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If Extinct Species Can Be Brought Back... Should We?
retroworks writes "Rebecca J. Rosen interviews experts in this edition of The Atlantic, to ask about the ethics and wisdom of using cloning, backbreeding, or genome editing. Over 90% of species ever to exist on earth are no more. The article ponders the moral and environmental challenges of humans reintroducing species which humans made extinct."
Should we be brought back if we go extinct?
I want my Dodo-burger and my Moa-burger too.
They can wait with the elephant bird and the terror bird until I get peckish again.
Gastornis parisiensis they can keep, I don't want them to tread on my feet.
But more seriously, instead of editing the genes so that Californian Grizzly doesn't eat people, they could do some editing so that they can be employed to pick oranges, that would be the day.
If we're talking about my Mother-in-law, I think we all agree the answer is 'no.'
This has been beaten and debated in a three part documentary, with a fourth sequel supposedly in the works.
Sig: I stole this sig.
If we exterminated a species, we have a moral duty to bring it back and eventually, reintroduce it to it's former natural habitat.
Let me tell you about endangered species...
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
My personal theory is that we killed all mammoths because they were delicious. Can't wait to taste one!
I want to see a stone age man/woman brought back, or preferably a Neanderthal. I want to see if they are as stupid as modern thinkers believe. Just a thought.
We made a species extinct, then brought it back, then made it extinct again!
No flightless bird f*cks with humanity.
While I appreciate the jest, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have mattered if the mammoth tasted like boiled gymshorts. They were FUCKING HUGE, and edible. Think about your least favorite food.... Now imagine that was basically the only food around, but in portions that weighed THREE FUCKING TONS. It's basically the only thing to eat, and if you don't like it, you can go without, get sickly, and die.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
"My personal theory is that we killed all mammoths because they were delicious. Can't wait to taste one!"
Which might actually be a decent reason to bring them back.
More seriously: we have had bad enough experience with invasive species. Re-creating them, and re-introducing them, are two very different things.
I don't see a lot of harm in the former, as long as precautions AND good isolation techniques are put in place. But I don't think, at our current level of technology, that the latter is even close to a good idea.
Crichton's books were not anti-science; they were intended as warnings. We need to know a lot more before we attempt such things.
It taught me that an 11-year-old can figure out how to operate a proprietary security system in 4 minutes.
God help us, we're in the hands of engineers.
Ancient DNA has proven difficult to sequence or clone, because it is fragmentary, and most of it breaks down into single strands after it is extracted from bone.
However, a new technique developed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequences single stranded DNA. Scientists just announced they used the technique to fully sequence Denisovan DNA from a bone fragment found in a cave in Siberia. They're going to go back to sequence their library of hundreds of Neandertal DNA specimens.
How long before they make Dolly Denisovan?
No, if we, as natural animals, cause the extinction of another species it is because it was unfit to survive and should be left extinct. Human beings are not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival.
Mother Nature isn't some fucking primitive fertility godless, its a bunch of organisms living together. There is no conscious mind directing a divine order for things. If you want to being back something extinct, go do it. Don't give me this bullshit that 'it wasn't fit to survive'. We change the environment whenever we feel like it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Is it even practical to bring back an extinct specie? I am wondering how many individuals with varied genetic code is required to avoid the issue of inbreeding.
Lets say I found two perfect genetic samples: One male and one female. I placed them into my magical DNA-To-Fertile-Adult(tm) machine, so now have two organisms set to reproduce. But then we run into a problem: Even if those two have 30 offsprings any further mating will result in genetic deterioration due to inbreeding.
So we need to have quite a bit more samples. What is a minimum population count that we need to hit in order to avoid this? Could we possibly have that many different samples of an extinct organism to fulfil such a quota?
"My personal theory is that we killed all mammoths because they were delicious. Can't wait to taste one!"
Actually, if memory serves, according to the paleontologists that is pretty damned close to the truth.
From what I understand, some Inuits ('Eskimos') have found mammoths frozen in glaciers, eaten them, and found them delicious. Only have anecdoctal evidence, though... They were pretty damned good sized, and one of them would feed a tribe for a couple weeks or so, so it was definitely worth Cro-Magnon's effots to hunt them.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
"Oooh, better not do that, it might go wrong" is "anti-science". The early 19th century Crichtons "warned" that travelling 30 miles in one hour by steam locomotive would cause our brains to explode. You can only reduce ignorance with information, not speculation.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Chinese River Dolphin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiji
#1, it happened in my life time. It makes it more personal. It feels like someone could have heard a story about the dwindling dolphins around 10 years ago, traveled to China, and done something about it. This really is the case where ONE MOTIVATED PERSON could have saved an entire species. It could have been me. It could have been someone reading this words. WE fucked up.
#2, these were intelligent, attractive, sensitive creatures. It's like killing your dog, or making dogs extinct.
#2, China was not a basket case country ten years ago. Modern, rich, growing, proud. It could reasonably have been expected some Chinese somewhere would have cared enough to at the very least preserve a tissue sample, if not a breeding stock. We're talking about something that the Chinese for thousands of years marveled at, lived with, considered kindred water spirits, perhaps even worshipped. These dolphins feature in ancient Chinese artwork, something their ancestors gazed on and felt kinship with. It's an insult on your ancestors. China: you built a dam, ran some river traffic, polluted some more without thought, and poof: a piece of Chinese identity, a Chinese national treasure, something a part of the fabric of your ancient nation: gone forever. Out of neglect. The slightest atom of national attention and interest and resources would have saved the Baiji.
There's a lot of bullshit nationalist chest thumping in the world, but really CHina: shame on you for this, shame on you. You fucked up. Fix it.
How? I don't know, start with a Indian River Dolphin as a template and engineer. Find some tissue in some bones in the muck somewhere. Bring the Baiji back. You owe your nation this, you owe your ancestors this, you owe the world this.
China, you fucked up. The insult is to your own nation and your own ancestors the greatest. And you have shamed and embarrassed yourself in the world.
Fix it.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We definitely should. We need to practice the technique. We'll need for ourselves someday. :)
There's a lot of early snark going on here. But they're missing an Elephant In The Room. What about the Religious questions? "God put them there, we killed them off, so of course we should do God's Will to put them back!" The article dares to mention "the natural evolution of Earth". Oh, I'm sorry, 41% (or whatever it is now) doesn't believe in evolution, right?
New wrinkle. Watch them try to Patent the processes that create the extinct animals. Wanna see what that trial looks like? "The Samsung Grizzly looks too much like Apple's iBear! Cease and Desist and re-Extinct the Samsung Grizzly!"
So if you're gonna get into ethics, get into ALL of them.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There was nothing anti-science about Jurassic Park. Taking a scientific discovery and making a fucking theme park out of it for profit without any idea of the repercussions was the problem in the book, not the genetic engineering on its own.