The most important part of yesterday’s story about the brand new cold-loving cockroaches of New York City is the discovery that scientists have learned nothing from Jurassic Park and will damn us all with their hubris and lack of foresight.
The likelihood that the new species will mate with the locals to create a hybrid super-roach is slim.
“The male and female genitalia fit together like a lock and key, and that differs by species,” Evangelista says. “So we assume that one won’t fit the other.”
COUNTERPOINT THE FIRST
NEVER ASSUME ANYTHING
COUNTERPOINT THE SECOND
HOW SLIM IS “SLIM” EXACTLY
COUNTERPOINT THE THIRD
Henry Wu: Actually they can’t breed in the wild. Population control is one of our security precautions. There’s no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: How do you know they can’t breed?
Henry Wu: Well, because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We’ve engineered them that way.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: But again, how do you know they’re all female? Does somebody go out into the park and pull up the dinosaurs’ skirts?
Henry Wu: We control their chromosomes. It’s really not that difficult. All vertebrate embryos are inherently female anyway, they just require an extra hormone given at the right developmental stage to make them male. We simply deny them that.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: John, the kind of control you’re attempting simply is… it’s not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh… well, there it is.
John Hammond: There it is.
Henry Wu: You’re implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will… breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I’m, I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.
COUNTERPOINT THE FOURTH
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Gee, the lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh… staggers me.
COUNTERPOINT THE FIFTH
Dr. Alan Grant: Oh, my God. Do you know what this is? This is a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs are breeding.
Tim: But Grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls.
Dr. Alan Grant: Amphibian DNA.
Lex: What’s that?
Dr. Alan Grant: Well, on the tour, the film said they used frog DNA to fill in the gene sequence gaps. They mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it with that of a frog’s. Now, some West African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment. Malcolm was right. Look…
[we see a trail of baby dinosaur footprints]
Dr. Alan Grant: Life found a way.
COUNTERPOINT THE SIXTH
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Dr. Sattler, Dr. Grant, you’ve heard of chaos theory?
Dr. Ellie Sattler: No.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No? Non-linear equations? Strange attractions? Dr. Sattler, I refuse to believe that you aren’t familiar with the concept of attraction.
These cold-loving super-roach hybrids will almost certainly be worse than we could possibly have imagined. Possibly they will feed on snow itself, growing to immense proportions after every blizzard. Almost certainly they will develop some sort of rudimentary “snow language” or “ice-chatter.”
They’re very clever girls.
