q=t%3A...v=card&s=cname

They made a dinosaur expansion, they made them have feathers, and they look awesome and colorful! Really into it.

ETA:

You are not getting why this is weird. No animal, literally none has an ability to process Lyseine so how was Wu and the other researchers supposed to knock out a gene that isn't there. It is like trying to remove the ability to see when an animal does not have eyes.

And then the researchers, Hammond, etc are shocked that animals which always required in Nature to eat Lysine so that they can use Lysine, decided to eat Lysine in order to use it. So to continue the metaphor of removing the ability of sight for an eyeless animal imagine this animal to have some other way to hunt such as echolocation or smell. Of course these animals would have ways to acquire Lysine for all animals need it. It is a fundamental for life on this planet as much as oxygen is necessary for life and thus creatures have ways such as lungs (and other methods) so they can acquire oxygen but also get rid of too much oxygen.

Yes the book explained the animals ate Lysine rich foods, but all animals need to eat Lysine rich foods.

Here's the thing: Movies - Hollywood in particular - just CAN'T get biochemistry right. More specifically, genetics. I can't think of a single movie that has a reasonable grip of genetics. EXCEPT for Jurassic Park the original. Yes, there are flaws. But all being said and done, Jurassic Park is the most realistic movie about genetic engineering that I am aware of. So I'm willing to forgive some mistakes like the Lysine stuff.

[Ramza00]

Here's the thing: Movies - Hollywood in particular - just CAN'T get biochemistry right. More specifically, genetics. I can't think of a single movie that has a reasonable grip of genetics. EXCEPT for Jurassic Park the original. Yes, there are flaws. But all being said and done, Jurassic Park is the most realistic movie about genetic engineering that I am aware of. So I'm willing to forgive some mistakes like the Lysine stuff.

I agree, but it is so frustrated for they picked one of the 9 amino acids that this stuff does not apply to, but if they picked one of the 5 non essential amino acids and said they removed the gene to allow you to process this stuff then it would make so much sense.

I am complaining for they got so close but obviously they did not understand what they were talking about for they were so far. It is like picking a name of an element by looking at the periodic table of elements, but then saying Argon has properties of a metal and not a noble gas. It is so weird and makes me do a double take.

I am fine with movies not being scientifically accurate (see my above stuff where I talked about birds and dinosaurs and how our understanding of science is changing so much and thus I am fine with feathers vs no feathers.) But to get it so close but so wrong just seems so weird.

[Jeivar]

Sorry, but why do threads around here so often get taken over by lengthy discussions about something different from the main point? Can't you guys just create a separate thread for dinosaur science?

[Peelee]

Sorry, but why do threads around here so often get taken over by lengthy discussions about something different from the main point? Can't you guys just create a separate thread for dinosaur science?

Conversations flow. This one happened to flow in the direction of dinosaur science and biology, while still being directly related to Jurassic Park. If you want to pull it back to the original topic specifically, feel free to try to pull it back in that direction.

[Dodom]

I've read the book too long ago to remember if that would be compatible with what the text describes, but an amino acid deficiency could be manufactured by disabling its reabsorption by renal tubules. There is a genetic condition where this happens with cystine, but since it's not essential it doesn't result in a deficiency. The target could also be in its absorption, if it's not efficiently transported through the intestinal wall, it'll take more of it to cover the body's need.


About the dinosaurs chasing egg thiefs, it's not an unrealistic behaviour. Lots of birds will do exactly that. Humans are exempt from the worst of it because we're too big to realisticly fight, but against smaller predators, it's a lot more persistent and violent.
Brief explanation of mobbing

[Gnoman]

Yep! Wu has a throwaway line in Jurassic World about how nothing in the park is real, everything is altered to look like what the public expected. Which is their way or explaining away the "no feathers back when we didn't know about feathers."

The original book had a discussion about this point. Wu wanted to redesign the dinos to fit then-common cultural misconceptions instead of the early-90s picture of how dinos really are, as well as eliminate inconvenient things not in the fossil record that the park discovered. Hammond absolutely refused to make any deliberate changes, because he wanted his dinos to be as authentic as possible.

The guy was Steve Jobs, except a lot more shady.

I don't know about that. Both the book and film versions of Hammond (moreso in the film version, of course) seemed to have a genuine passion for the field that Jobs lacked. Sure, he might have gotten more people killed, and he was openly in it for the money, but I don't remember either version expressing the sort of contempt Jobs often did for his customers.

[Darth Ultron]

Let me ask the question:

Could there ever be a Jurassic Park movie without dinosaurs eating people?

If not, why have we never seen one? If yes, then why is it so important?

When the filmmakers sit down to make a Jurassic Park movie, do they have anything on thier mind other then A) Making Money and B) Making the movie about Dinosaurs eating people TO make that money.

Now, it's not like they are in any way wrong: Make a Dino Eating Movie and you will make money. It's a basic fact that kidz love Dinosaurs, and even more so love the ''monster dino eats people Num Num Num!". And it's not just the kidz, as plenty of adults like to turn off their brains and watch the ''Num, Num, Num" too.

[Peelee]

The original book had a discussion about this point. Wu wanted to redesign the dinos to fit then-common cultural misconceptions instead of the early-90s picture of how dinos really are, as well as eliminate inconvenient things not in the fossil record that the park discovered. Hammond absolutely refused to make any deliberate changes, because he wanted his dinos to be as authentic as possible.

True, but this is also the same guy who got by on a mechanized flea circus and funded his company with a dwarf pygmy elephant. He built his career on selling people what they wanted to see. Maybe the dinosaurs were a "finally I can do something real" moment, but the way he still came across as a total jackass in the book, I'm disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The movie version I would buy that though, mostly because you can't cast an Attenborough and have them not be lovable.

I don't know about that. Both the book and film versions of Hammond (moreso in the film version, of course) seemed to have a genuine passion for the field that Jobs lacked. Sure, he might have gotten more people killed, and he was openly in it for the money, but I don't remember either version expressing the sort of contempt Jobs often did for his customers.

I more meant along the lines of how he treated his employees and how he built his company; you're absolutely right that he was in some ways better than Jobs.

[Forum Explorer]

True, but this is also the same guy who got by on a mechanized flea circus and funded his company with a dwarf pygmy elephant. He built his career on selling people what they wanted to see. Maybe the dinosaurs were a "finally I can do something real" moment, but the way he still came across as a total jackass in the book, I'm disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

IIRC in the books in was also one part 'we aren't scrapping what we have and starting over this late in the project.' And one part 'Your part is done geneticist. Things work, and I don't have to listen to you anymore.'

The guy went from being the main villain in the books, to be a well meaning entrepreneur in the movie.


Anyways, I never really saw Chriton as a Technophobe, so much as having a consistent theme that the world is not in our control. Basically dissing human arrogance in thinking their systems will work or handle the problem, and then they fail. Like in the Andromedea Strain.