On the flip side, we do know what will happen if the Aedes aegypti, Anopheles, etc... is allowed to continue to exist - 100s of thousands of people a year will die.
I wonder how the author would feel about keeping mosquitoes around "just in case", if hundreds of thousands of her neighbors were dying every year.
And guess what, if, for some very, very bizarre reason it turns out that Aedes aegypti/Anopheles was a super important species, there is zero difficulty in breeding and releasing billions of them back into the wild in very short order.
On the pro-science side there's singularities and AI fantasy and the anti-science side the planet is "being destroyed".
It's just one giant argument from ignorance, "we don't know, therefore you don't know, therefore we can say anything we like".
On the other hand, we should probably do some due diligence before deciding to embark on a mosquitocide, just to try and swing the odds in our favour.
I.e. please be completely certain that the GM offspring mating with female individuals will not result in some other side effect...
Because, here's the thing - we do know the implications of letting these mosquitoes live. 100s of thousands of people a year die. Every Year.
The potential of unforeseen mutations occurring is 100%, GM or no. How do you think species evolve?
That's why I love the idea of being able to genetically modify them to produce only male offspring. It provides a nice, asymptotic curve way of culling the population without dramatically changing their ecosystem overnight
If it works exactly as described, the 'only male offspring' modification should be nice and side-effect-free. But then, evolution is a big-numbers statistical game. Who knows what interesting variations we'll see..
So eradicating human-threat mosquitoes may not have such a large effect on the global mosquito ecosystem.
It's disappointing to see an ostensibly researched article not even approach our remedial level. I wonder why anyone would upvote it.
mosquitos inhabit a niche which could be filled by another organism were they to be eradicated and then we're back to square-one in a new way
but yeh let's eradicate them
Admitting it is maybe not so popular.
Sorry, Nature, but I can name several species that could not live without mosquitoes, and you should be able to do the same also. This would be like banning the milk for babies because humans don't depend solely on milk and can eat many other things.
