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Wooly Mammoth Extracted Intact From Siberian Ice
Lawrence_Bird writes ... a group of scientists have extracted a wooly mammoth intact from a Siberian icefield. "They used a radar imaging technique to `see' the mammoth in its icy grave, then excavated a huge block of frozen dirt around it to preserve the 23,000-year-old creature." See the dailynews.yahoo story. Naturally, there's talk of cloning the thing. If the effort succeeds, will McDonald's sell McMammoth burgers?
But even Darwin believed in a Creator God - and he said so himself.
/. discussion and look at some of the anti-Christian anti-creationist hate speech below.)
As for objectivity, I think it's quite fair to say that there are unthinking, knee-jerk types in both camps. (If you think creationists have an exclusive on that, just keep reading this
It's just simply neither fair nor accurate to say that there are not deep thinking people on both sides. And evolution itself is a dogma at least as strong as that in any religion. (If you doubt this, do some good research on anomalous fossil finds (there are many) and then publish your results - anything that challenges evolution in the slightest is ridiculed in the "scientific" community, regardless of merit.)
In fact, the only people I know who have done honest, well-balanced reviews of the evidence on both sides happen to be creationists, since, unfortunately, evolutionists tend to dismiss creation as impossible before bothering to look at the facts that support that position.
Truth is what matters. The point is to seek the truth.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Anyway, I think this is ultra-cool. To use an elephant to give birth to a mammoth is kind of an interesting idea. I don't think any animal has ever given birth to a child of a different species before. The whole idea is amazing.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
It is refreshing to know that we have come to the point technologically, scientifically, and medically that we can begin to re-populate the earth with the animals we brought to extinction. Yes I am aware that we did not bring the woolly mammoths to extinction, but I think there will be other efforts to clone animals we have killed off (the tasmanian wolf comes to mind). It makes you wonder about the Star Trek movie where they have to go back in time for the whales... heheh they could've just cloned one :-)
Deitheres
-- .sig files go when they die?
Child: Mommy, where do
Mother: HELL! Straight to hell!
I've never been the same since.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Hair dryers?
Also catch the link at the bottom: Russian Scientist Denies Whole Mammoth Unearthed. Some question as to how much of the beast's remains remain; it may be just wool and bones.
-- Jeff Paulsen
But, duh, that was before they succeeded in getting the carcass out of the ice. Can we have a single freaking slashdot update, once, where some bozo doesn't ask "didn't we talk about this already"?
Otherwise I'm going to start posting "didn't we talk about this already?" posts in every Linux-vs-Microsoft thread, I swear.
Sheesh. You'd think people paid to use the place.
----
Lake Effect, a weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
If you'd have read a little more on the article, they only have a male, ie Mammoth sperm. The article suggest creating a Mammoth-Elephant hybrid using intact sperm, or cloning the existing mammoth with Elephant reproductive parts.
I think the main reason for this re introductio of a species is for one, to prove we can do it, and two, to provide mankind with another beast of burdon. Sure I think animals should be free to do as they please, but some countries depend on things like this (Note that story about the elephant that stepped on a landmine in Cambodia).
Regardless, I'd like to see the follow ups on this at it is a useful challenge for "infant technology"
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Did you notice that the Dolly clone was NOT the same size? There was a BIG size difference. Identical twins are usually about the same size. OK so they shared the same womb and womb environment, but I doubt such a significant size difference can be explained by different womb environments.
Are you a complete idiot?
First off, Dolly and Dolly's clone are NOT TWINS! Twins implies birth together. Dolly is two years (?) or so older than the clone. Could this possibly explain size difference? Hmmmm?
And Mitochondrial DNA has next to no effect on the animal's development. If you really cared, you could have the mDNA identical simply by:
a) using fertilized eggs from the animal to be cloned to transplant into as well as from (assuming it's female).
b) same as above, but using fertilized eggs from the mother of the clone to transplant into (since mDNA are passed through the mother's side only).
Most people agree that it doesn't really matter that much.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Actually, Noah had three sons. Ham, Shem, and Japheth. One was black, one white, and the other in between. Biblically speaking, this is when the human species was subdevided into three races.
See the BBC SciTech article for more info.
Actually, no, and this is one of the areas where the creationists have a very valid point, especially with the acceptance of the punctuated equilibrium theory among the evolutionists.
(Punctuated equilibrium (PE) was added to evolutionary theory to address the concern that there are a distinct lack of in-between forms in the fossil record, particularly w.r.t. the Cambrian explosion, where thousands of new species appeared at once with no transitional fossils. PE says that things remain stable for a long time, then something disturbs the equilibrium, and life rapidly adapts completely new forms.)
If this is true, then species transitions happen relatively quickly, and a very small number of the mutant species would parent an entire family tree. This should, in theory, result in in-breeding/genetic vigor problems. The fact that it doesn't is a point in the creationists favor. On the other hand, an active and perfect Creator would create a perfect example of the species, which would not (at least initially) be subject to the degradations we see as a result of in-breeding today.
I'm open-minded enough to recognize that *WE DON'T KNOW* how things came to be, and I recognize that both the evolutionists and the creationists have some very valid points. The creationists have in thier favor the fact that thier theory does gracefully explain things that otherwise present significant problems, and the universe certainly seems to show evidence of design. Keep an open mind, and you'll find that the creation theories have thier own strength areas that are different, but at least as compelling as, the evolutionary theories.
P.S.: Don't know for sure about the water for the flood came from, but you might want to check out this article from last month's New Scientist about where they may still be receding... (See, those creationists may not be so kooky as you think!)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I watched a special on the history chan. dealing with mummification in egypt. The problem with trying to get DNA from mummies or other artifacts is that you only get about 150 unit chains at best. That is very small compared to what we can get from the living. I'm scared to think what animals we might have to execute because they "didn't turn out right". Bad/Old DNA will have to be researched more I feal.
SL33ZE, MCSD
em: joedipshit@hotmail.com
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
Cloning is not perfected by any means. And it's already been determined that Dolly wasn't an exact clone. The mitocondrial DNA (I think this is it) was from the cell that Dolly's DNA was moved into. While the technique used to clone Dolly is supposed to be quite easy, it isn't terribly reliable. And this is with nice fresh DNA. Who knows about stuff from an animal that's been dead for a long time, and not intentionally preserved.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
I'll agree. I'm one of the most right-wing baptist, "Bible-thumping" believers you'll find. God set certain laws in place on this earth. Just because man creates life from existing life doesn't mean he's "playing God". He is simply using the same principals that God set in motion on this earth to replicate. Furthermore, if you truly believe, as I do, that God created man in His own likeness then you'd realize that this includes the desire to "create". I believe if God didn't intend for this to happen, he would have made it impossible to do what we have thus far. Using science to prove creation is much better than placing science and God on opposite sides.
SL33ZE, MCSD
em: joedipshit@hotmail.com
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
I hate to say it, but don't be so dogmatic.
I agree that scientifically provable truths are important.
But just as creationism (or your turtles) cannot be proven, niether can some aspects of evolution, particularly macroevolution, which is vital for the whole thing to hang together. This bothers me as it should bother any serious-minded inquirer looking at the evidence. Serious creationists don't dispute the overwhelming evidence for microevolution (that is, gasp, they accept scientific fact), but there is a real dearth of evidence for macroevolution. In fact, numerous people have pointed out that microevolution actually works against macroevolution in the following way: mutations that weaken the species tend to result in non-propagation of that mutation, and mutations which strengthen that species tend to ensure it's survival as a species and discourage the large-scale jumps required to create a new species. This is a serious problem that should be seriously evaluated. Current evolutionary theory has no adquate answer to these concerns.
I freely admit that some creationists try to shoe-horn a few facts around a pre-determined conclusion, resulting in deplorable science and sometimes even worse theology. Some evolutionists do the same, just without the theology.
But I am open-minded enough to see that the serious creationists raise some very scientifically valid points. Anyone truly believing in the scientific method realizes that they cannot throw out data points simply because they are inconvenient and still expect to arrive at the truth.
The remainder of your argument is essentially ad hominem, that anyone with a religious worldview is automatically excluded from consideration, which is ridiculous. Also, remember that although science reveals certain truths, our understanding of them is often woefully incomplete, for instance , a hundred years ago, we "knew as fact" that Newtonian physics was true, and yet Einstein, Heisenberg and others have since revealed that virtually none of Newtonian physics is strictly true, but rather only a useful model within certain bounds.
Finally, on a related note, I strongly disagree with your assertion that only the quantitative is true. There are many things in life which are demonstrably true but which cannot be quantified, including (but not limited to) all things which have an as-yet-undiscovered scientific explanation.
Science is a very valuable tool, but it is not applicable in all situations, and attempting to force-fit it is a bit like driving screws with a hammer.
P.S.: Your choice of where the flood waters went was a prticularly bad choice in light of the fact that I included a link in my original post (which you apparently did not read) from the New Scientist (hardly a creationist bastion) that shows the earth is even now losing tremendous amounts of seawater to the interior of the planet. Does this prove the flood? Of course not, but it should make an open-minded person think, at least.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Didn't this happen a while back? I think scientists at some special event were served Wooly Mammoth Steak from a preserved one.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Carbon dating showed that it was 3,000 years old, not 20,000 (according to the article). That's in the accurate range of carbon dating, since we have known-age tests from that long ago. (Darn, that was RECENT.)
I hope they post followups about what they find. That's a BIG freezer out there! What was the diet of the old wooly mammoths? How did this one die? So many cool questions...
-Billy
Bringing back the wooly mammoth population is pretty much a statistical impossiblity, even with a subject to clone.
Why? Well, for starters, it's a subject. Without at least one male and one female, there's not going to be much hope for that species.
Let's say we overcome that obstacle, though, and engineer a mammoth of opposite gender to the one that was found. You've still got the problem that the mammoths are essentially twins. Mate them, and you've got a handful of inbred mammoths. Actually, this goes beyond inbreeding, because even among siblings there's some genetic variance; between these mammoths there would be none. Eventually you'd get to the point where no mammoths could survive for very long, and the species goes extinct a second time.
Theoretically you could engineer enough differences into many clones and start the species that way. Just one problem: to do that you have to understand the genome. To understand the genome you need living mammoths, so you're in a chicken-and-egg situation.
Maybe if scientists found a couple hundred more mammoths, then we might have something feasible. But to try with only one specimen simply isn't going to work.
Argghh! We've been through this.
Of course the mitochondrial DNA was from the host cell. They knew it would be and didn't really care. It's not a big thing. Mitochondria are mitochondria, they change tranportable blood fuel into usable cell fuel (I'm just not up to big words like glucose tonight). A mammoth with modern elephant (or cow, or pig, or sheep) mitochondria is a mammoth as far as I'm concerned.
(now that that's out of my system...)
The Dolly technique is crusty in other ways, but it should work well enough to get some hairy elephants walking around northern Asia. Well, not quite the Dolly technique... this requires something a little more complicated, but IMHO doable in a year or two with enough money (or ten years from now in somebody's back yard).
I'd agree with you on the DNA bit, but they've got a whole mammoth. That's one heck of a DNA sample! They should be able to patch up the cracks with that big a sample.
Animals have given birth to implanted fetuses of other species. I can't remember the exact details of an example... I think there was a rare type of cat that another cat of a common species gave birth to...
Tortured creature? "Resurrected in the name of science?"
How about resurrected in the name of fuzzy critters with trunks?
How is the mammoth "tortured"? Because after death he did not rot with the Glory Of Nature? Because pleistocene worms were deprived of a meal?
I'm all for the cloning. I hope that I shall soon
see mammoths grazing across the permafrost.
Wonderful animals, Mammoths...
While inbreeding can cause problems, often severe ones, it is not a death sentence. You can create an entire population from a single pair of siblings. Release a mating pair of rabbits on an island with no predators and lots of food, and come back in a few years; if you don't find rabbits, you probably won't find anything green either.
And I'm not talking ethics here...
Why would you use an infant technology to create copies of dead Mammoths if there was a possibility that they had pure, frozen GAMETES?
With the in-vitro fertilization we have today,
Here's a recipe for baby Mammoth:
Preheat Elephant Uterus to 100 degrees or so,
1 part frozen Mammoth sperm
1 frozen Mammoth egg,
thaw,
stir,
let incubate in a test tube for a short while, place in elephant uterus and let bake for 1.5 years or so.
We've had the technology to do this for quite some time, again, it's just a matter whether the gamete material has decayed in the past 3,000 years. But from what I know, sperm and eggs are frozen and thawed all the time without damage.
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If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?
duh. :]
..a fundamental drive amongst scientists everywhere: the urgent need to accomplish something because we can (specifically, to prove this notion), not necessarily because we should (or can even find a useful application of the discovery that would validate the time and effort expended).
Whether or not the mammoth would be "tortured" is not an argument I care to play into (especially since arguments on such topics seem to be especially shallow), but I might point out that the more animals we are able to clone, the closer we get to cloning an actual human, which is something that certainly sparks a lot of interest among scientists and the world at large.
~ Kish
Introducing an element that was once part of [an ecosystem], but is no longer is does just as much harm to an ecosystem as introducing a specimen that has never been there at all.
That's speculation. The former has never been done before. The latter has been done many times (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently; sometimes by humans, sometimes by wind, ocean currents, etc.) with varying results.
Speculation is a good thing - we ought to consider all the possibilities before reintroducing an extinct species - but it's still speculation. It is by no means certain that it will be disasterous, as the introduction on non-native species has frequently been.
If we re-introduce Wooly Mammoths into nature, we don't know how well they will adapt, and we don't know how well nature will adapt around them.
True, but consider. Mammoths are much like present-day elephants. Megafauna. Long-lived. Few predators. Slow maturation. Slow reproduction. What population biologists would call K-strategists. Introduced species that become a problem for native ones are almost invariably r-strategists (A notable exception being the most invasive species of all - humans). R-strategists are typically small creatures. Short-lived. Normally subject to intense predation in their native environment. Rapid maturation. Very rapid reproduction. These things combine to give introduced species an edge in their new, predator-free environments. They're not likely to be a problem in the case of wooly mammoths.
Cloned wooly mammoths would probably not be released into the wild right away, but kept in zoos, or penned up on research farms for study. Given their slow rate of reproduction, it'd be a very long time before there were enough of them to have much of an impact on their environment.
One more thing - wooly mammoths have probably been extinct for only a few thousand years. As no other creature has appeared to fill the niche previously occupied by the mammoths in that short time, I suspect their reintroduction to Siberia would have little negative impact, assuming they ever were released (or escaped) into the wild.
I hope that's feirenhight (sp?), a uterus won't work too well when it's boiled.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
So far as I've read, one of the biggest obstacles in undertaking this whole cloning thing is that it's going to take a long time before we see any results. Assuming we are able to impregnate an elephant with a mammoth or half-mammoth zygote, the gestation period of an elephant is anywhere from 600 to 760 days(!), and it takes ten or twelve years for an elephant calf to reach sexual maturity. Even if everything goes according to plan, we won't know if we have a viable mammoth (or half-mammoth) for well over a decade after conception.
Regards,
You can download the video of them pulling it out and all that at Msnbc.com, fairly interesting. http://www.msnbc.com/news/292726.asp
I am unsure what science you are using here. Mammoths were an adaptive change dating to the beginning of the last ice age. They died out towards the end, although their may have been a few kicking around still 5-6 thousand years ago.
Using generational dating from the King James Bible? That's questionable even among die hard creationists. I would suggest you take a closer look at the Talmud before jumping into any strange forays into highly dubious math.
Oh yeah and all the evidence the universe is billions of years old. I alway find it amazing that people seem to think that God is a rather limited thinker and something as complex and novel as evolution would utterly impossible for him to think up. Exactly why should we trust a text so crusty and old that we can't properly translate the original language. God is a lot smarter than you, me and the guy who wrote the Bible.
Thalasar
"Now i'm wondering, what do you do in a power failure? You have a huge, several thousand year old meat pack in your lab freezer, and it begins to defrost......."
In Khatanga it probably gets a bit colder
because you don't have the heat from the light
bulbs. My globe shows 4 places closer to the
pole, 3 nearby in Russia & Thule Greenland.
But the amazing thing about these frozen
mammoths is that there must have been a fairly
mild climate to produce enough veggies to keep
them going. Then it got much colder so suddenly
that they didn't rot or get eaten by scavengers
- and stayed that way since.
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Do you want to restart your computer now?
I'm skeptical about cloning ancient things from their DNA. DNA, even more than most macromolecules, needs to be constantly repaired. If you leave DNA sitting around it will slowly lose its properties. For example, UV light causes a process called pyrimidine dimerization where adjacent pyrimidine bases fuse in a specific manner. It is estimated that we have over 10,000 pyrimidine dimerization events that happen every day in our bodies, all of which are quickly and systematically repaired. This is simply one example of a way in which DNA can become damaged if not fixed constantly -- there are others. Something I never hear from the proponents of such techniques is how they get the info INTACT.
Granted, the DNA may be good enough to do RFLiPs or other restriction enzyme digestion technique and get reasonable data. But, and this is a big but, for a diploid organism to work properly we need (two) copies of each gene that will be used to work. I, as a biochemist, don't believe that we have the ability to isolate two copies of nearly perfect DNA....
-- Moondog