Chaos and catastrophes

Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park is an allegation against the unreasonable use of science. In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, one of the characters in the book:

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the ga me in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act... Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

This problem arises especially in the scientific field that serves as the basis for Crichton's novel, genetic engineering, which poses many important ethical problems. There are many things that we can already do, or are close to achieving, but should they be done? I will mention a few:

The debacle of determinism

Isaac Newton

By the end of the eighteenth century, Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation was well established. As this theory makes it possible to predict very accurately the orbits of the bodies in the solar system, the French astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace believed he had sufficient reasons to say the following:

An intelligence that knew all the forces that animate nature, as well as the respective situation of the beings that make it... could cover in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the lighter atom. Nothing would be uncertain and both the future and the past would be present before his eyes.

This assertion became the dogma of deterministic materialism, a philosophical (not scientific) doctrine asserting that only matter exists (taking the term broadly) and that the whole history of the universe is determined. Therefore there is no human freedom, nor intentionality, nor final causes in nature. There are just efficient causes.

Laplace’s statement can be expressed in more modern terms:

If we knew the position and the momentum of all the particles of the universe at a given instant, we could predict all their past and future development.