Slashdot Mirror
The Mammoth Cometh: Revive & Restore Tackles De-Extinction
theodp writes "Slashdot's been following de-extinction efforts for a good 15 years. Now, in The Mammoth Cometh, this week's NY Times Magazine cover story, Nathaniel Rich writes that 'bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it's going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.' Among the 'genetic rescues' being pursued by The Long Now Foundation's Revive & Restore project is The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback. And returning a flock of passenger pigeons to the planet is just the tip of the iceberg. 'We're bringing back the mammoth to restore the steppe in the Arctic,' says Stewart Brand. 'One or two mammoths is not a success. 100,000 mammoths is a success.' De-extinction, while no doubt thrilling ('It would certainly be cool to see a living saber-toothed cat,' Stanford's Hank Greely and Jacob Sherkow argued in Science), is disturbing to many conservation biologists who question the logic of bringing back an animal whose native habitat has disappeared, worry about disease, and are concerned that money may be diverted from other conservation efforts."
just buy an costa rica island to put them on
will no doubt be thrilling (although I would personally prefer seeing a return of packs of dire wolves) unless you are out for a hike. They will certainly be one more nail in the coffin of gun control.
I mean if they do this sometime they are going to recreate something NASTY.
Do we really want to have something that you would need to hunt using an AA12 or M60??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Give my creation LIIIIIFE!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's too bad you think she's annoying, because in the meantime she grew up, and is really beautiful and seemingly really smart and interesting.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."
Don't fear the penguins
Some of the arguments against "de-extinction" (there's got to be a better term) puzzle me.
"Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?" First, perhaps we're now in a position to avoid the stupid actions that drove extinction the first time -- in the case of the passenger pigeon, and perhaps even the mammoth, over-hunting. Second, this argument would seem to apply equally to species that aren't extinct at all, but merely endangered. Whey go to any arbitrary amount of effort to protect a species, when it's likely to go extinct (eventually) no matter what we do?
"It's likely to become a new disease vector." This happens all the time anyhow. As the article points out, restoring a species that competes with current "pest" species (rodents and deer) may well reduce transmission of diseases like Lyme that are currently increasing.
I'd like to see some discussion that focuses on the differences between "de-extinction" and restoration of endangered-but-not-quite-extinct species. I'd also like to see some discussion about efforts like the American Chestnut Foundation, which is working to undo the profound damage from the early-20th-century arrival of chestnut blight in the US. Our forests have adapted to the loss of the chestnut, and its re-introduction would surely cause another ecological upheaval. Does anyone see this as a dangerous undertaking? If not, why not?
On one hand, it would be really cool to be able to bring back mammoths. On the other, with a warming planet, their preferred habitat will be shrinking in the future. So it seems kind of cruel. What about the saber-tooth tiger? Can we bring them back too? They're not cute and fluffy, so I guess not. Even so, mammoths went extinct before it was likely our fault. Perhaps we should figure out how to save the animals we are currently pushing toward extinction before we start bringing ones back that have been gone for tens of thousands of years.
I'll get the mop.
I can't see this working out well. Probably only a small number of individuals could be resurrected, simply because of lack of good DNA samples, and I bet a lot of errors would be introduced in de-extinction given current tech.
Genetic diversity, therefore, in the de-extinct species would be incredibly poor and any second generation would likely be rather sickly and not resistant to diseases. Either that or a continuous and very difficult (impossible?) genetic engineering effort would have to be involved in restoring genetic diversity to the species.
Second, all of a species isn't exactly captured in just the DNA. DNA only gets expressed properly in the right cellular environment, it's a 'chicken and egg' problem. If you don't have a chicken egg, how do you raise a chicken with just the DNA and some other egg? Your other egg may not provide the right environment for correct genetic expression and you may end up with some sort of chimera of dubious viability and authenticity. Incompatible mitochondria are an obvious issue.
Third, given the first two, your de-extinct species is likely to simply go extinct again unless you correct the environmental issues that led to the first extinction. And given the rate at which we're screwing up the planet, is that really realistic?
I think it'd actually be better to devote resources to discovering and preserving as much as possible of DNA and related structures for future de-extinction attempts when technology is better and we've learned better planetary management.
--PeterM
A lot of our conservation efforts amount to regional 'de-extinction'. Take reintroducing Canadian wolves into American habitats where they were driven out of, for instance. How is whole-species de-extinction different from this? (Genetic/technical arguments and such aside, since those aren't what have been presented here)
Animals have culture too. It is learned behavior on top of hard-wired instinct that makes an animal behave the way the characteristically do. "Bringing back" the passenger pidgeon will not restore its migration patterns, because the navigation data is not baked into their dna but was stored in their brains. Same thing goes for the mammoth, just because we can recreate the hardware does not mean we will have the same animal we had before. Since you are such a geek, think someone perfectly recreates the motherboard of some 1970s arcade machine but no roms with the games itself have turned up. Sure you can still make something out of that motherboard, you can go and write a new game for it. But it just wont ever be like the old games were. So again the same thing with the restored mammoth, over time the species will again learn behaviors they can pass on to their young, but yet again this will not bring the species back...
and we must ask is it a generally a good thing to bring extinct species back?? Do we want to share our national parks with the short-faced bear, the largest and most caniverous predatoy mammal that ever lived and that used to pray on other bears(!)?? I can already tell you even the grizzly bears don't want them to come back, they have done the past thousands of years quiet well without them. The only reason I can see to bring back the mammoth is its meat, yes I will certainly try that steak.
I might be thinking of something else, and somebody who may have appropriate reference material handy please feel free to correct me, but from what I think I remember reading about the Mammoth back when I as learning about such creatures in school is that they were by all indications very social creatures, particularly the females, generally living in communities, and not at all solitary... and creating only a very small number of them could arguably be considered a type of animal cruelty.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Then why is she dying her hair so badly? Or is that a modern art project on her head?
Hunters and fishers hate it when people destroy natural habitats with tract housing or businesses poison rivers. Sustainable hunting and fishing and conservation of our natural resources means that future generations will be able to enjoy the same connection to nature that we have found.
The idea of stewardship is very important to hunters, but to some environmentalists it has a negative reaction.
This will literally bite us in the ass. This simply brings into specific relief the age-old argument between the self-assured arrogant prick scientist:
Henry Wu: You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will... breed?
And people with enough perspective and wisdom to understand that there is more to the world than science:
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
And there it is.
> First, perhaps we're now in a position to avoid the stupid actions that drove extinction the first time
We're not even in a position to prevent the current ongoing extinctions. When we stop driving currently living species out of existence, then maybe you can convince me we're ready to start undoing some past damage. Might as well stop the bleeding first.
This effort will probably never result in anything like true de-extinction. It will result in hybrids at best because to bring back an extinct species, you need a living egg from a closely related species. For mammoths they will use elephant eggs, and replace the genetic material in the nucleus with gene sequences from mammoths. But part of what it means to be a species resides in the egg cytoplasm, rather than in the egg nucleus. The genetic material is like a tape recording, and the egg is like a tape player. You need both to hear what is on the tape. So we will have hybrids with nuclear mammoth genes, but cytoplasmic elephant genes (for example, mitochondria have their own DNA, and that will come from the elephant egg donor). So the resultant mammoths will be better than 90% mammoth (if they get all the sequences right from frozen mammoths), but the other small percentage will be true elephant in character. There is no getting around this because there are no viable mammoth eggs left on earth.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
What about all the ancient gut bacteria that you don't have genetic data for? Complex multicellular organisms often have more symbiotic microorganisms in and around their bodies than they have body cells themselves.
Personally I can't wait for orders taken for 'em.
They say they tasted great.
Second, all of a species isn't exactly captured in just the DNA. DNA only gets expressed properly in the right cellular environment, it's a 'chicken and egg' problem.
I asked this question myself and the answer I got was that the first generation wouldn't be genetically pure, but through selective breeding of the first generation down a couple of more generations you will have a pure genetic animal. Similar to how they destroy mice that have been cultured with partial human DNA (growing a human ear on their back, for science!), it is possible if you let them breed you will get something human.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Since the indians ate all the best tasting animals first, these are probably really good!
The core tenant behind the increasingly popular paleo diet is that food has been over-domesticated, favoring things like size, portability, and crop yield rather than health. Taste is often also low on the priority list (though higher than health). Wild plants like dandelion greens and ramps are significantly healthier than our domesticated cabbages for example.
The same goes for meat. Wild game meat is far healthier than meat from a factory farm. It's often tastier as well, though the farmed stuff tends to be fattier (and fat equals flavor). I'd love to try the meat of an ancestor of the cow that pre-dates its domestication. (It should also be eating and excersizing similar to the way it would in the wild rather than eating corn and living in tight quarters.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
All the more reason to perfect this technique. If we can routinely take samples from species for future revival we can ensure their survival forever.
And please nobody say this will become an excuse for not caring about species going extinct, would you rather they go extinct anyway and vanish forever? Think about it, no one actually interested in conservation is going to argue against means to preserve species like this.
Ok, but how about, there's a reason why species go extinct -- to make room for other species.
In other words, Some of the arguments against evolution puzzle me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Does the phrase "think of it as evolution in action?" have any meaning for you?
New species evolving and old species going extinct are both part of evolution. And restoring extinct species to life is pretty much the same as GMO corn - they're both humans changing things for their own benefit without regard to the effect on the biosphere as a whole.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"it's going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad."
Well, I think that covers pretty much all the options..
Mammoths never existed, GOD just put those bones and fossils there because he like to fuck with you.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Can't we just start with something we can easily drive back into extinction if it's a flop? How about Dodos? There is almost no chance of vast migratory herds of Dodos thundering across the tundra and mashing the unawares underfoot. If they start to bug us, we'll just eat them all.
please refile under the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept. thanks!
The nice thing about mammoths is they are found all the time, in pristine condition, so well-preserved in ice that they're still edible (for a lot of money per steak)...some of the endeavors with them include research on the viability of eggs and sperm from them, though the likelihood is that a modified elephant egg (using parts from a mammoth's if possible--radically simplifying 'a bit') is to be the recipient of factors for fertilization...and then another and another and another for a long time.
If folks have been smart, they've been capturing good samples of DNA for mammoths for quite a while now. No word on whether that's what's been happening, though.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
heading.
You need to read my post again more slowly.
What you wrote seemed to imply that gun control, already on it's last legs, would be close to death were "large sabre tooth cats" revivified (or did you mean the opposite?). Your post per se, however, made not reference to cats. That GP mistook your post for being on-topic is entirely due to wretched habit of placing discursive material in the subject field. Your bad.
My god, a judgemental comment posted anonymously online?! What new spore of madness is this?!
I can't see this working out well. Probably only a small number of individuals could be resurrected, simply because of lack of good DNA samples, and I bet a lot of errors would be introduced in de-extinction given current tech.
Genetic diversity, therefore, in the de-extinct species would be incredibly poor and any second generation would likely be rather sickly and not resistant to diseases. Either that or a continuous and very difficult (impossible?) genetic engineering effort would have to be involved in restoring genetic diversity to the species.
They address this briefly in the article. They intend to perturb the genome to introduce variability. I don't know whether they'd do this by introducing traits from the host species, or just more-efficiently permuting the variation from existing individual samples, or whether we've actually reached the point where we can synthesize variation based on our understanding of allele function in other species.
If only her character were a real person. Not only is she beautiful, but if you remember she got genuinely excited over Unix. My guess is that she'd have a three-digit /. ID, at most.
...that extinction was a necessary part of the evolutionary process. It does bother me though that species are now becoming extinct at such a rapid rate, because of the thoughtlessness of our own species, and before we learn what we can about them. At the very least it would be interesting ("thrilling") to see once extinct species (safely in zoos, than you very much) but perhaps some things of practical scientific value could also come out of this. De-extincting some of those little amazonian creatures that appeared to have interesting medical implications might be worthwhile if there's not already too much lost of them to identify.
does she run Linux?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Mmmmm! Mammoth steak!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
We're not even in a position to prevent the current ongoing extinctions.
So we're not in a position to set aside land for the species at risk? We're not in a position to reduce or regulate human activities that could harm the viability of this species? We're not in a position to fight invasive species that might be competing with or preying upon the endangered species? I disagree. I think we're in a position to do all these things, if we think they are worthy enough.
And restoring extinct species to life is pretty much the same as GMO corn - they're both humans changing things for their own benefit without regard to the effect on the biosphere as a whole.
Except that one was at some point in the past a creature not formed by man and the other never was.
She's okay, but 'really beautiful'?
And why did you mention looks when OP specifically mentioned the sum of personality traits. In your attempt at white knighting, you actually come across as more obnoxious than the post you reply to.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I'm pretty sure saying "there's a reason why species go extinct" is begging all sorts of teleological questions. Humans are a part of the natural (occurring in nature) evolutionary process, and so is this effort. Unless you want to argue that humans are somehow outside or beyond the natural universe...?
people do not read the subject line. It is their loss plus it is an easy way to bifurcate threads.
Some advice to you: many people do not read comments that start off with a score of zero. :-)
The difference between restoring chestnuts vs assorted prehistoric animals is that chestnuts don't kill you. A mammoth may very well kill you.
Another argument is that we humans tend to mess up nature. Killer bees come to mind. We may think that what we're doing is okay, then it turns out that it was a really bad idea. Consider for example all of the invasive species we've brought from other continents. We should be very, very careful about messing around with mother nature. She can be a bad ass bitch.
nce, are you?
Some advice to you: many people do not read comments that start off with a score of zero.
That does not include you obviously. And since I'm communicating with you, and you alone, it is impertinent what "many people" do.
people do not read the subject line. It is their loss plus it is an easy way to bifurcate threads.
You want to bifurcate on the basis of people and not-people?
Now I don't know, because I didn't read the subject line ;), but you may have meant that people of lower intelligence sometimes do not read the subject line. That is probably true. However, I can guarantee that people with intelligence several SDs above the norm (as measured by the admittedly problematic metric of IQ) also, on occasion, do no read the subject line. I suspect, in fact, that the more intelligent the reader, the greater the likelihood that the subject line will go unread.
However you really have been granted more of my time than you deserve (I shall not respond again). You seem stubbornly to want to maintain your poor communication habits. That's your right. But again, do not feign surprise when, having calculated to be misunderstood, you achieve your objective.
nt
Personally, I think they ought to blend in elephant DNA. The Mammoth DNA is probably incomplete in every particular case anyway. and there's a fairly close relationship. Just perturbing the DNA is more likely to introduce non-working genes, and maybe some of the elephant DNA has evolved to handle microbe changes. (Of course, mammoths live in a very different ecosystem than do elephants, so that may not help.)
FWIW, unless they can reconstitute mammoth mitochondria, I think that there's a decent likelihood that elephant mitochondria won't work properly with straight mammoth DNA, so this "blended" approach is probably necessary. Even within just humans some mitochondria don't work properly when transplanted to a cell with another person's genome. It's not a particularly tight linkage, but there is *some* dependency.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Intinction?
First off, evolution isn't the simple 'survival of the fittest' deal that you read about on a matchbook cover somewhere in a bar once.
Evolution is a process of divergence; species move into ranges they were not originally in, the ranges separate, and two new species emerge because they have separate ranges to evolve in. If and when the ranges merge again, one or the other species likely will dominate and wipe out the other species.
That's just one of the mechanisms of evolution. It's a complicated area of science, it's not just 'one species growing better and better.'
That way we can actually know what the thing really looked like!
There is cytoplasmic, i.e. maternal, inheritance which adds another dimension to the issue.
"de-extinction" (there's got to be a better term)
entinction ?
There was a classic Analog story by that name ages ago, a decade or so before "Jurassic Park"... Somebody (deceased, alas) thought it would be a good idea to clone a T-Rex. Hijinks ensue.
"At this point, the subject was approximately three stories tall, as evidenced by the lack of damage and fatalities above the third floor."
But 10.000 would require a lot of space, a lot. It's not like we are destroying Paris, so they would put them in paces where there is already a natural fauna that could become extinct, you can say that we will revive them too... but unlike the Mammoths, that fauna has a lot of genetic diversity that can't be restored with de-extinction.
You can't fill a room with a lot of needles and say, hey we did our job for nature, we now can destroy anything and restore it whenever we want. Besides, Mamooths are cool and big, but what about smaller animals? Insects in those ages were part of the chain, they made the world what it was, but I don't see scientists reviving insects.
And your point is?
Or are you one of the idiots who think that humans recreating extinct species is somehow "natural"? Sorry, it's no more natural than my Buick....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Or are you one of the idiots who think that humans recreating extinct species is somehow "natural"? Sorry, it's no more natural than my Buick....
Depends what definition of natural you are using. But by any definition of "natural", recreating nearly exactly a species that once existed is more natural than creating an organism that couldn't form naturally (eg, maize with genes inserted from the animal kingdom).
Clever girl!
Third, given the first two, your de-extinct species is likely to simply go extinct again unless you correct the environmental issues that led to the first extinction. And given the rate at which we're screwing up the planet, is that really realistic?
According to the Wormers, yes; yes, it is. Since an ice age is attributed to the mammoth extinction, global warming will have a net positive environmental impact for the mammoth.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"Third, given the first two, your de-extinct species is likely to simply go extinct again unless you correct the environmental issues that led to the first extinction."
Fourth, what happens when there are no brakes on its population because the appropriate predators and other risks to its survival no longer exist? What happens when this species thrives to the point that it drives out (and possibly extincts) current species?
Reintroducing an extinct species is taking a terrible risk with the current balance of nature, right up there with introducing rabbits to Australia.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
...when wolves have been reintroduced to an area they tend to take the wrong wolves and put them in an area that can not cope. For example, the artic wolves replacing grey wolves in NW Montana and Idaho are not only killing off sheep, goat and cattle herds but are also killing off the game animals and other wolves. Disaster
Now I'm hungry for a brontosaurus burger.
> so well-preserved in ice that they're still edible
I'm pretty sure it would have the freezer burn from hell. Yuck.
In the immortal words of Samuel L. Jackson, "Hold on to your butts!"
sounds like just what my manhood needs
What sort of (rich) nerdy artist wouldn't have known IRIX in the 90s!!! :)
Sounds legit to me! :-)
Does the phrase "think of it as evolution in action?" have any meaning for you?
How is human activity not part of evolution? Evolution isn't some magic druidic god that somehow ceases to apply to humans and human related activities. Pressures introduced by humans are every bit a part of evolution as is an impact from a comet.
Looks like I had good taste in celebrity crushes as a tweenager. Move aside Natalie Portman!