Michael Crichton. The Lost World. Ballantine, 1995.

The Lost World is the second novel Michael Crichton wrote about the reconstituted dinosaurs on the fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica. The first was Jurassic Park, where an attempt to monetize the discovery into a traveler’s destination (think the Galapagos Islands) turned into a nightmare.

The Lost World is set five years later, so the tale contains 1994 technology. Two groups of people land on the island at the same time to study the dinosaurs, but they have cross purposes. The dinosaurs have gotten wilder: Nearly all the surviving lizards after the 1989 Jurassic Park disaster are predators. The conflicts are both man vs. man and, more seriously, man vs. beasts. Crichton tells a great story. Readers will enthusiastically keep the pages turning.

There are a few interesting things woven into the story. Young readers or readers who were young once probably recall reading elementary or young adult novels where the protagonists are children who get involved in situations with adults and help solve the mystery or problem in the story.

The tradition perhaps goes back to stories like Treasure Island and Captains Courageous, and one could even make a case for David in the Bible or Telemachus in the Odyssey. Still, in the twentieth century this became a standard. The Hardy Boys solved their mysteries because they somehow always got involved with cases their father, a famous private detective, was working on. Ditto with Nancy Drew whose father was a famous defense attorney. Now thousands of YA books do something similar with their young protagonists.

Even though The Lost World is written for adults (for a chuckle, see what Crichton wrote about Jurassic Park here), kids play an important role. Two middle schoolers who have made connections with a well-known paleontologist get wind of his plans to investigate the Jurassic Park island when he realizes that some dinosaurs have lived on. Except perhaps for a smattering of profanity, this story would be appropriate for an eager YA reader.

They stow themselves away and end up on the island with a small group of adult scientists. Another generation can envy them the way my generation envied Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys for getting involved in a bunch of exciting mysteries. They both contribute to the overall expedition thanks to one’s interest in paleontology and the other’s knowledge of computers.

The Lost World makes some interesting observations about culture. The leading paleontologist notes that the velociraptors—yes, they are still there and just as dangerous as in Jurassic Park—seem to have different behaviors from what the fossil record suggests. Fossils reveal velociraptor nurseries that suggest that the adult dinosaurs fed and nurtured the young ones. On The Lost World island, however, nothing like that has developed, and it is strictly every dino for itself.

Perhaps most intriguing to this reader is that Crichton admits something that many scientists refuse to acknowledge. While Crichton apparently believes in evolution and an old earth, through his characters he notes that there are major disagreements on how evolution works. He even notes that the existence of extinction challenges the theory, and that 150 years after Darwin people disagree on the mechanism or mechanisms which cause evolution.

Indeed, in his afterword, Crichton notes over two dozen scientists whose ideas influenced the book—and these theorists often disagree with one another and present a wide variety of hypotheses. One of the characters in the novel notes that it is next to impossible for random chemicals to spontaneously combine to begin living, but that must have been what happened. He even notes that some people say that life forms came to earth from another planet, but all that does is put off the same question to another location.

One of the characters says that Homo sapiens appeared some time around 70,000 B.C., a fairly common assumption. However, another character challenges that idea because it appears that writing and record keeping only began about six to ten thousand years ago. That would indicate truly sapient humans in the way we understand mankind today. That is true whether one believes in a young earth or a big bang fifteen billion years ago.

I recall the press getting mocking a politician who said something like “in the five thousand years of recorded history.” They accused him for being an “unscientific” creationist. Even big-bangers have to acknowledge that 3,000 B.C. is roughly as far back as recorded history goes. Anything older we infer from archaeology, geology, and fossils, not historical records. Crichton gets it.

The goal of the chief protagonist in The Lost World is to observe how the “new” dinosaurs adapt to their environment and develop their own ways of doing things. From these observations, perhaps we can get some clues as to how they evolved or why they went extinct. Of course, as the lost world becomes too dangerous, we are not going to find out anything this time. All the island’s human visitors are fleeing for their lives.

I was reminded of one of the last things Crichton wrote before he died—his speech and essay entitled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” Clearly even the title reflects something of his position. Let’s examine the science carefully, he says, before jumping to radical conclusions. The Lost World suggests the same temperate view concerning evolution.

A common concept about evolution that actually began with Darwin writing about the Galapagos Islands is that evolution within a species that hypothetically brings forth new species is more likely to take place in an isolated population. Masses bring uniformity. One of the characters then makes a cautionary observation which in 1994 was prescient. Now we are beginning to see how entities like Facebook, WeChat, Baidu, and Google promote groupthink. He says:

In ten thousand years humans have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species….

Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent and evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it becomes impossible. Thirty people, and nothing happens. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps [sic] diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity….

And believe me it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. (339-340)

The Lost World is more than just entertainment. It raises serious questions, and not just about genetic engineering. Are we up to the challenge?