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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Further and more annoying "Ship of Theseus" questions:

If I engineer an animal whose DNA matches that of an extinct species, but it's raised in captivity, or in another way such that its environment is very different from that of when the species was not extinct -- have i actually resurrected a species?

Radiolab had a bit about this w.r.t. whooping cranes. Captive raised birds, released in the wild, have no ability to raise chicks -- because there have been no tutors. The existence of adults in the wild is thus totally dependent on humans raising them in captivity -- is that "really" saving a species from extinction? http://www.radiolab.org/story/254840-operation-migration/

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I get the argument from a theoretical perspective, but in practice most recently extinct species have very close relatives we could probably co-opt into teaching rearing practices if necessary.

(captive) elephants could almost certainly be used to raise cloned wolly mammoths; there are a variety of Rhino species which could be used to help raise un-extinct Rhinos.

I don't see why it's not worth trying. Maybe it will work for some species, and it won't for others, but there have been much largest amounts of money wasted on much less noble projects.

>(captive) elephants could almost certainly be used to raise cloned wolly mammoths

Their native habitats are about as totally different as you can get without being underwater. Why do you assume their behaviors will be similar?

We know enough about woolly mammoths to know that they behaved and ate in a roughly similar way to elephants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth#Palaeobiology

I'm really not convinced, especially when you add the role of environment; the epigenetic factors.

> (captive) elephants could almost certainly be used to raise cloned wolly mammoths

By that logic, bonobos could almost certainly be used to raised cloned humans. I would actually like to see the results of this experiment, particularly manner in which the person would resolve conflicts :)

> Maybe it will work for some species, and it won't for others, but there have been much largest amounts of money wasted on much less noble projects.

This is more philosophy, but this doesn't seem noble at all. Unless the animal being resurrected plays a crucial, irreplaceable role in the global ecosystem, these actions strike me as a hubris borne out of a collective/species-wide guilt for exterminating the animal in the first place.

Yes, our actions caused a species to go extinct. We should accept and make peace with that. It is cruel to bring a species back from extinction to be captive, like bringing something back from the dead so it can truly serve a sentence of life in prison.

Also, if we aren't doing anything to preserve its natural habitat, and all elements point to a more, not less, anthropocenic world, then it will just go extinct again in the wild.

The main reason to resurrect extinct species is the scientific research (and not the "guilt treatment").

> Captive raised birds, released in the wild, have no ability to raise chicks -- because there have been no tutors.

Except this can be fixed trivially by puppetry/robotics. Just because it currently is under-addressed doesn't mean its some unsolvable problem. There are probably a lot of steps from cloning to wild survival we're ignoring here, but the idea that they're insurmountable because we haven't really tried to solve them is a bit much.

I think with global warming, we more or less have a moral responsibility to try to preserve and in some cases try to resurrect the animals that will go extinct in the future due to irresponsible use of fossil fuels. I suspect this stuff is going to move from the theoretical and experimental to concrete results in our grandkid's time.

I imagine biologists of the future will be running Jurassic Park-like technology as the norm and gleefully watch old movies to point out all the technical mistakes we made, the same way we can laugh at movies about shooting men to the moon with a cannon.

That same Radiolab episode indicated that some fraction (something on the order of 1 in 20 or 50) of those cranes could raise young even though most couldn't.

It also indicated that the young reared by cranes had a much higher chance to rear their own young reasonable (something on the order of 1 in 2 or 3).

I agree it is a meaningful question if that part of bird "culture" for lack of better terminology cannot be recovered, but it seems that at least these birds are not entirely without instincts.

What will we do for species that we have no basis for deciding how to teach them to be themselves? What does a baby mammoth, smilodon or dinosaur need?

Yeah, you don't need the engineering, or even artificial selection to make this analogy. Species is just a human-invented term to categorize and only roughly matches nature.

What is a species? Organisms that can interbreed? Well we have Ligers. Percentage of similar DNA? Well what percent? Morphology? It all boils down, eventually, into what we think it is.

That is, there are no two identical animals (ignore identical twins for the moment). Attempts to resurrect/restore things as they were (for moral posterity or whathaveyou) are futile. We can only hope to restore some sort of balance that helps ourselves.

I don't see the problem here. Even if our distinctions are somewhat arbitrary they do have meaning. E.g. there is a difference between frogs and cats. If we bring back a creature from the past, like the Mammoth, who cares if it's exactly the same?

No problem, just a thought experiment.

> If we bring back a creature from the past, like the Mammoth, who cares if it's exactly the same?

And that's what I would say.

I was thinking along the same lines -- for example, say if scientists do bring back a huge group of passenger pigeons. Would these passenger pigeons know which route to fly, which parts of the habitat to utilize, etc. similar to those of their extinct ancestors?

It's almost like the scientists would then need to 'bootstrap' the de-extinct animal's brain to give it it's previous identity and knowledge.

Whooping cranes taught to migrate over a 15 year period by using ultralight airplanes to lead them:

http://operationmigration.org/

More recently they've stopped because it's unclear if it's working.

Yes. Because we could teach them this skill

Again.

We're engineering new species, not resurrecting extinct ones. I remember either seeing a documentary or reading somewhere that cloning extinct species is pretty much impossible. Even the Woolly Mammoth "clone" would end up being a cross between an elephant and a mammoth. Similarly, a T-Rex "clone" would be engineered out of modern chicken DNA until it starts producing something that resembles the extinct dinosaur.

>We're engineering new species, not resurrecting extinct ones.

I think this is way more honest.

That depends on how you describe a species. The problem is that the recreated mammoth would probably made from modified elephant DNA, therefore having most of the time the gene order of elephants (while having mammoth gene sequences). It would therefore almost certainly be impossible to cross them with the original mammoth. Nevertheless, aside from chromosome arcituctual influences that we do not yet understand would you have a mammoth that is phenotypically identical to the original (and not be a cross between elephant and mammoth). If there should be a successfull genome writing program, it would be possible to recreate the original genome and you would get the original species. The T-Rex clone is different as we do not know (and almost certainly will never know) its genome.

I've never thought about the Ship of Theseus in those terms.

I always thought it was more of a "Are you still you even though all the cells in your body eventually get replaced; so except for many of your brain and nerve cells, you have little to none of what you were born with." or "Is it still that computer I build in 2005 even though I've literally replaced everything in it and the case, except for this old DVD drive?"

Also known as "Trigger's Broom" in the UK.

From Wikipedia: In the episode "Heroes and Villains", Trigger wins an award for having owned the same broom for 20 years. He reveals that it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles, but insists it is still the same broom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_(Only_Fools_and_Horses...

I don't think Ship of Theseus really applies here. The thought experiment asks, 'is it the same ship?' - not, 'is it a ship at all?'. It is considering identity, not classification.

If I kill you and then use your DNA to clone you ten years later, have I somehow not killed you? No, for the reasons GP puts forward (OK, philosophers might disagree, but I will leave that to them). But I have undeniably created a human, just not (necessarily) the same human I killed before.

We have a stable definition of "species", and if we create a genetically correct woollen mammoth, it is a mammoth, by definition, even if it's natural habitat is gone. Just like an elephant in a zoo is still uncontroversially an elephant, even if it has no capacity to survive in the wild.

I wish we could do stuff not "to save" or "make things better", but just because it's awesome (also greatness cannot be planned, so we don't know what a challenge like quasi-resurrecting exinct animals could teach us).

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