But, Mommy, When Do the Dinosaurs Start to Sing? : Society: Parents are complaining about the violence in ‘Jurassic Park.’ But since when is nature an Eden, orderly and serene?

GGGRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!! (an actual quote, not a reconstruction) says that cute, cuddly Tyrannosaurus Rex as he smashes the car that the lunches--I mean actors--are riding in during the rainstorm when the power to the electric fences that are supposed to contain the resurrected thunder lizards fails just when, conveniently, everyone is most vulnerable in the new movie “Jurassic Park.” Cute little Rexy proceeds to attempt to devour just about everybody on the menu--I mean in the cast: to snarf up one of the equally antisocial but smaller velociraptor dinosaurs, munching away on his reptilian cousin as the terrified lunches--I mean actors--look on.

“Jurassic Park” may be one terrific suspense flick, but it’s not a pretty picture of dino life. (And OK, so most dinosaurs actually lived during the Cretaceous, not Jurassic, era. Call Rexy’s agent about that. Just remember: TRY NOT TO GET REXY UPSET.) In fact, “Jurassic Park” presents such an daunting, unpretty portrait of dino life that some commentators believe the movie does a disservice. “We teach dinosaurs as extinct animals and how much fun it would be if they were alive,” one elementary-school teacher told The Times. “But we don’t really go into what their behavior would be like if they were here today. . . . It would be a horrible shock for these kids.”

Many children do, in fact, believe that dinosaurs were cute, sweet, friendly beasts. Such ideas are fostered by children’s books and movies generally; by the popular new “Dinotopia” picture book, in which humans and thunder lizards abide harmoniously in a romanticized pretechnological society where everyone recycles and all parents seem to be employed as transcendental-meditation teachers, and in the hideous, revolting, saccharine, contemptibly puerile and therefore, of course, wildly popular “Barney and Friends” public-television show, starring some ingratiating dimwit singing lovey-dovey songs in a purple dinosaur suit.

If Steven Spielberg were to produce a horror movie in which Barney is gobbled up by Rexy, it would be a smash among my peer group of young parents--assuming the violence against Barney was graphic and whoever is inside that purple suit was depicted as dying very slowly in intense pain while sickly sweet music plays.

Though the details of dinosaur comportment in “Jurassic Park” involve some speculation--no one, including the film’s credentialed paleontological advisers, knows with assurance how T. Rex or any dinosaur behaved--the basic premise is likely to be accurate. Dinosaurs were not Quakers. We can be certain that many dinosaurs devoted much of their waking energies to pursuing, goring and devouring their fellow creatures. We can be certain because this is how many creatures live today.

In the modern era of environmental consciousness, somehow a notion has arisen that, without the intrusion of humankind, the state of nature is a utopia. Birds sing, flowers bloom, attentive mother creatures nurture their furry young. All this does happen, but many of the mothers have claws and fangs.

“Back to Eden” often appears as a slogan of the environmental movement. Kirkpatrick Sale has written that before white people came to North America, the continent was a “prelapsarian Eden” knowing only abundance and rapture. No: Animals were chasing and goring each other, Native Americans were chasing animals and goring them, Native Americans were chasing and goring each other. In Eden, the lion slept with the lamb. That does not happen in the real world.

People can imagine nature is an Eden, because we sit at a pinnacle of the food chain. No species preys on us. But to the millions of Earth’s creatures that live to be chased and eaten, it is doubtful that the natural scheme suggests Eden. What do we suppose an antelope experiences, dying in terror as its flesh is shredded by a tiger--blissful oneness with the universe?

Cruel death may be a functional inevitability of a natural system; as far as is known, the only way for biological creatures to exist is to consume biological substances. But some factions of the environmental movement consider recognition of cruelties inherent in nature to be bad for business, and so have advanced the Edenic mythology that inspires some of the current reaction to “Jurassic Park.”

“Jurassic Park” is surely too intense for many young children; I would hardly let my 4-year-old go. But is the basic horror of slavering animals attempting to devour Hollywood starpersons something to which no child should be exposed?

As Bruno Bettelheim has written, children, from a surprisingly early age, are suspicious of adults who offer sugarcoated versions of the world. They sense that the world contains bad news, if only because they observe bugs and animals dying, and know that some of the food they eat was once alive. Despite my constant instructions not to, my 2 1/2-year-old daughter stomps on bugs and pronounces, “That bug is HISTORY!” She didn’t get that from me--or from Barney.

The darkness of childhood imaginings is often cited as a reason for the constant themes of awfulness that run through such supposedly cute children’s classics as the Brothers Grimm stories.

Anybody remember the plot line of Hansel and Gretel? Evil stepmother thinks Hansel and Gretel eat too much, so she wants to kill them. The kids’ father, a woodcarver, considers that a bit extreme, but is willing to lose them in the forest so they will starve to death. In the forest, the witch catches the kids. Hansel goes into a cage, where he is fattened up so the witch can eat him. Gretel is treated as a slave, later told to prepare a fire for her own brother’s body. At the last minute, the kids kill the witch by shoving her into an oven. They discover her secret stash of diamonds and jewels. Now fabulously rich, the kids return home to find their role-model dad has “driven off” the stepmother. His mind opened by the jewels, dad welcomes the kids back home.

Warm story, huh? Makes “Jurassic Park” seem like a model of ethical behavior. At least the dinos in the movie are only responding to an instinct to eat.

Critics have also hit the movie for having a maudlin moral, that vegetarians are better than meat eaters. The carnivore dinosaurs are all bad guys. But several characters experience moments of bonding with the herbivore dinos, who are depicted as attentive and loving. Just because an animal is a herbivore does not mean it is a sweetie. Llamas, for example, are among the cutest and seemingly most mild mannered of God’s creatures: And if you tick them off, which can be surprisingly easy, they spit in your face.

Actually, the moral of “Jurassic Park” is not maudlin; it displays, whether by design or accident, a sophisticated understanding of the latest scientific research.

The standard textbook view of nature is that of an amoral, Darwinian realm where every creature is trying to render every other creature extinct. Competition rules.

That standard view is currently being assailed by a number of researchers and analysts, most prominently the botanist Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She believes that cooperation, not competition, is the primary force of the natural world. Statistically, most species do not prey on others. Most species either cooperate with other life forms (birds scatter seeds by excreting them after eating the fruits of plants, and so on) or seek to evolve toward open elements of the local ecological niche, places where they can coexist without threatening other life forms.

If you think about it, evolutionary logic might favor creatures that avoid destruction combat. That is, the meek really might inherit. Already, that appears to be the case: Today “meek” species outnumber aggressive ones by a huge margin, and, as Darwin described the rules of his contest, whoever ended up with the most offspring would be the winner.

As the Harvard University entomologist Edward Wilson has recently written, since most species are not predators, it may be something of a fluke that intelligence first arose in a hunter primate. Had it first arisen in a herding herbivore, much of history’s tragedies might have been avoided. (Though we might all have two sets of stomachs and spend a large portion of the day chewing.)

If work by Margulis and others on natural cooperation theory withstands the test of review, it could lead to a profound shift in understanding of the natural world. Nature might no longer be seen as a brutal “war of all against all,” as Thomas Hobbes described. Instead nature may eventually be perceived as a place where predation is the exception.

Human beings observe the spectacular exception--the tiger that gores the antelope, or the T. Rex that snaps up the velociraptor--and falsely assume this to be the way of all flesh, emulating the predator in everything from statecraft to our love lives. Perhaps, instead, nature would have us emulate those cooperative herding dinos from “Jurassic Park” that actually were cuddly and cute. You can tell why they weren’t on screen much: They didn’t create mayhem. But that could be the point, after all. Good grief. Did Spielberg accidentally make a movie with a clever hidden message?