The problem around de-extinction is that you can't just shoehorn a new species into a habitat that already filled the void left by a past extinction.
If some marsupial in Australia got extinct because it was replaced by feral cats, then that habitat won't welcome that marsupial anymore. And there's nothing we can do about it. Even if we somehow people organize themselves to hunt all the feral cats to extinction, it will either be replaced by new post-domestic cats or either some other, equally capable and already existing predator.
The habitat wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed. It changed the same way it changed when all non-avian dinosaurs got extinct and then replaced with mammals and birds that filled the void left by them.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-bringing-b...
That's an interesting way to describe the massive effect humans are having on pretty much every habitat on the planet ... "It just changed."
At some point, a new habitat will reach a new balance with our introduced species and there's no going back.
And yes, there may be less diversity in species all over the world (for the time being) thanks to that. But once the new species learn to reproduce and survive in a new place, then that is the "new" state of the habitat.
I agree we should strive to not fuck up our place on the planet. But habitats will change whether we like it or not.
Maybe in a million years feral cats in Australia will differentiate themselves with the ones in Europe.
Also, humans are terraforming this planet anyway so I don’t see a reason not to do it in a way to make room for previously extinct species.
Some other discussion could be if those animals would be happy living. Maybe we will have to ask whether we de-extinct Homo Erectus. Apparently, we're not even asking this for animals we eat…
"And we can charge anything we want, 2,000 a day, 10,000 a day, and people will pay it. And then there's the merchandise..."
There is barely room for contemporary species.
As the article mentions improved fertilization, more accurate genome editing, and advances in in-vitro gastrulation are the real prize.
To me there is also something profoundly sad about the loss of molecular information with each extinct species. Having a simple hope, perhaps naive, to reverse this process is comforting.
Just think, eventually and extinct species zoo garden, not unlike JP, except more tame species... maybe. It would be a destination attraction for sure.
There's a French idiom for that, "pompiers pyromanes", which means arsonist firemen. Seems appropriate.
Fascinating idiom, thanks!
It's always true that if you have different goals you'd spend resources differently.
How about instead of bemoaning how “money could be better spent on conservation”, the author could pursue that route (they won’t) and let people who are interested in research do what they want to do?
Clearly many animals have gone extinct because of humans (many memorable ones before humanity developed a sufficiently profound collective consciousness that could ponder about this), but I don’t see how there’s any moral, ethical or natural urge to repent and offer reparations for this. Species die, that’s the natural order of things for species in general and if this round of mass extinction is humanity induced then we should focus on reducing its scale instead of trying to go undo it as if that absolves us of anything.
This says nothing about the scientific ability to do this, anyway, which as this article points is mostly BS. My general experience is if you try to do something that doesn’t make full logical economical and moral sense, you end up with this charlatan group. Crypto is another example of the same.
When we say “natural” we’re already being anthropocentric by dividing reality between things that happen because of humans and everything else. You can’t hand wave away what’s occurred because of our behavior by point to the “natural order of things” when it explicitly isn’t.
As to why people are obsessed. It’s just a value judgement? You might as well asked why certain groups are obsessed with getting in orderly queues and other groups deal with lines as competition to get to the front.
If you value not killing off other species then undoing an extinction would most definitely absolve you of that sin. I can see how if you personally don’t care about extinctions you wouldn’t care about undoing them, but you need to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes to be able to understand the answer to your question.
It's because we care about our children and their children. Each extinction eliminates a species that our ancestors lived among or depended upon. Eventually, an extinction may fundamentally break a food chain that keeps our descendants alive.
In very short terms: lack of biodiversity makes the ecosystem brittle and susceptible to collapse with changing selective pressure.
To me its like climate change. The climate change, just like species go extinct. But humans are exasperating both processes in a ways that will ultimately make living on earth worse for future generations.
"Bland" is a better argument. If one bird species spreads across the world and outcompetes 10 regional species, there will be just as many birds as before. There will be less regional variation though.
We have a bunch of technologies mentioned that are perhaps out of the pure basic research stage, but need to be developed a bunch. Developing those can be done independently and in parallel, but is that happening? Trying to put them all together probably is premature as the article suggests, and yet this is the easiest way to raise money because it is catchy.
> I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil - it’s as evil as the concept of death itself;
If you characterize worrying about extinction as being obsessed, would you characterize worrying about death to be an obsession we should rid ourselves of? Why should I worry if people are dying, people always die, doesn't matter?
Claims like “it’ll take 5000 years” are always funny because they’re so incredibly status quo biased, without the least bit of self consciousness of how remarkable the progress has been in the last 50 years on things like this.
Humans overestimate progress in the near term and underestimate progress in the long term.
Moments after they cloned it? The immediate result of cloning is a single cell, not something with a lung. So that single cell grew into an organism with lungs, in moments?
I stopped reading a few paragraphs after that.
Let's say they make a perfect clone of an extinct animal. It can't reproduce by itself. It needs a mate. Let's say they clone a second animal of the other gender. Let's say they reproduce (low chance of that, but let's say they do). All their descendants need mates too, other than their siblings, otherwise it leeds to inbreeding.[2]
They need dozens if not hundreds of different individuals to make a viable population that doesn't go extinct again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression
Mutations are very rarely viable. In fact, the original cloned animal mutations must be eliminated in order to have viable future generation. The only thing that (may) benefit from mutations is the imune system. See the problem with cheetah's lack of genetic variability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah#Genetics
Sadly, the last member of that particular species died in 2016, in Edinburgh Zoo[1]. However, they had some success with other Partula snails[2].
[1] - https://islandbiodiversity.com/faba.htm
[2] - https://www.rzss.org.uk/conservation/our-projects/project-se...
Ah, ye old whataboutism canard... it seems to be forgetting that this technology would have an immense value by itself!
> True de-extinction is nowhere near possible.
I'm not sure I can parse the convoluted English here. Are we saying it's impossible? I see no evidence in the article that it is correct. Are we saying it's really hard? Sure, but no one claimed otherwise.
I am not the kind of person that tends to have starry-eyed faith into any appealing idea, and perhaps it is truly hard to "resurrect" a dead species. However it seems to me that it's obviously doable at some level: Craig Venter has created a synthetic bacterium so I don't see why a particularly simple life form can't be "de-extincted".
I realize though that multicellular organism are much harder and quite far away from our current capabilities, but impossible? I don't see why.
A species that has dwindled to about ten living individuals has a shallow gene pool.
Bringing in genes from recently deceased or preserved specimens could help deepen that pool.
It has happened that only one female of a species was known to be alive. The ability to put together a viable egg for her to bring to term would be the difference between extinction and survival.
We're also awfully mammal-centric. Frogs have already been de-extincted. The gastric-brooding frog was resurrected in 2013.
Compared to mammals it is relatively easy to transfer DNA around between the eggs of related oviparous species and there's no real reason we can't make a large-scale DNA bank for them, protecting the endangered birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians of the world.
These technologies are all part of one tech tree.
