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Extinct Pyrenean Ibex Cloned
jamie points out a story in the Telegraph about a project to clone the Pyrenean Ibex (known also as bucardo), a species that went extinct in 2000. Before the last known member of the species died, scientists took tissue samples to begin a project to clone the animal. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. " Now, for the first time, one of them has survived the gestation period, living for seven minutes after birth. One of the researchers said, "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."
Except the species isn't extinct. The species Capra pyrenaica is still alive, it's just that one subspecies, Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica is extinct.
After enough adaptations and mutations, you cease to classify an animal as being in the same species as its ancestor. If these adaptations occur based on local conditions, then it isn't uncommon for the two species to coexist. No matter that they haven't evolved yet enough to invent taxes, death is still certain. And if the local adaptations make one species better globally, then you'll see competition and likely, the extinction of the ancestor's species.
You have to remember that the definition of species is vague, that the tree of life has many branches, and that inevitably, all branches terminate. So evolution constantly produces more and more species, and even when there is no branch, a large enough change will be considered the line between one species and another.
Evolution doesn't necessitate extinction, it's the semantics we use to describe it and the cold hard fact that you can't indefinitely sustain every species that has ever existed on Earth.
And this is the fun problem with the layman's explanation of evolution. Unless you were trying to be funny.
The fossil record is littered with hundreds and thousands of creatures that have no direct genetic descendants. They failed, they went extinct, they lost.
However, quite a few other ones survived to evolve into the mass of life we have today.
Natural selection is based on extinction. The failed mutations die. Sometimes the whole failed species dies. But somewhere up the evolutionary tree, their second or third cousins twice removed were better adapted and survived.
It is pure arrogance to think we are the only creatures who drive this process. How many herbivores were eaten by tigers? How many carnivores went extinct their prey moved on or died? How many fish died simply because their part of the world dried up? How many diseases have wiped out hundreds of acres of trees - entire species have gone locally extinct in the last hundred years. Yes, we have a huge affect, but we aren't the only thing.
Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't try to mitigate our effects - if we destroy the environment, we'll be dealing with an entirely new mess that *we* didn't evolve for. But have some perspective.