Why was the Dragon Fractal in the Jurassic Park novel?

Question

Within the Jurassic Park novel, in between various chapters, we see inset images of a fractal being drawn. Specifically, this is the Dragon Fractal. I'll spare the details about this specific fractal but, suffice to say, we see the first iteration early in the book, and after every chapter (or possibly 2 or 3, I can't recall) we see another inset of the next iteration.

I also seem to recall that under each iteration there might have been a quote from Ian Malcolm, often regarding chaos theory since it is one of the central themes of the story.

I was 16 when I read the novel shortly after the film was released and I've not picked it up since then. I recall being fascinated with the fractal images because I'd thumbed through the book and seen them before I even began reading. This made me curious about the fractals purpose, but to my recollection, the inclusion of the fractal was never really explained and I recall being a bit frustrated about not understanding why it was there to begin with. Yes, it was a neat set of mathematics, but I failed to see it's purpose.

So, why did Crichton include the drawing of the fractals in the book? What purpose did the illustration serve within the story? It might be obvious but as a 16 year old, and since then, I've never figured out the purpose for including the images in a story about dinosaurs "finding a way" to survive when they had been engineered to be incapable of reproduction.

Answer 1

I have not found anything from Crichton himself, but the theory here makes sense to me.

Each chapter (or iteration as the book called it) was found to have a seemingly meaningless illustration of some lines and squares adjunct to a quotation from one the book’s characters.

The First Chapter/First Iteration contained the above image with the quote: “At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.” Ian Malcolm.

With each subsequent chapter, the quotations begin to resemble the events in the story – the idea of unpredictability; chaos theory – and the illustrations become more elaborate – and eerily reptilian.

So basically, it's about simple systems that rapidly become more complex as we look more closely at them. In the case of the Park, more complex in a deadly fashion.

Answer 2

I interpreted it as a metaphor for DNA; like a fractal, it keeps duplicating itself to build a bigger version of something (organism).