Dr. Ellie Sattler Character Analysis

Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display at the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)

The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct […] It was a young Procompsognathus.

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 fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us […] that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. 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.

Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”

“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see an immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t’ see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.”

The behavior of the dinosaurs had always been a minor consideration for Wu. […] You couldn’t really predict behavior, and you couldn’t really control it, except for in very crude ways. […] You couldn’t look at a DNA sequence and predict behavior. It was impossible.

And that had made Wu’s DNA work purely empirical. It was a matter of tinkering, in the way a modern workman might repair an antique grandfather clock. You were dealing with something out of the past, something constructed of ancient materials and following ancient rules […] Wu would make an adjustment and then see if the animals behaved any better. And he only tried to correct gross behavior: uncontrolled butting of the electrical fences, or rubbing the skin raw on tree trunks. Those were the behaviors that sent him back to the drawing board.

Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display at the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)

The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct […] It was a young Procompsognathus.

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 fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us […] that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. 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.

Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”

“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see an immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t’ see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.”

The behavior of the dinosaurs had always been a minor consideration for Wu. […] You couldn’t really predict behavior, and you couldn’t really control it, except for in very crude ways. […] You couldn’t look at a DNA sequence and predict behavior. It was impossible.

And that had made Wu’s DNA work purely empirical. It was a matter of tinkering, in the way a modern workman might repair an antique grandfather clock. You were dealing with something out of the past, something constructed of ancient materials and following ancient rules […] Wu would make an adjustment and then see if the animals behaved any better. And he only tried to correct gross behavior: uncontrolled butting of the electrical fences, or rubbing the skin raw on tree trunks. Those were the behaviors that sent him back to the drawing board.