Tag: jurassic park

The Illusion of Control

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

I’ve been thinking about this for days. Maybe it’ll grow into a Newswithviews column. Maybe your comments will inspire me. Pitch in, everybody.

When Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park says “Boy, do I hate being right all the time,” he’s talking about his repeated warnings that the dinosaur park is going to fail spectacularly–and of course he’s right. Everything goes wrong.

And of course the park’s creators are totally flabbergasted because they were 100% sure they had everything, and I do mean everything, totally under control. In fact they had nothing under control.

As Christians we’re expected to know that God is in control of His creation. We’re lucky if we can control ourselves for five minutes, never mind managing the world.

But the delusion of this age is the illusion of control, the old con game Satan ran on Eve, “Ye shall be as gods.” In fact, think the fat-heads who believe this, they’d better be as gods because the real God does not exist, it’s all up to them to keep the planet spinning, etc. All up to them! And these are people who’d be hard-put to organize a game of hopscotch.

Rather than suffer the shock of coming to grips with their limitations, control freaks just think bigger and bigger. A lousy dinosaur park? Peanuts! They’re after global government. They aspire to micro-manage the climate. They’ll do all those things God should’ve done, but couldn’t–end war, end poverty, no more disease, everybody equal, free college education, blah-blah.

If that doesn’t scare you, what will?

UK Says ‘Yes’ to Designer Babies

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of frankenstein

“Maybe we used too much frog DNA…”

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has said it’s okay for scientists to proceed with work on “genome editing” of human babies, to produce what we might call “designer babies” or “GMO babies” (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/17/genetically-modified-babies-given-go-ahead-by-uk-ethics-body). Or even “Franken-babies.”

Get this: Go ahead, said the council, “if it was in the future child’s interest and did not add to the kinds of inequality that already divide society.”

What? What are they talking about? Are these people quite all there? Like, it’s okay to genetically mess around with a baby as long as it doesn’t make him “better” than others, in some way, any way? Well, if it doesn’t, then why the devil do it? Or maybe for every “improvement” the genetic editors make, they’d have to “dis-improve” the baby somewhere else. “We’re going to make your baby very intelligent, Mrs. Windsor, but we don’t want to leave others feeling that they’re not equal to him–so we’re also going to make him frightfully ugly.”

Really, you wonder about the kind of people we have sitting around up there, making decisions for us. What loony bin did they escape from?

Hello? Hello? Didn’t any of these doofuses ever see Jurassic Park? Messing about with genetics leads to results that are inherently unpredictable. And the dinosaurs get loose and eat you.

She Could Play Ellayne (Ya Think?)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Remember Arianna Richards, from the original Jurassic Park? I kept trying to get a clip of one of her ear-piercing screams, but had to settle for this one instead.

Anyway, last night I thought of her to play Ellayne in the $150 million Bell Mountain movie that is in the process of not being made. If you’ve read No. 4, The Last Banquet, you know when and where a really piercing scream is necessary.

Yes, the movie contest didn’t fly… but that doesn’t mean you can’t go on playing it.

Oh, Boy! GMO Mosquitoes

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of mosquitoes

Okay, we all hate mosquitoes. But here in the continental U.S., what mosquitoes mostly do is annoy us. They don’t generally kill us with dreadful tropical diseases, like yellow fever or sleeping sickness, as they do in many other parts of the world.

Do we hate mosquitoes enough to plunge full-throttle into an experiment in genetic engineering–releasing swarms of artificially-created GMO mosquitoes, in hopes that these will wipe out all the regular mosquitoes? (http://www.mosquitomagnet.com/articles/gmo-mosquitoes-pros-cons)

Yep, they’re gonna try that in the Florida Keys. The way it’s supposed to work, the GMO skeeters are modified so that their offspring die before reaching maturity, and they will out-compete the regular mosquitoes and pretty soon, no more skeeters. And then the environment hangs out a “Help Wanted: New Mosquito Species” sign because there’s now an empty niche to fill. With worse mosquitoes, maybe.

Somebody please cue that Jurassic Park music. And switch on our flashing neon sign: the one that says We’re In Control!

Oh, come now–what could go wrong?

Well, we won’t know, will we, until after it has gone wrong and the genie is out of the bottle. Our modern egotism encourages us to blunder into things without regard for unforeseen consequences that could have been foreseen if only someone had taken a bit more time to think about it! But hey, we’re smarter than God, we’ve got Science, we can do anything we want–

Could we please think this over just a bit longer? Pretty please?

‘Michael Crichton’s Dark Night of the Soul’ (2014)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of jurassic park and michael crichton

Michael Crichton spent his adult life writing best-sellers and expanding his knowledge of the sciences. When he rebelled against Global Warming dogma by writing State of Fear, the Left turned against him viciously. But I wonder what they thought of these paragraphs from his Jurassic Park  sequel, The Lost World:

https://leeduigon.com/2014/08/09/michael-crichtons-dark-night-of-the-soul/

Science makes a useful tool but a dangerous religion.

Fight Climbit Change! Bring Back the Mammoth

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of mammoths grown in lab

“Clone ’em, Dano!”

Say hey! Did you know there’s a Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival Team? And they’ve got a little science project, straight out of Jurassic Park, to fight imaginary Global Warming [trumpet fanfare]–by bringing back the woolly mammoth! (https://www.livescience.com/62569-mammoth-elephant-hybrid-help-climate.html)

The project director flat-out denies they have any interest in doing what was done in the Jurassic Park movies, and then describes what they’re gonna do, which is exactly what they did in Jurassic Park and its sequels. They don’t want the whole mammoth: just the bits that resist cold. So they’ll mix mammoth DNA with elephant DNA and grow the critters in the laboratory. Psst, dude! That’s exactly how they got into all that trouble in Jurassic World!

The idea is to fight off Global Warming by turning a whole buncha mammoth-elephant-whatevers loose in Siberia to knock down the trees and trample the snow, which will keep the permafrost from suddenly thawing out because of SUVs and toilet paper and oh man oh man we’re all gonna die–!

Absent from the calculation is knowledge of what caused mammoths to go extinct in the first place, not to mention any sure knowledge of just how they interacted with their environment, and with what result. Which came first–the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or the forests that now cover much of Siberia where the mammoths used to live?

Aw, hell, we don’t need to know all that stuff before we grow a million mammoths in the lab and sick ’em on the trees.

Maybe they didn’t see Jurassic World. 

‘We’re Living in Jurassic Park’ (2015)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of jurassic park

(“Who’ve they got in there? King Kong?”)

Famous last words: “We’ve got it all under control!”

Remember Jurassic Park?  Hey, we’ve got the money, we’ve got the technology, we can do anything and everything we want!

https://leeduigon.com/2015/09/06/were-living-in-jurassic-park/

Only it never quite works out that way, does it?

‘How Stupid Can It Get?’ (2015)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of sick triceratops

Since the beginning of time, no country has ever spent more money on “education” than the United States of America. And what have we got to show for it?

People who think you shouldn’t oughta shoot dinosaurs…

https://leeduigon.com/2015/06/11/how-stupid-can-it-get/

Scary Martian Comes to ‘Life’

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of life science fiction movie

Hey, we saw a cool science fiction movie yesterday, a nice and scary one–Life, which we rented from amazon.

The ideology of unbelief dictates that life be found on other planets. Somehow that’s supposed to prove there is no God. You’d have to ask them how that works. Although I wouldn’t bother.

But if there were… this movie shows you what might happen.

“Oh, boy, Martian soil samples! Why, look at that–a little tiny organism… let’s see if we can wake it up…” Cue to Colin Clive in Frankenstein, screaming exultantly, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

Actually, messing around with alien organisms seems like it would be a very bad idea. Somebody on that space station should’ve read The Andromeda Strain. But they do screw around with it, they just can’t help themselves, they give it a cutesy-poo nickname–and of course it winds up loose, and sets about killing everybody there. It’s sort of a half-octopus, half-starfish that gets bigger and bigger and smarter and smarter with every victim it devours.

And everything goes wrong. They should’ve watched Jurassic Park before they left earth. All these carefully thought-out protocols and procedures, all the bright ideas of scientific whiz kids–well, the Martian monster doesn’t know and certainly doesn’t care about any of that.

I really didn’t notice who was in the cast. All the characters were too busy trying to stay alive, and had no time to devote to personal issues. I can say the film was well-acted, well-directed, fast-paced, and with a straightforward cinematography that didn’t make my wife seasick, watching it. A very effective study in suspense punctuated by frantic action.

Again and again the movies we make tell us that our science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and warn us to proceed with caution. On some level, we know this!

And yet we never listen. It’s not Martian monsters that devour us, but bright ideas and clever societal innovations dreamed up by blockheads hailed as sages.

 

A Very, Very Dangerous Medical Technology

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of jurassic park t. rex eating lawyer

Is there anybody who does not want to find cures for cancer, HIV, diabetes, and other so far incurable diseases? Really bad diseases, that can kill you?

Probably not. But next question: how far are we willing to go, to get those cures?

Dr. Mercola reports on new “gene-editing technology” that seems to offer real hope of curing terrible diseases… and is also a mine field strewn with unintended consequences and prospects for disaster (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/06/13/crispr-gene-editing-dangers.aspx?utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art3&utm_campaign=20170613Z1_UCM&et_cid=DM147520&et_rid=2042432193).

It turns out to be not quite so easy as they thought. Testing on mice showed these procedures brought in “more than 100 additional deletions and insertions”–whoa! that means stuff taken out that they didn’t mean to take out, and stuff put in that they didn’t mean to put in–“and more than 1,500 single-nucleotide mutations.” Does that sound good to you? It doesn’t sound too good to me!

So, OK, we’re gonna “cut and paste your DNA” and maybe nothing  but good will happen, and maybe not. We might be tempted to try to make designer babies, and next thing you know, we’ve unleashed some unimagined horror on the world.

Of course we want to alleviate suffering! Of course we want to heal diseases! And of course we’re going to try.

But, oh, boy–to pursue that course without humility! We are not going to be able to abolish disease and death, any more than we can abolish war or injustice–because we are not God. God will do those things, not us. We can only try our best to make the world a little better, a little less terrible: and that, by God’s grace and with His help, we can do. Only a fool would deny that medical science has made great strides since the 19th century.

But what we might call “moral science” sure as shootin’ hasn’t! How much power do we want to put in the hands of moral imbeciles?

Some folks out there need to re-visit Jurassic Park.