Michael Crichton Died Recently!

I’m probably the only one on the planet who missed the news that Michael Crichton died on November 8th of this year. He died of throat cancer at age 66. I hadn’t heard about his death until about a week ago.

Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT.

However, Crichton is best known as a writer and filmmaker. He wrote The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park and created the TV series ER. His 2004 novel entitled State of Fear challenged the alleged scientific consensus about global warming both in its plot line and in a non-fictional afterword and two appendicies. Crichton was concerned that science in general was losing its objectivity and was being co-opted by political interests.

I was very impressed by a speech he gave in 2003 entitled Environmentalism as Religion. I recently re-read that speech to get some quotes for a project I was working on. In the course of doing so, I learned that Crichton had died recently.

I started reading some of his other speeches and found them as insightful as the original essay that brought him to my attention. He wrote a lot about science — both about it potential and about its misuse.

He was a gifted writer. To wet your appetite, consider this gem about a headline from a so called “scientific” study. The headline read: “How Many Species Exist? The question takes on increasing significance as plants and animals vanish before scientists can even identify them.”

Commenting on this, Crichton says, “Now, wait a minute…How could you know something vanished before you identified it? If you didn’t know it existed, you wouldn’t have any way to know it was gone. Would you? In fact, the statement is nonsense. If you were never married you’d never know if your wife left you.”

If you are interested, here is a Crichton sampler:

Environmentalism as Religion — environmentalism appeals to urban atheists but it is almost a perfect parrallel to the Judeo-Christian religion (doubly interesting becasue I think Crichton was an urban atheist)

The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming — a good discussion of various problems with global warming orthodoxy. Includes a helpful summary of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that is featured so prominently by global warming adovcates but which has been shown by other scientists to be inaccurate.

Testimony before the United State Senate — regarding the proper role of science in public policy making.

Aliens Cause Global Warming — a romp through beliefs in extraterrestials, nuclear winter and other discredited psuedo-scientific pursuits and how similar they are to the global warming issue of today.

Why Speculate? — the opening two paragraphs of this speech are priceless.

Some of these speeches are quite long but all are, in my opinion, very insightful.

Enjoy!