Kenner--showing that interpreted data can't be trusted?

After getting about 300 pages into State of Fear, I can say without a doubt that Kenner is my favorite character. Besides being able to take down a group of robber guys singlehandedly (well, Sanjong there too, but he hasn’t really counted for much so far), Kenner is also a hardcore scientist-type from MIT. He can’t really get much cooler than that. Wait, yes he can! Kenner was almost a part of the Olympic ski team and he’s actually on a mission to save the world. BAM!

Now onto the the more analytical stuff...

I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but I liked how Crichton used the Kenner-Evans quarrel (p. 241-245) over the ‘is Antarctica melting or cooling?’ argument to show how the same non-human agents, scientific articles in this case, can be interpreted in different ways by various organizations/groups of people. Kenner’s bolded interpretations on the printed document given to Evans all suggested that Antarctica has been cooling over the past decades and the amount of sea ice has actually been increasing. Later when Evans looked up the references that Kenner provided, Evans noted that “Kenner had summarized the raw data correctly, but he had drawn a different interpretation from that of the authors” (p. 249). 

I haven’t read any of the articles, but assuming Evans’s statement is true, it shows how our paradigms cause us to interpret data in different ways. Since non-human agents do not have a voice, they must be interpreted by humans. However, the data becomes “tarnished” by a certain viewpoint in the process and becomes partisan. If this is true, then can we really trust any data (or more broadly, any non-human agent) that comes along with an interpretation? I hope that Crichton explores this theme later on in the book, but judging from others’ blog posts, I have the feeling he won’t...