Should We Revive Extinct Species? (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The last male northern white rhinoceros died just last week, and a total of just 29,000 rhinoceroses now remain on earth. But National Geographic reports that "the genetic material of several northern white rhinos has been stored away," and scientists hope to give birth to another using in vitro fertilization -- or to breed a hybrid using a genetically similar southern white rhino.
Meanwhile, a postdoctoral fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology reports that scientists are seriously considering the possibility of "de-extincting" the Carolina parakeet, America's only native parrot, which became extinct 100 years ago. Thanks to the data I compiled as well as cutting-edge machine learning approaches to analyze those data, my colleagues and I were able to reconstruct the Carolina parakeets' likely range and climate niche, [which] turned out to be much smaller than previously believed... While this may seem rather minor, some scientists consider the Carolina parakeet one of the top candidates for 'de-extinction', a process in which DNA is harvested from specimens and used to "resurrect" extinct species... If someone were to spend millions of dollars doing all of the genetic and breeding work to bring back this species, or any other, how will they figure out where to release these birds...? Whether or not de-extinction is a worthwhile use of conservation effort and money is another question, best answered by someone other than me. But this is just an example of one potential use of this type of research. "
It seems like all kinds of havoc could ensue if we released a resurrected species back into the modern ecosystem. And yet Harvard researchers are already working to breed a new creature that's half-elephant, half Wooly Mammoth.

What do Slashdot's readers think? Should we revive extinct species?

Comments

Re:No, for three reasons

[careysub]

1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.

Odd notions about "inbreeding" abound. This remark manages to capture a number of misunderstandings about inbreeding and its significance.

Population ecologists do value, and try to maintain, existing genetic diversity since managing populations does become more difficult with low levels of diversity. But inbreeding per se is not some sort of apocalyptic doom for a population or species.

First note that successful wild populations with very low levels of genetic diversity are not rare.

The cheetah for example is an extreme case of low diversity since it appears to have gone through two bottlenecks (about 100,000 years ago, and about 12,000 years ago) with only a breeding population of fewer than a dozen each time, but went on to spread quite widely and develop a large population in Africa and South Asia. Many populations of various species have been founded by a few breeding pairs, or even one pair - all New World monkeys for example seem to have descended from a very small group African monkeys (perhaps a single breeding pair) who rafted across in a rare event tens of millions of years ago and went on to diversity into all the New World monkeys. As humans spread out of Africa, through Asia, and Oceania there were many cases of very small founder populations successively founding successful communities from populations that had already gone through multiple bottlenecks.

High levels of inbreeding do cause deleterious or lethal genes to surface with harmful effect. But over time this tends to remove them from the population. People tend to get a warped idea about the significance of this from a population perspective by the well documented existence of royal families among humans. Sure, inbreeding brings about monarchs who are idiots, infertile, or with other serious genetic problems - but in the wild this is how those genes get removed. Outside of human culture those drooling idiots would not be monarchs, they would be non-breeding dead ends, it is only human cultural tradition that insists they play the role of leader.

Similarly it is well know that many highly inbred domesticated "show" breeds have serious genetic problems. But this is due to the malfeasance of human breeders who intensively select for arbitrary cosmetic traits and ignore serious genetic disease.

The technology that permits the recreation of extinct species, by reconstructing a genome, is more than able to remove harmful genes with the same tools. There is no difficulty, really, in having a highly inbred population of low diversity, with no disease. This is what the standard strains of white mice and rats used in laboratories are. They are quite healthy but have zero diversity within a strain, they are literally clones of each other.

BTW - the mainstream culture of Americans has a peculiar and distinctive horror of inbreeding to a degree that is not supported by evidence. Throughout human history humans have commonly bred in small closed groups of only dozens to hundreds of individuals with little or no outbreeding. First and second cousin marriages are common in human culture. It turns out that a certain amount of inbreeding is actually optimal for successful reproduction, surviving child fertility is highest among humans with third cousin marriages, unrelated humans have lower success rates.

2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.

3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.

--PeterM

The reasons that species went extinct do need to be addressed, to bring a species back, though it is certainly possible to maintain some species in captivity. But not rarely the factor that needs to be addressed