It is an accident waiting to happen. The project is impossible, he knows, because Jurassic Park technicians are trying to engineer complexity with the mentality of simplicity. Thus, the technological and biological systems at Jurassic Park break down catastrophically. This jeremiad applies equally as well to bioengineers throughout the world who do not know the basic genetic preconditions of life, the function of some genes, how they interact, and what the long-term consequences may be of tampering with the DNA of plants, bacteria, animals, and human beings. Life breaks free.
Life expands into new territories.
Painfully, even dangerously. As W.J.T. Mitchell notes in his fascinating cultural study, The Last Dinosaur , dinosaurs are richly overdetermined and multivalent in meaning. Like Stephen Jay Gould, Mitchell seeks to explain dinomania, but he rejects what he claims is Gould's ahistorical appeal to archetypes and he roots different images and perceptions of dinosaurs in commercial imperatives and changing social conditions. The enormous size and monstrous nature of dinosaurs are convenient emblems of global capitalism. As rapacious eaters, moreover, dinosaurs are fitting icons of an energy intensive social system and glutinous consumers whose lifestyles exact a heavy ecological price.