There’s a moment near the beginning of Jurassic Park — the novel, specifically — where chaos theorist Ian Malcolm sits across from the park’s creator, John Hammond, and delivers what amounts to the entire thesis of the book in a single paragraph. He explains, with the patient condescension of a man who has done the math and genuinely wishes he hadn’t, that the park is going to fail. Not might fail. Will fail. The system is too complex, the variables too unpredictable, the ambition too far ahead of the understanding required to support it.

Hammond, of course, dismisses him. Hammond has already built the thing. The gift shop designs are done. There’s a logo.

I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot lately, because the real world has caught up to Michael Crichton in ways that are equal parts thrilling and deeply unsettling — and I find myself, somewhat to my own surprise, firmly in Malcolm’s corner.

The Setup You Already Know

If you’ve seen the 1993 film — and statistically speaking, you probably have, given that it was the highest-grossing movie ever made at the time of its release — you know the broad strokes. Billionaire John Hammond builds a theme park full of genetically resurrected dinosaurs on a remote island off Costa Rica. He invites a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, and a mathematician to evaluate it before opening. The mathematician hates everything about it on principle. The power goes out. Things go badly wrong in the specific and spectacular way that things go badly wrong when there are large predatory animals and no functioning electric fences.

The novel goes deeper than the film on the ethical scaffolding underneath all of this. Crichton, who trained as a physician and spent much of his career writing about the dangers of unchecked scientific ambition, was making a very deliberate argument. He opens the book by noting the shift in how science had changed — moving away from universities, where research was conducted for the collective good, toward private laboratories where it was done “in secret, in haste, and for profit.” InGen, the company behind Jurassic Park, isn’t portrayed as cartoonishly evil. Hammond isn’t twirling a mustache. He genuinely believes he’s giving the world a gift.

That’s actually what makes it scary. The road to a T. rex loose in a theme park is paved with good intentions and insufficient humility.

What Malcolm Was Actually Saying

Critics of the novel — and there were some — dismissed Malcolm’s long speeches about chaos theory as pretentious philosophizing. One contemporary review called it “dime-store philosophizing,” which is the kind of thing you say when someone is making a point you don’t want to sit with.

But Malcolm’s argument is worth unpacking, because it’s more nuanced than “science bad.” He isn’t anti-science. He’s against a specific pathology that can infect science when it operates without accountability: the assumption that achieving something proves you understand it.

Hammond’s team could clone a dinosaur. They could observe it, measure it, contain it — for a while. What they couldn’t do was fully model the downstream consequences of what they’d created. The gap between “we made this” and “we understand what making this means” is, Malcolm kept insisting, not a minor technical detail. It’s the whole problem. And the particular arrogance of Hammond’s enterprise was that it treated that gap as though it didn’t exist.

Crichton made the same argument in the language of chaos theory that he’d made elsewhere in the language of medicine, computer science, and corporate culture: complex systems resist the kind of top-down control that human beings tend to assume they’re capable of. The park’s dinosaurs began breeding despite being engineered as all-female. The frog DNA used to fill genomic gaps turned out to carry the capacity for sex change in single-sex environments. Life, as Malcolm memorably puts it, finds a way — and the problem with that statement is that it sounds like wonder when it’s actually a warning.

Here’s Where It Gets Uncomfortable

For most of the 1990s and 2000s, you could enjoy Jurassic Park as a cracking thriller and file de-extinction comfortably under “science fiction.” The specific mechanism Crichton used — extracting viable DNA from insects preserved in amber — has been definitively ruled out. Ancient DNA degrades, and the idea of recovering functional genetic material from a 65-million-year-old mosquito is, as scientists have gently but firmly explained, not a thing that is going to happen.

But the broader project? That’s very much alive.

Jack Horner, the actual paleontologist who served as scientific advisor on all the original Jurassic Park films, has spent years working on what he calls the “Chickenosaurus” project — the idea that since birds are the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs, you might reverse-engineer a dinosaur-like creature by activating dormant ancestral genes in a chicken embryo. His 2009 book, How to Build a Dinosaur, laid out the science in earnest. It’s not Jurassic Park science — no amber, no mosquitoes — but it’s real science, conducted by the man who spent years on those sets warning Spielberg when the dinosaur behavior was inaccurate.

Meanwhile, a company called Colossal Biosciences is currently working to resurrect the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo using genetic engineering. Gareth Edwards, who directed the 2025 film Jurassic World Rebirth, visited Colossal’s laboratories during production and said, upon arrival: “This is the real Jurassic Park, isn’t it?”

That quote should probably give us pause. It was not intended as a warning. It was intended as excitement.

The Case For (And It’s Not Nothing)

I want to be fair here, because the pro-de-extinction argument deserves a genuine hearing rather than a dismissive eyeroll.

The most compelling version of the argument centers on responsibility. Many extinctions — particularly those of the last few centuries — were caused directly by human activity. We hunted the passenger pigeon to nothing. We introduced invasive species that wiped out endemic island birds. We destroyed habitats at a scale that species couldn’t adapt to fast enough. If we bear responsibility for those losses, there’s a real ethical argument that we bear some responsibility for trying to correct them.

There’s also a legitimate ecological case. Ecosystems are networks of interdependence, and losing a species can trigger cascading effects throughout the system. The woolly mammoth, proponents argue, played a key role in maintaining Arctic grasslands; restoring it could theoretically slow permafrost thaw and address one small piece of a very large climate puzzle.

And honestly? There’s something genuinely moving about the idea that extinction doesn’t have to be forever. The dodo is a punchline, but it was also a living creature, and it’s gone because Dutch sailors found it too easy to catch. Something in us recoils at that kind of permanent loss, and I don’t think that instinct is entirely wrong.

But Here’s Why Malcolm Was Right

Here’s my problem: the argument for de-extinction requires a level of ecological confidence that our track record simply doesn’t support.

De-extinct animals wouldn’t be returning to the ecosystems they left. Those ecosystems have changed — dramatically, in some cases — in their absence. Introducing a species back into an environment it didn’t evolve for, in a world reshaped by a century of human activity, is precisely the kind of complex-system intervention that produces unpredictable results. We have extensive, grim documentation of what happens when species get introduced into environments they weren’t part of. It rarely goes the way anyone planned.

There’s also a resource argument that I find genuinely troubling. De-extinction is expensive and technically demanding. It requires the sustained attention of some of the world’s best geneticists. Meanwhile, thousands of living species are sliding toward extinction right now, today, for want of funding, political will, and habitat protection. The decision to pour resources into resurrecting the woolly mammoth is, necessarily, a decision not to spend those resources somewhere else. It’s worth asking who makes that call, and what assumptions are baked into it.

But the deepest issue — and this is where I keep coming back to Crichton — is the one Malcolm was raising all along: not “can we do this?” or even “should we do this?” but “who decides, and who bears the consequences if it goes wrong?”

Colossal Biosciences is a private company operating with private funding and private incentives. The regulatory frameworks for de-extinction are, to put it diplomatically, underdeveloped. The communities and ecosystems that would absorb the actual consequences of a de-extinction gone sideways have limited say in whether it happens. That is precisely the structure Crichton was diagnosing in 1990 when he wrote about science conducted “in secret, in haste, and for profit.” The technology has changed. The power dynamics, unfortunately, have not.

Hammond didn’t ask whether he should bring back dinosaurs. He asked whether he could, confirmed that he could, and then started planning the gift shop. The venture capitalists backing Colossal are doing something more sophisticated and more responsible than Hammond — but they are also, fundamentally, asking whether they can, and treating the answer to that question as sufficient justification for proceeding.

Malcolm would recognize the pattern.

What Jurassic Park Got Right (And What the Sequels Quietly Abandoned)

Here’s the bittersweet irony of all this: Jurassic Park was remarkably effective at sparking public interest in paleontology. Scientists credit the franchise with driving increased funding and a surge in fossil discoveries throughout the 1990s. It popularized de-extinction as a concept in a way that no academic paper ever could. It got millions of people thinking seriously about genetic engineering, about the ethics of creation, about what we owe to the natural world.

And then, gradually, the franchise stopped asking those questions.

The later films have leaned harder and harder into spectacle, and Crichton’s cautionary note has grown fainter with each entry. By Jurassic World Dominion, we’re watching a globe-trotting action movie in which dinosaurs are largely backdrop. The specific ethical discomfort that animates the original novel — the quiet horror of creation without accountability — has been traded for bigger set pieces and more elaborate hybrid dinosaurs.

Which is fine. Movies are movies. But there’s something almost perfectly ironic about a franchise built on a warning against commercializing the act of creation becoming a multi-billion-dollar commercial juggernaut with theme park rides, Lego sets, and an Xfinity commercial featuring digitally de-aged versions of the original cast. Crichton wrote about a man who couldn’t resist turning dinosaurs into a product. The franchise Crichton accidentally launched has become, in its own way, the very thing he was warning against.

John Hammond would have loved it. Ian Malcolm would have had thoughts.

The Question I Can’t Shake

Here’s where I land, and I’ll be honest that I’m not entirely comfortable with my own position.

I believe Malcolm was right. I believe the gap between what we can do and what we understand well enough to do responsibly is still very large, and I believe the institutional structures we’ve built — private companies, minimal regulation, incentives optimized for investor returns — are not well-suited to close that gap carefully. I believe that when the consequences of getting something wrong are systemic and potentially irreversible, the burden of proof should be very high, and I’m not sure we’re meeting it.

And yet. The dodo is gone. The passenger pigeon is gone. The Tasmanian tiger is gone. The Steller’s sea cow is gone. These losses were real, and we caused them, and the instinct to try to correct them is not the worst impulse human beings have ever acted on.

Maybe the answer isn’t “don’t do it.” Maybe it’s “do it differently” — with stronger oversight, broader input, slower timelines, and less deference to whoever happens to have the venture capital.

Or maybe that’s exactly the kind of compromise that sounds reasonable in the abstract and falls apart when the money gets involved.

I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. And I think that discomfort — that inability to resolve the question cleanly — is probably the most honest response available.

Malcolm spent the whole movie being right, and nobody listened until the bodies were on the ground. I’d like to think we’ve gotten better at listening to the people who do the math and don’t like the answer.

I’d like to think that.

Where do you come down on this? I’m curious whether anyone finds the pro-de-extinction case ultimately convincing — because I keep trying to, and I keep ending up back in Malcolm’s corner.