Disambiguation Links – Ian Malcolm (S/F) / Ian Malcolm (JN)
Ian Malcolm was one of the experts brought to Isla Nublar to endorse John Hammond’s biological preserve, Jurassic Park. Malcolm could be described as a rock star, being a mathematician, and only wears two colors-black and gray. He believed in Chaos Theory, which stated that small glitches in a system can and will eventually worsen and destroy the very system itself. It was his opinion that the systems at Jurassic Park were far too complex to be properly maintained, and were therefore doomed to failure. He also felt that Hammond and his scientists were undisciplined and foolish for choosing to bring dinosaurs back to life, and that there was no possible way for them to control the animals, nor care for them. Hoping to prove his point on the tour, Malcolm accompanied Alan Grant and the other experts to view the dinosaurs. He used a proposed ‘compy height chart’ to show that the dinosaurs were in fact breeding. Later, during the Tyrannosaurus rex attack on the Land Cruisers, Malcolm attempted to flee but was thrown by the rex in a ‘half-hearted attack’. He was rescued later by Robert Muldoon and Donald Gennaro, and suffered a lot of damage to his leg. He remained conscious for a while, and continued to insult Hammond’s plans. However, he soon slipped into delirium. It was believed that he died before the island’s bombing, with his body carried away in a helicopter. However, luckily for Malcolm, doctors were able to heal him and keep him alive.
After the incident, Malcolm tried to keep the existence of dinosaurs a secret though he proposed some ideas that seemed to hint the existence of InGen’s ‘secret dinosaurs’. He partnered with Richard Levine to discover the location of Site B, where dinosaurs still lived, and later accompanied the expedition to the island. Malcolm worked with Levine to collect data on the dinosaurs and helped Sarah Harding, his past girlfriend, to work on the injured leg of a baby Tyrannosaurus. During the attempt, he and Harding were attacked in the trailers by the adult Tyrannosaurs, and Ian injured his leg again during a fall. Harding and Jack Thorne rescued him, and Harding attempted to clean out his wounds. Soon, though, they had to flee to the worker village. Malcolm was able to escape the island later on a boat with the other survivors.
However, he opined that he doubted the island could tell much about extinction from observation of the satellite feeds. He mused that extinction had happened several times on the planet, and some were caused by natural disasters, and some were not. He mused that the Permian Extinction resulted in the loss of over eighty percent of life on the planet and a cause was unknown. He thought that the next large extinction event could be caused by human destruction because they were extraordinarily good at destruction in his opinion. He wondered whether the destruction of the ecosystem was Humanity’s place, to let the ecosystem balance out. However, he was rebutted by Thorne, who pointed out that it was just a theory,made in light of insufficient evidence. He compared this theory to older theories like phlogiston, and humorism and referred to seemingly ‘outdated’ thinking and new theories like the belief that human behavior was controlled by self-esteem and ego. And thinking that because they had no other better explanation.
