“Believe me, they can’t breed.”
The chief geneticist of Jurassic Park is not the only person who repeats the line “they can’t breed.” Hammond says it and other characters repeat it in questioning form. It becomes a mantra of expectation as well as an emblem of the false sense of hope and the reliance upon the unknown becoming known that drives the hubris of those responsible for bringing the dinosaurs back from the extinction to which nature condemned them. Wu’s admonition that what he says should be believe precisely because he is saying it is also emblematic of a larger fault within the human population: the tendency to believe those who with only a pretense to being honest.
“You get the engineering correct and the animals will into place. After all, they’re trainable.”
Hammond is the vision through the construction of Jurassic Park as an ideological entity is viewed. And Hammond believes that the park is one-half amusement thrill ride and one-half zoo. The efficiency of the amusement park is an engineering problem and the zoo is just like any other zoo. Train the animals and things will run smoothly. Hammond’s inability to register that zoo animals behave as is a feat of engineering based on experience, trial and error and centuries of study is what ultimately causes the entire thing to break down. The dinosaurs are not like other zoo animals because none of that experience is available to the trainers, therefore they must be treated like an engineering problem that has never been addressed before.
“Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”
Malcolm, on the other hand, understands that the animals in the park are going to present a long series of engineering problems that require mastering long before the animals can ever become trainable. Procreation is the ultimate engineering problem and the sheer number of obstacles and obstructions that potentially prohibit most animals from ever thriving as a species is belied by the number of thriving species. Considering the advantage that predatory evolution has over most species, it almost defies reason that millions of species have found a way to get past the limitations imposed upon their survival. This defiance is a miracle of evolutionary engineering and Malcolm is trying to get the genetic engineers to realize despite the genius of their accomplishment, they are still literally billions of years behind the nature they seem confident of controlling.
“Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world."
Malcolm gets at the core issue of the problem that Wu and Hammond are missing. What those in charge of the park are trying to present is a reality that is controlled by machines, but the very fact that something is controlled means it no longer natural. Therefore one of two things are possible: Jurassic Park can be controlled and thus is not, as Malcolm suggests, the real world as nature intended or it is as nature intends and thus cannot be controlled. Malcolm is working from the proposition that it is going to be latter which is revealed while Hammond and his crew are ridiculously misplaced in their confidence that it is the former. The stubborn unwillingness to accept that Malcolm may be right will prove disastrous to the park.
Gennaro thought: we are going to make a fortune on this place. A fortune.
This, in a nutshell, is the motivation of everyone involved with Jurassic Park. A business proposition only, every other consideration is reduced to where it falls on the balance sheet. Jurassic Park thus becomes a dreadfully difficult argument in favor of strict industrial regulation to refute.
“The children of the world love dinosaurs, and the children are going to delight—just delight—in this place.”
Jurassic Park is filled with wonderful examples of irony and this assertion by Hammond work on two ironic levels at the very least. In the first place, it soon becomes quite clear that as things currently stand, children would not only fail to be delighted, but would run screaming from his park in terror. Secondly, Hammond’s interest in building Jurassic Park has about as much to do with appealing to kids—who are by and large way too poor to afford his prices—as it does with actual dinosaur behavioral research. One might well suggest a third level of irony is equally manifest: the only reason Hammond knows that children love dinosaurs in the first place is that he saw a limitless business potential in this fascination with the arrival of suitable scientific knowledge.
"And, you remember our original intent was to use the emerging technology of genetic engineering to make money. A lot of money."
But, hey, when pressed and under the right circumstances, at least Hammond is willing to admit to the right audience that he is nothing more than a bloodsucking capitalist leech living off the blood of selling at exorbitant prices the one site in the world all those kids who love dinosaurs want to see more desperately than anything else in the world.
“We don’t know.”
No other phrase is repeated as often throughout the book as “We don’t know.” Usually followed by some variation of “why so and so does this or that.” The repetition rises to the level of leitmotif which reminds the reader every time they see it that these are men working at the cutting edge of their specialties. The best and brightest minds working on what these people are working on eventually are exposed as people who just seem to be winging it on the hope and prayer that given enough money, any mistakes can be controlled and corrected before any irreparable disaster occurs. Turns out that is not necessarily the case.
