Can Genetic Engineering Bring Back Extinct Animals?

> Better statistical techniques will push this bound

That's what he meant by statistical techniques, we don't currently read a full "stream" even with brand new DNA, we smash it to bits then read those and have the computers put them back together.

At a certain point though what's left is too garbled or in too small sequences so that there isn't enough overlap that you can't put humpty back together again :).

Not likely. Dude to the chemistry of nucleotides, they can degrade in a particular pattern that obscures the ancestral allele. For example the deamination of cytosine to thymine can leave us with an ambiguity in what in our read for the correct nucleotide is.

Was it thymine? Or was it cytosine that degraded to thymine? That means for literally 50% of the genome we have a huge ambiguity and few ways to tell what it really is.

We can use the ancestral allele from a nearby extant species, but then we miss out on all the extinct variation (which is the important stuff).

We can try to increase coverage of the ancient genome to capture loci where cytosines haven't deaminated, but thats tough for a dozen reasons, and in the end you'll still have no confidence in 25% of the genome.

We can get very close to a full ancient genome, but never 100%. Maybe through transgenics, selective breeding, and ancient sequencing we can re-create ancient species, but we will never make them exactly as they once were.

Yes, but with a half life of 500 years, the amount of information you have halves every 500 years you go back. At some point there just isn't enough information to go viably go back further.

>If that's not the case, you'll be left with the ethics of zoos and animal rights.

This is kind of to my point. Nobody I know has raised objects like that, and animal rights is largely PR based anyway. (E.g., politicians eating baby elephant but social media upset about Cecil.)

Nobody I've talked to has said something like, "We shouldn't do it for ethical reasons and they are..." which I find interesting and why I broached the topic.

Keep them in large cages and let us look at them.

One could also ask the question of whether humans need to behave in such a way as to bring about the extinction of so many species. Certainly the passenger pigeon wasn't made extinct for the common good.

Biodiversity is the only answer we have right now to the question of how to maintain a healthy planet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Services_enhanced...). Until we get a lot smarter, it's wise to learn how to better preserve as much as we can.

How would you feel about cloning endangered species compared to resurrecting extinct species? Endangered species are still part of ecosystem, so you avoid some of the problems or arguments around introducing new, invasive species.

Siberian landscapes suffer much from not having mammoths, sabertooth tigers and wooly rhinos. Half of Siberia could be productive arctic steppe instead of grim forest we see today (we don't because there's no business being there).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park

(Biology) restores some bio-diversity to the planet.

(Cuisine) If passenger pigeons became commonplace again, we could eat them.

Regarding your point about knowledge: totally agree. If we could coax extinct life forms back into existence, think of the likely medical implications. Regenerating limbs, repairing brain damage, curing MS and ALS and a host of other genetic problems.

People like this science writer keep saying "We might be able to, but should we?"

Of course we should. The opportunity costs of not doing it are potentially enormous.

I agree with the latter reason, but for Karma, arguments such as that always strike me as odd. It's sort of like admitting that your unwittingly blundering in and making a hash of other people's relationships has caused you to try to try to purposefully insert yourself into more relationships in the future to try to help. Perhaps the lesson being missed there is that you shouldn't intrude in those relationships at all.

Glory? Eh, if it's beneficial overall, I don't see too much harm, but it doesn't sway me much.

Knowledge is the real inventive here for me. Knowledge is how we advance our species as a whole. It's the only thing that makes this discussion possible, on every conceivable level.