Chapter 35
Malcolm
"You know Sarah, life is such an amazing thing," said Ian dreamily, looking up at the ceiling of the maintenance shed as if it were telling him all the secrets of the universe.
"How's that Ian?" asked Sarah warily, sitting on her knees at the side of his makeshift bedding, soaking a flannel with her water bottle.
Malcolm had regained consciousness ten minutes before, groaning in pain and breathing shallowly. She could tell from his incomprehensible mutterings that his condition hadn't changed since his last brief moment of lucidity, but this time he seemed to be fully awake for the first time since the day before.
Sarah didn't know what else to do with him; she was qualified to treat animals, and had been sufficiently experienced in field medicine to treat most injuries and ailments. But she wasn't a medical doctor, she was a scientist. And none of the others seemed to know what was wrong with him either. She could only hope that help would arrive on the island before his condition became any worse. Not knowing what else to do, she had given him a shot of morphine which Anderson had left with her.
Malcolm seemed to welcome the drug, and she had a suspicion that it wasn't just for the relief of the pain. She had seen him on morphine several years before, on more than one occasion, and she was sure that he somewhat enjoyed it. His ramblings never ceased while he was drugged like he was now, nor did they ever wander from being riddled with chaos theorems and mixed with other sentences with were completely nonsensical.
Within minutes of receiving the injection he had begun to sing merrily, adding his own lyrics to several tunes. And now he was remarking on life, and she was sure that they were about to launch into a conversation that only he would understand fully.
"Because, Sarah," whispered Ian, giggling slightly, as if he were telling her a great secret, "it's such a wonderful subject to study. So full of chaos. It's a miracle that it exists at all."
Sarah nodded as she laid the dripping flannel across his forehead, causing Ian to sigh contentedly. "I've heard this before, Ian," she said, "you've always said how life is just as unpredictable as any complex system. And that we're powerless to control it."
"Yes, Sarah," said Ian, opening his eyes wider for a moment, and gripping her coat loosely with one hand, while pointing at her with the other. "That's just it. We've seen it happen over and over. We lock animals up in zoos, thinking that we have complete control over them, and we never doubt ourselves or falter in our arrogance. But the animals escape all the time. Elephants and moose are easily the greatest jail breakers of all time; they unlatch fence gates with apparent ease. Yet the owners of these zoos never change the designs of these cages, they just shove them back in their cage and wait for it to happen again. And why does this continue to occur? Because we assume that no animal can possibly rival the ingenuity and mental prowess that we possess. People pass it off as pure chance, a freak accident that the animals managed to free themselves. But it happens all over the world. And none of these animals have ever seen it happen. They were never taught to do so by an elder. They figured it out for themselves."
"Yes, I can see your point—"
"Environmentalists are another example," continued Malcolm as if Sarah hadn't said anything. "They claim to be fighting for the earth, to save it from the evil destructive forces of man. But as good as their intentions may be, they have no idea what they're doing, nor do they comprehend the complexity of the systems that they interfere with. And most of them never even bother to try, because as with all human conceptions, they are brainwashed by the social collective into thinking that by adopting that poor baby koala bear that they're saving the world."
"So, what are you saying? We shouldn't try?" asked Sarah, more than a little offended at Ian's blatant attack on the
conservationist community that she had spent most of her adult life an active part of in Africa.
"No, no," said Malcolm with a small cough, "not at all. Look, take a basic food chain. Say you have a field of grass, and you put two dozen Rabbits in it, and they feed on the grass. And within this area you also have two Hawks. Now, the Rabbits will feed on the grass, and the Hawks will feed on the Rabbits. But the amount of Rabbits in the field ensures that the amount of the grass in the field stays almost the same; there aren't enough Rabbits to eat all of the grass, but there are enough to keep it in check, to stop it growing out of control. And the same is true with the Hawks; there are only enough of them to keep the Rabbit population from growing by too much, but there are never enough Hawks to kill of all of the Rabbits. Nature, it seems, creates its own equilibrium."
Sarah was nodding. What he was saying was taught in schools throughout the world, but she wasn't sure whether what he was saying had any significance, or whether it was simply the ravings of his drugged mind.
"But suppose that one of the Hawks came down with a sickness, or it broke its leg. Surely, in order to maintain the equilibrium, and to protect the Hawk as a species, it's only prudent for us to intervene, to help it. Right?"
"Right."
"Wrong," said Malcolm, eyeing her with distant disappointment through glazed eyes. He shifted his position on the floor slightly, and groaned as his leg moved like a dead weight. Sarah held it steady gently, and moved it back towards its original position.
"What do you mean?" she asked, sitting back and resting her head against one of the boxes that littered the floor.
Malcolm licked his lips, and continued in a determined voice, as if giving a lecture to an ignorant class of schoolchildren. "This natural equilibrium has been maintained for billions of years, and it happens without any outside intrusion whatsoever. It's a perfect balance, sensitive to any form of tampering. As soon as we blunder our way into the system and start introducing new variables, the entire system is more than likely to collapse."
Sarah shook her head. "You're losing me. How is that possible?" he said. "You'd give the bird a shot of antibiotics, or set its leg, release it back into the wild and everything would be the same as it always has been."
"That's what we'd like to believe," said Malcolm, nodding faintly, "but in practice, that is rarely the case. If you help that Hawk, then you interrupt nature's course of action."
"But surely if it had died then the Rabbit population would grow out of control, and eat all of the grass," said Sarah.
"Ah yes, of course. But you are forgetting that this is a mere pinprick. This is one single food chain. If that Hawk had died, then a cat, or a fox, or some other predator would take its place. Now, the Rabbit population may increase slightly, and the grass might decrease, but the system would recover. It's a perfect system of evolutionary precision. Built over billions of years. And we know so little, yet we assume that we have the power to 'save' nature."
"So we sit back and watch as species become extinct?" said Sarah.
Ian paused for a moment, and took a deep breath. After a few seconds, he nodded slowly. "Until we can fully appreciate the complexity of the systems in which we aim to control, yes, we watch."
"How can you say that we, say let the Rhinoceros go extinct?" Sarah said in indignation.
"Sarah, species have been going extinct since the beginning of life. In actual fact over ninety nine percent of every species that has ever lived is now gone. And yet, life remains. Why? Because that is Nature's way. If an animal can adapt no further to the ever changing environment, then it will be weeded out, in favor of a more adapted species. If we change that, we can cause things to happen that we can never predict."
"Like what?"
"Say we save all these wonderful animals from going extinct. What then? Do these animals require any further adaptation in order to survive? Are the weaker ones weeded out in favor of the strongest? No. We will, in essence, render evolution inert."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"When you think about it at first it doesn't sound so bad, does it? We can create a world free from competition, from damnation. But think to yourself, what happens when we're no longer here to play the caretaker?"
Sarah sighed, and closed her eyes. He was being arrogant now, and she could see that in this state there wouldn't be room for her side of the debate. Although, she had to admit that during these conversations Ian always displayed a notion which pertained to thought beyond thinking. He saw things that she had never thought of.
"Babe…" Malcolm began to sing merrily, "I got you babe…" He then receded into humming the song's tune incessantly, looking back up at the ceiling.
"What's your point in all this?" Sarah asked, trying to pass the time by keeping the conversation going.
"My point is Sarah," said Malcolm, resuming his determined tone immediately, "is that we think that we know more than is actually possible. This island displays a perfect example of just that. The men who created this island never stopped to think that what they were setting out to do; to re-create a horde of animals that have never been seen, heard or touched by anybody, that we know absolutely nothing about. They never stopped once to consider the fact that what they were doing would inevitably lead to disaster. Because they never expected that the dinosaurs would display intelligence of their own, nor did they have any idea of the limitations of any intelligence which that might be. They simply released them into their pretty little paddocks and set to work on creating the next batch of animals. They didn't study each animal, document its behavior, its habits, its social structure. None of it. And they therefore threw away any chance that they may have had in truly controlling any of them."
"Human beings are the first sentient animals to inhabit this planet, which we know of. Within thirty thousand years we have gone from a hunter gatherer species living in caves and living in fear of everything, to farming, to the Pyramids, to the industrial revolution, to the atomic bomb, to the computer, to the moon. All of it occurring with exponential speed. Two
hundred years ago if you had told somebody that you wanted to built a flying machine capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean everybody would have laughed rancorously, and promptly announced you insane. Now, it's hard for people not to imagine the convenience of passenger airliners. One hundred years ago, if you had asked somebody to work out a complex mathematical equation, they would have had to grab a pencil or a piece of chalk. Now, everybody has a computer in their homes capable of working it out in a second."
"And this means?" asked Sarah.
"We are now entering the age of biotechnology, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, etcetera, and etcetera. All of this is projected to have had an adverse affect on everybody's lives within the next decade."
"We have all of this right now. Isn't that enough just to save a few animals?" asked Sarah pleadingly.
"My point exactly Sarah. We have all this right now. All the technology we could ask for. But that's not enough to do what we would like. At the exponential rate in which we're advancing, we'll be experimenting with quantum computers in just a few years. All this, right now. Imagine what we'll have tomorrow. If we have the mind to wait, just wait, then we might be able to do the right thing for once, when we're ready."