[HN Gopher] Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality
___________________________________________________________________
Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-09-01 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.livescience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.livescience.com)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Curious - the entire objection to this endeavor as mentioned in
| the OP was, "What's gone is gone" according to some 'expert'.
|
| Now, new species are often disruptive in lots of ways. No reason
| to think an old one, reintroduced, would be less disruptive. But
| no mention of real issues like that.
|
| I think the writer was just fishing for something provocative to
| say.
| 99_00 wrote:
| A species that was eliminated by hunter gatherers or sailors
| with clubs is going to have a hard time getting out control.
| jfengel wrote:
| I feel like the main objections would be in terms of animal
| welfare. You're almost certainly gonna harm a lot of animals in
| the process. Not just animals born deformed but also dangerous
| pregnancies.
|
| We do that all the time of course. But I'd kinda like to take
| at least a moment to consider how we minimize suffering before
| we plunge ahead.
| arp242 wrote:
| And even if you clone a perfect mammoth on your first try,
| then what?
|
| We know elephants are very intelligent, emotional, and social
| animals. I see no reason to assume mammoths are significantly
| different. And of course what they're working aren't even
| mammoths, more like "hairy elephants".
|
| Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity
| would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness. It would
| be nothing short of cruel.
|
| So you managed to clone a herd of hairy elephants, then what
| do you do with those? The mammoth steppes they once roamed no
| longer exist. There is no ecosystem to save or improve
| because that ecosystem is gone. That's what they meant with
| "what's gone is gone".
|
| Can you just re-introduce them to the wild? These are huge
| animals that need a lot of space. Other animals and people
| live there. You can't just have a bit of land; you need a
| huge amount of it.
|
| Cloning mammoths is just dumb. None of the logistics really
| work out and a bunch of mammoths spending miserable lonely
| lives in zoos is basically the best-case outcome we can hope
| for and after a few decades of this everyone will all realize
| it was pointless and mammoths will be extinct once more. All
| these notions are rekindling a lost ecosystem are nothing
| more than flights of fancy.
|
| For some other animals there is perhaps a slightly better
| case to be made; I don't know. But for mammoths the case is
| pretty bad.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| The goal of the project is absolutely to release them into
| the wild. And their historical range is still largely empty
| of humans. There is enough space for everyone if we are
| willing to do it.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in
| captivity would consign it to a miserable life of
| loneliness
|
| Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Small
| elephants bond also with humans.
| seszett wrote:
| > _Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants._
|
| Would it be that easy?
|
| Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any
| contact with other humans, no education or anything, just
| put somewhere and left to themselves.
|
| How many centuries would they need to even develop an
| actual language?
|
| They might very well be totally unable to cooperate or
| survive at all, without a preexisting society to guide
| them.
|
| Even if they don't have societies as developed at humans
| do, I can imagine the same would happen to different
| degrees with elephants, mammoths, dolphins, crows even.
| katbyte wrote:
| Well the thing about a large mammal like an elephant is
| population control is easy and the effects generally more
| understood
|
| Unlike a zebra muscle which one it's in your local lake
| goooooood luck ever removing them and now your lake may die a
| toxic blue green algae death
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| You would think that, but we can't even agree to eradicate
| the hippopotamus from the Americas. Why? Animals rights
| groups think it is apparently an issue to just exterminate
| them. These are literal invasive species brought in by a drug
| lord.
|
| If it turned out that mammoths were actually a problem, we'd
| never agree to actually control the population.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Probably one of the few actual wins of human activity.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Why?
| gweinberg wrote:
| There's no reason we should be able to agree. Some people
| like them and want them protected, other people hate them
| and want them gone. If it were really clear that they were
| harmful, shooting them all would be super easy, I could
| probably do it myself. Why would the fact that the guy who
| introduced them is a drug lord matter? Hippos can't inherit
| original sin.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Your comment made me laugh, but to actually answer:
|
| It matters from a Chesterton's Fence perspective: We know
| that the hippos were not brought for any good reason,
| inevitability, etc.
| rikroots wrote:
| The camels in Australia would like to (very impolitely)
| disagree:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_feral_camel
| kenjackson wrote:
| It's more than that. They also say:
|
| "Both Asian and African elephants, which Colossal plans to use
| as surrogates to grow mammoth calves, are endangered, and every
| elephant gestating a "mammoth" calf can't grow babies of its
| own. "That's going to reduce population size," Lynch said."
|
| We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try
| to bring back these past species.
| xhevahir wrote:
| Well, it's not as if the surrogacy would continue
| indefinitely, putting a continuous strain on elephant
| reproduction. They would need surrogates only long enough to
| establish a breeding mammoth population, and there's even the
| possibility that, should elephants get even nearer
| extinction, future mammoths could return the favor, so to
| speak, by performing as surrogates themselves.
|
| If, as I've been told, grasslands are a better carbon sink
| than taiga, and mammoths are capable of converting the latter
| into the former, I'm hopeful for efforts like this.
| hparadiz wrote:
| The range of the Mammoth currently includes massive chunks of
| Alaska, Canada, and Russia where few people live. They might
| thrive in that environment much more so than the Asian and
| African elephants we have alive today. Maybe would even give
| them more breeding partners in the long term.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| >We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to
| try to bring back these past species.
|
| Well, if the currently endangered species go extinct, we'll
| have the technology to bring them back too -\\_(tsu)_/-
| tim333 wrote:
| The elephant population is about 500,000. Using one or two as
| surrogates isn't going to change things much in itself. It's
| humans multiplying and taking their land which is more the
| issue.
| kenjackson wrote:
| They just need one or two surrogates? The scope described
| in the article made it seem MUCH larger.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Other way to see it is that we would be raising the number of
| protected elephants on captivity by +1.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's interesting! If we value an existing species over one
| forth millenia gone, then that would be a negative. Quite a
| lot of discussion possible there.
|
| For instance, existing elephants are already obnoxious
| destructive animals to have roaming a landscape inhabited by
| people. It's only fair to include that in the analysis. All
| part of the equation.
|
| Somebody wanted to reintroduce wolves to Iowa but that got
| squashed by popular objection. Everyone would have been at
| risk.
| patall wrote:
| Aren't the wolves in Iowa a bad example since that in fact
| should reduce risk to the general population? I mean, there
| are studies that predators reduce traffic collisions with
| deer due to making those more wary, which far outweighs any
| real danger imposed by wolves themselves. Hence, as always,
| looking at the whole picture is necessary to get a full
| view of what is at stake. And popular objection is not a
| good argument for that at all times.
| Kye wrote:
| This doesn't seem any different from the reintroduction of
| horses to the Americas. Humans get along with similarly massive
| pachyderms now. This isn't like bringing a brachiosaurus back
| where there's no realistic way for them to live in the current
| biosphere.
|
| The risk to elephants in using them for this is a real concern
| though.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now.
|
| Some humans do on a single continent which has a human
| population density half that of Eurasia, and even that not
| particularly smoothly:
|
| https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_spec.
| ..
| anon84873628 wrote:
| It seems the de-extinction efforts help reinforce the
| rewilding and land conservation efforts. If an area has
| been populated by these reintroduced species it may be more
| resistant (politically if not physically) to human
| development.
| pizza234 wrote:
| Further into the article, there's a section dedicated to the
| main objections ("Unintended consequences").
|
| > For one, de-extinct animals may be sickly, given that the
| pool of available DNA for each species is relatively small.
|
| > It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-
| scale mammoth reintroductions went wrong.
|
| > Reintroductions can lead to clashes between humans and
| wildlife.
|
| > The makeup of the reintroduced population matters too
|
| > There's also no guarantee that animals will stay where we
| release them
|
| I have the impression that while each single point may be
| unlikely, there are (too) many unknowns in the project.
|
| In addition to the biological objections, there are the
| ideological ones, primarily:
|
| > Instead of using that money to bring back three extinct
| species whose ecological impact is unknown, the funds could be
| put toward saving roughly 100 species that are currently facing
| an uncertain future
|
| I agree that this is ultimately purely driven by profit:
|
| > "If they're successful -- and I have no doubt that they will
| be -- they're going to make a ton of money," he said.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Yes, an underlying motivation of the project is simply to
| fund more biotech research. Which, if it comes to fruition as
| imagined in sci-fi novels, could radically upend ecosystems
| and societies alike, in far more dramatic ways than discussed
| here.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That cow is already out of the barn. There's precious
| little ecosystem left on this tired old iron ball that
| hasn't been radically upended.
|
| Funny how any effort to arrest the runaway catastrophe
| that's been caused is met with resistance that calls it
| 'further damage'. Like we aren't already facing tremendous
| risks by leaving it unchecked.
| patall wrote:
| In addition to that, societies and ecosystems could also
| upend differently if we do not develop this technology.
| As every technology, you can use it for good and you can
| use it for bad. But simple banning (or 'moratoria') do
| rarely stop a novel field from developing, and just end
| up pushing it in the less open grey zone of top secret
| research projects.
| rikroots wrote:
| My 'gut' objection to the endeavour is that they're creating
| a new "genetically modified" creature without any
| consideration for the ecosystem which surrounded the
| originals. Not just the plants and animals that made up the
| Arctic ecosystem 10k years ago, and now, but - more
| importantly - the ecosystem (parasites, gut biota, etc) that
| used to live on/in those mammoths. The gut flora in
| particular will be critical if they want these Indian-
| elephant born mammoths to thrive in the Arctic - will the
| creatures even be able to digest what they eat?
|
| If we have to revive something elephant-related, then I'd
| much prefer them to concentrate on (one of) the Madagascan
| elephant bird species. The eggs alone would offer a
| potentially robust revenue stream for whichever God bought
| the beast back from the dead.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The good ol' False Dichotomomy, rearing it's irrelevant head.
|
| Save existing species, go right ahead. That the effort being
| made to do {absolutely anything else} takes money too, is no
| kind of argument whatsoever. The aren't exclusive activities.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| In specific instance they aren't totally independent. The
| plan is to use endangered elephant surrogate mothers,
| removing them from the breeding pool of their own already
| threatened population.
| Eridrus wrote:
| There's a real (small c) conservative bias where we should keep
| things as they are rather than changing them for all sorts of
| reasons. People who want to actually change the world are a bit
| of a rarity.
| 99_00 wrote:
| I hope this is for real and they make progress to their goal.
| loufe wrote:
| I think it's a world of difference bringing back a species for
| which we have actual DNA, instead of creating a "wooly-mammoth-
| like" creature via guesswork. I'm not opposed to the effort, if
| privately funded, just weird to consider the pointlessness of it
| in my eyes.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Personally I'm curious how they taste. A Mammoth burger could
| be succulent for all we know.
| afavour wrote:
| Doubt we're much closer to that. When was the last time you
| had an Elephant burger? Definitely the closest alternative
| that isn't really accessible today for a bunch of good
| reasons.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| What are the good reasons? I assume we're talking about a
| situation where we could create the elephants "on demand",
| like with these mammoths.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm wondering as well, there should be sufficient supply
| of those dying old age or accidents to have at least some
| going around. The long gestation cycle and comparatively
| long time to maturity reasonably make them inefficient,
| but still some supply would be expected.
| adolph wrote:
| Well for one, a rate limiting factor is gestation period
| which is proportionally long for elephants.
|
| You'd probably be better off farming Homo sapiens or
| maybe reviving some other species of homo. Put them in
| gestational pods to harvest their metabolic heat energy.
| Maybe run mental simulations of various things via neural
| link.
|
| https://www.bbcearth.com/news/elephant-gestation-period-
| long...
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| "Better off" doesn't mean much. We would be better off
| doing neither of these, but being better off is not the
| goal - the goal is to eat an elephant or a mammoth.
|
| Seems like the gestation period would make it more of a
| luxury.
| adolph wrote:
| Like the mammoth, other species of homo disappeared when
| sapiens arrived. Like the cousin comment's conjecture
| that mammoth might be very good eating, maybe these other
| species were likewise delectable.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Sure, if that is so, then it might be an option too.
| Though I have never heard about that, while children are
| singing campfire songs about mammoths... Marketing
| matters - "Eat a prehistoric human" doesn't sound as cool
| as "taste the food of the prehistoric human"
| anon84873628 wrote:
| You need to have seen the film "The Matrix" to get the
| joke.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Oh I got that part of a joke, but that doesn't mean I
| don't want to continue discussing :)
| delusional wrote:
| Do we need a good reason? It sounds really cool, and I
| dont see why not.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Untold misery on a new species we brought back from
| extinction.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Species don't experience misery, individuals do. We farm
| billions of animals every year, how could a few
| individuals of a de-extinct species living a mostly free
| and protected life pose a moral issue?
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Given what we know about elephant intelligence and
| community, I'd be morally horrified by any level of
| systematic and ongoing "farming" of elephants for food.
| You may rightly accuse my of getting ahead of myself for
| extending the same feelings towards the mammoth for which
| we know less, but nevertheless I feel the same about them
| at the moment.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Of course, but this not what we are talking about. The gp
| objects to de-extinctioning the mammoth per se, not to
| farming it for food. As if the recreated mammoths would
| feel some unbearable sadness at the thought of being out
| of their time, or they missed their dead relatives from
| 10000 years ago.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I totally get this. Each person has to decide, where do I
| draw the line? My girlfriend won't eat octopus, for
| instance, but is fine with beef or pork.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Possibly but humans basically hunted Mammoths into
| extinction and they consumed them to the last bite. They
| must have been delicious compared to elephants. Just like
| different breeds of cow or pigs, etc, have vastly different
| marbling, flavor, and texture. Humans ate them out of
| existence they must be good eating!
| afavour wrote:
| I can't think of many historical scenarios where a human
| was faced with the decision between hunting an elephant
| and hunting a mammoth.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Possibly but humans basically hunted Mammoths into
| extinction
|
| No, they didn't. It's a myth.
|
| https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/humans-did-not-cause-woolly-
| mammot...
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Definitely the closest alternative that isn't really
| accessible today for a bunch of good reasons.
|
| "Today, all species of elephant are hunted specifically for
| their meat. This occurs notably in Cameroon, Central
| African Republic, Republic of Congo, and the Democratic
| Republic of Congo. During ivory hunts by poachers, meat may
| be taken as a by-product for eventual sale, or to feed the
| hunting party. As of 2007, wildlife experts expressed
| concerns that the major threat to elephants may become the
| demand for meat rather than the ivory trade. Organisations
| such as the WWF and TRAFFIC are campaigning to reduce
| consumption levels as this, along with the ivory trade,
| leads to as many as 55 individuals being killed a day."
|
| -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_meat
| GolfPopper wrote:
| "Mammoth burgers" are basically here (and have been for
| over a century). Siberian explorers have eaten frozen
| mammoth. The Atlantic, "What Happens to Meat When You
| Freeze It for 35,000 Years". And a startup demo'd a mammoth
| meatball last year.[2]
|
| 1. [archive link] https://archive.is/QkS7J 2.
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-massive-
| meatb...
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| How does an elephant burger taste? I'd imagine mammoth would
| be even more difficult to come by.
| pvaldes wrote:
| On the heat period, probably horrible
| tomcam wrote:
| My grandfather knew. It was not unheard of when he and his
| father mined gold in the early 20th century. At least that's
| the family lore. He died around the time I was born, so I
| never got to question and went with firsthand knowledge.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Why does "privately funded" make a difference?
| lolinder wrote:
| Presumably because they would be opposed to tax money being
| used to fund a project that they consider pointless.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| That seems short sighted. I live in Denver, CO. I consider
| it pointless to fund roads on the east coast. I'm never
| going to drive on them.
|
| That's silly. Goods arriving at East coast ports travel via
| systems I have no clue about.
| namlem wrote:
| Cloned wooly mammoths aren't a public good like roads
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Was landing on the Moon a public good?
|
| Science often brings unexpected fruit. Cloning woolly
| mammoths may as well.
| eastbound wrote:
| And so does blowing wind. You never know. Where do you
| put the limit? Pouring a trillion dollars into war sure
| has more benefits, like local hiring, finding out about
| microwaves, cheaper petrol, etc. But is pouring a
| trillion dollars into that, a good thing?
|
| The moon landing was a propaganda stunt against the USSR.
| We have no need to revive literal mammoths.
| lolinder wrote:
| The sense of pointlessness in this case isn't "I'll never
| take advantage of those roads", it's "this feels more
| like someone wanting to cosplay Jurassic Park than it
| does a serious effort to do something useful for
| biodiversity".
| wormius wrote:
| Pointless, and for a certain category of people (on all
| sides of the political spectrum), a "moral" issue. The
| right doesn't want people to play God (the same religious
| types who think IVF is a sin, or embryonic stem cells are
| murder). The left side of things, invoking nature as a god,
| using a similar argument (or fears of unknown results).
|
| I don't know if it's pointless, and there's plenty of room
| for "pointless" research (because we learn so much in the
| process). But I do wonder if it's prudent. I think it's
| cool either way.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Why does "privately funded" make a difference?
|
| Because is not subject to political time of four years
| intervals. Politicians lie often about where the funds will
| arrive, or change their minds after a while. I you can afford
| it, is much safer this way.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Not necessarily pointless - it could help mitigate climate
| change, by re-creating 'mammoth steppe' across much of Siberia.
| From _Smithsonian_ (2018): "Can Bringing Back Mammoths Help
| Stop Climate Change?" [1] (Full disclosure: I am a supporter of
| the Long Now Foundation which has advocated for mammoth
| reintroduction to reduce climate change. [2]
|
| 1.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-
| bringing-b... 2.https://longnow.org/ideas/reviving-woolly-
| mammoth-solve-clim...
| tim333 wrote:
| They seem to have quite a lot of actual wooly mammoth DNA. In
| the linked document:
|
| > The final dataset consists of 23 woolly mammoth genomes (22
| Late Quaternary and one Middle Pleistocene), with 13 at medium
| coverage (2.3-4.13) and 10 at high coverage (10.4-28.63)
|
| The efforts to make dinosaur like things more fits your
| description.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| How many times have I heard this in the last 40-something years?
| Just get on with it.
| Arch485 wrote:
| Cool, but why would we want to do this? Is there any practical
| value?
|
| There are species that are important to our current ecosystem
| that are going extinct, why are we bringing back mammoths instead
| of fixing that?
| vikramkr wrote:
| We are trying to fix that - there are eight billion people on
| this planet and we as a species are capable of doing more than
| one thing at a time.
| Arch485 wrote:
| The article says that trying to bring back mammoths is
| endangering other elephant species, so in this case it is
| mutually exclusive
| pvaldes wrote:
| This claim does not stand a minimum logical analysis.
|
| More animals in captivity means that you are increasing the
| habitat of this species. You can fit more animals from this
| species in the planet than before.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The economical value just as domestic animal for frozen areas
| is invaluable. But, the males would be most probably very
| complicated to manage. Also would help to fix those ecosystems
| in some way.
| xutopia wrote:
| It's a bit crazy to think that we're bringing back a wooly
| mammoth just in time for record temperatures. Science is
| amazing... would be amazing if political forces would do
| something about climate change.
| doodaddy wrote:
| I am unconvinced that we know enough about life's engineering to
| do something like this safely. I am doubly unconvinced that
| private industry will take the risks seriously. This sort of
| project is steeped in classic misguided pie in the sky human
| thinking - let's live on the moon or terraform mars instead of
| fixing our mess on this planet! Let's resurrect an extinct
| species instead of saving the ones we're about to make extinct!
|
| And then the idea that if the population gets out of control,
| well, we could just cull them. What, because we didn't do a good
| enough job the first time?
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| What's "safety" here? I don't intend the question to be
| trolling. What's the risk of bringing back a wooly mammoth?
|
| Sure it could die of a weird disease bc we didn't have the full
| genetic code. And yeah I'm equally unconvinced from the article
| that we actually can do this, but it's unclear to me what the
| risks are if we can and do?
|
| Scenario: Bring back one to one hundred wooly mammoths and... X
| worst case scenario happens. What's X in your view for the
| wooly mammoth? I can't think of any that seem actually bad but
| maybe my creativity is lacking?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > let's live on the moon or terraform mars instead of fixing
| our mess on this planet!
|
| Why not both? We are 8 billion on this planet, we can fix our
| mess _and_ do all these crazy things.
|
| And I don't think "de-extinguishing" species is particularly
| unsafe. Generally, the risk with messing with biology is that
| things can get out of control, but here, we are talking about
| extinct species, they went extinct because they were not
| adapted to the environment we thrive in. By far the most likely
| result if we screw up is that the specie become extinct again.
| remixff2400 wrote:
| That's the thing: we're _only_ 8 billion and amongst that we
| only have so many researchers and people who have the
| knowledge to do anything like that. We have limited capital
| to pursue any major initiative, so wasting it on unfeasible
| and non-beneficial initiatives like starting a Mars colony
| just wastes time we could do doing something more useful i.e.
| reforming deserts, stabilizing ecosystems, developing cheaper
| materials for various industries, etc.
|
| I'm not sure how dangerous "de-extinguishing" a species would
| be, but we've had numerous faux paus with destabilizing
| ecosystems by introducing non-native species (i.e. lionfish,
| as an invasive species). These cause extensive environmental
| damage and can be irreversible if not contained in time. The
| worst thing that could happen is losing control over the
| population of de-extinct species and damaging an
| ecosystem(s).
|
| That all being said, I'd be stumped if we somehow lost sight
| of a woolly mammoth... and I'd be lying if I said I didn't
| want to see one myself, so...
| Animats wrote:
| At least they're re-creating something big. Jurassic Park
| notwithstanding, large animals are far less of a threat to humans
| than something small that could become an invasive species.
| Humans have tens of millions of RPG rounds in stock.
| creatonez wrote:
| > Humans have tens of millions of RPG rounds in stock.
|
| What is this, Horizon Zero Dawn? Will we have to steal parts
| from the mammoth's cauldron facilities for our survival, while
| the mammoths continue to get stronger and stronger in an
| unstoppable paperclip optimizing loop?
| hashhar wrote:
| By paperclip optimizing loop did you by any chance mean
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html?
| bink wrote:
| And yet Australia "lost" the Emu war.
| sushid wrote:
| Zeno's mammoth is what I'll call it until I see one breathing in
| front of me.
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Is it a mammoth or an elephant that looks like a mammoth:
|
| "To produce the calves, Colossal scientists will first identify
| the genes encoding the woolly mammoth's most emblematic physical
| traits, such as shaggy hair, curved tusks, fat deposits and a
| dome-shaped cranium. They will then insert these genes into the
| genome of closely related, and therefore genetically similar,
| Asian elephants (Elephas maximus)."
|
| They're not actually taking a full mammoth set of DNA and
| inserting that into an elephant egg to grow into a mammoth, which
| they'd done with earlier animals referenced in the article.
|
| Also - how do they know the mother can actually handle it? Seems
| pretty cruel to make the mother carry an edited child that she
| might not be capable of handling.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The question isn't so much whether we can resurrect lost
| species but if we should.
|
| I see what you did there, and I approve.
| anonnon wrote:
| > It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-scale
| mammoth reintroductions went wrong. "The ecosystem has been
| adapting to the absence of mammoths since mammoths started going
| extinct," Lynch said. "What if there's an unintended consequence
| and something bad happens?"
|
| > Other experts echoed these concerns. "To get some impact, you
| need to have a lot of animals," Sophie Monsarrat, an ecologist
| and the rewilding manager at Rewilding Europe, told Live Science.
|
| The target species are all ones that humans (and exceedingly
| primitive humans, in the case of the mammoth) hunted to
| extinction, and inadvertently, at that. If there are unintended
| consequences, why couldn't we just hunt them to extinction again?
| The species listed in the article are all large, and all
| mammalian and non-flying avian (Dodo). It's not like they can
| hide or get away from us easily.
| timoth3y wrote:
| They are not operating from the full DNA, but "enough DNA to
| piece together functional genomes."
|
| However, even if we had pristine copies of mammoth DNA we could
| not re-create a mammoth.
|
| Complex organisms like mammoths (or humans) are not fully defined
| by DNA. They are an ecosystem of bacteria and smaller organisms.
| We don't know the number for mammoths, but about 40% of the cells
| in the human body are not human. They don't have our DNA. Without
| them, however, we could not even process food. We get those
| organisms, not from DNA, but from other humans and the
| environment around us.
|
| These scientists may be able to create _something_ , and
| hopefully something that will not suffer horribly, but de-
| extinction is not nearing realty.
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