De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

> The habitat wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed.

That's an interesting way to describe the massive effect humans are having on pretty much every habitat on the planet ... "It just changed."

I see two points: 1. scientific curiosity, and 2. people might enjoy seeing these animals.

Also, humans are terraforming this planet anyway so I don’t see a reason not to do it in a way to make room for previously extinct species.

Some other discussion could be if those animals would be happy living. Maybe we will have to ask whether we de-extinct Homo Erectus. Apparently, we're not even asking this for animals we eat…

Are you an ecologist?

Sometimes the holes don't get filled. Mammoths in northern steppes are one example, and getting them back would actually be pretty helpful.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-bringing-b...

It's unlikely these resurrected species will inhabit their ancestral habitats but rather, like Jurassic Park, satisfy human curiosity and entertainment for nature itself does not care one way or the other.

Just think, eventually and extinct species zoo garden, not unlike JP, except more tame species... maybe. It would be a destination attraction for sure.

Rich people spend money on a fancy boat, nobody gives a damn. Rich people spend their money on some charity or philanthropic endeavor, "Shame! You should spend that money on THIS charity instead!"

The habitat may also come to be dominated by a bully species due to human intervention (think: plastic pollution causing Turtle deaths and thus rise in Jellyfish population) which may result in extinctions of a variety of other species.

Bringing back beaver and wolves to areas where they've been wiped out is functionally the same and shows that often such niches don't get filled all that fast. The replacement for wolves has been hunters, beavers had no replacement. Usually when either gets reintroduced, the local ecosystem functions quite a bit better, there has been quite a bit of backlash by hunters because it turns out wolves do a substantial part of their work and there is less need to control deer populations. Might not work in all cases, but even if partial restoration is an option, having that genome around is a good thing in itself, as life thrives off diversity. Reducing genetic diversity hampers an ecosystem's ability to adapt to change. We have a lot of ecosystems that have been decimated to the point of being close to unviable, and we're losing keystone species all the time. Fixing what drove them over the cliff (hard if it's feral cats, easier if it's a specific pesticide, disease, hunting, or habitat fragmentation) and subsequent reintroduction may well prove a pretty important strategy to keep the world a place that humans can thrive in, especially given the predicted decrease in world population by the end of the century which may result in renaturation of swathes of land.

I think the apt comparison here is landing on the moon. Although overtly it carries little value, the technologies developed along the way are very valuable.

As the article mentions improved fertilization, more accurate genome editing, and advances in in-vitro gastrulation are the real prize.

To me there is also something profoundly sad about the loss of molecular information with each extinct species. Having a simple hope, perhaps naive, to reverse this process is comforting.

In regarding the Mammoth there is some who claims that bringing the Mammoth back would help recreate the northern subarctic steppe grassland ecosystem that flourished in Siberia during the last glacial period. This would increase the animal density in Siberia and so on.

I don't think that's true. Leaving aside that feral cats will just re-extinct the species, whatever other species has filled it's niches is very unlikely to be as good as that as the original.

I fully disagree. There are so many examples of animals that once de-facto disappeared (like huge sea-lion colonies, same for turtles, reintroduced american and/or european bison, black footed ferret, arabian oryx, hermit ibis, wolves, ...) and then came back, to restore their original biological role. You cannot release a mammoth into central park and hope that it just works. But nobody is trying to do that.

If someone went to set your house on fire, empty your bank account and kill your family, I'm pretty sure "your life wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed" would not be well accepted by you.

That doesn't really sound like the same thing?

Protecting existing species is a different goal though.

It's always true that if you have different goals you'd spend resources differently.

In 1800's United States, fire departments in many large cities (Chicago and New York, to name two) were private for-profit industries. If a homeowner did not pay what was effectively protection money, the fire department would refuse to extinguish your property if it caught fire, and would sit around as the dwelling burned, in some cases with people still inside.

Fascinating idiom, thanks!

It's even worse. The claim sounds like: "Billion dollar company needs to invent new things to succeed, surely it is doomed to fail."

The article also illustrates the problem of the gap between research and development.

We have a bunch of technologies mentioned that are perhaps out of the pure basic research stage, but need to be developed a bunch. Developing those can be done independently and in parallel, but is that happening? Trying to put them all together probably is premature as the article suggests, and yet this is the easiest way to raise money because it is catchy.

> I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil

It's because we care about our children and their children. Each extinction eliminates a species that our ancestors lived among or depended upon. Eventually, an extinction may fundamentally break a food chain that keeps our descendants alive.

Maybe this can help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss

In very short terms: lack of biodiversity makes the ecosystem brittle and susceptible to collapse with changing selective pressure.

I personally don't want to live in a bland, dead world.

To me its like climate change. The climate change, just like species go extinct. But humans are exasperating both processes in a ways that will ultimately make living on earth worse for future generations.

> Species die, that’s the natural order of things for species in general…

When we say “natural” we’re already being anthropocentric by dividing reality between things that happen because of humans and everything else. You can’t hand wave away what’s occurred because of our behavior by point to the “natural order of things” when it explicitly isn’t.

As to why people are obsessed. It’s just a value judgement? You might as well asked why certain groups are obsessed with getting in orderly queues and other groups deal with lines as competition to get to the front.

If you value not killing off other species then undoing an extinction would most definitely absolve you of that sin. I can see how if you personally don’t care about extinctions you wouldn’t care about undoing them, but you need to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes to be able to understand the answer to your question.

Extinction is the complete destruction of something that took millions of years to make. As much as it seems like people create the world they live in, they don't. We ingeniously assemble the world we live in out of the great diversity of material around us. It's better that we have wheat now than the world in which we didn't. It's better that we have tomatoes, corn, chickens, etc.. Without them, our lives would likely be more difficult and less pleasurable. Tomorrow's tomatoes and chickens may have been killed today partially out of greed, but mostly out of carelessness and lack of understanding.

> I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil - it’s as evil as the concept of death itself;

If you characterize worrying about extinction as being obsessed, would you characterize worrying about death to be an obsession we should rid ourselves of? Why should I worry if people are dying, people always die, doesn't matter?

Maybe the juicy headline was written by the editor?

Well it used to take ~infinity years as the technique didn’t exist to do it at all.

Claims like “it’ll take 5000 years” are always funny because they’re so incredibly status quo biased, without the least bit of self consciousness of how remarkable the progress has been in the last 50 years on things like this.

Humans overestimate progress in the near term and underestimate progress in the long term.

Technically that could be overcome if you don't care about individual specimen welfare and mutate until you get viable specimens. It won't be quite the same but it would restore a viable species.

Yes, and the technologies involved in attempting de-extinction are also useful in preserving existing species.

A species that has dwindled to about ten living individuals has a shallow gene pool.

Bringing in genes from recently deceased or preserved specimens could help deepen that pool.

It has happened that only one female of a species was known to be alive. The ability to put together a viable egg for her to bring to term would be the difference between extinction and survival.

We're also awfully mammal-centric. Frogs have already been de-extincted. The gastric-brooding frog was resurrected in 2013.

Compared to mammals it is relatively easy to transfer DNA around between the eggs of related oviparous species and there's no real reason we can't make a large-scale DNA bank for them, protecting the endangered birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians of the world.

These technologies are all part of one tech tree.

Great minds think alike.

Had to google it. Made my day

Not a single one of those movies are an actual argument against a real de-extinction project.

You mean Jurassic Park, that famous parable of the need for better fences?

People seem to be forgetting the meaning of "fiction" recently. Citing Jurassic Park makes about as much sense as citing cyberpunk's loss of humanity trope from cybernetics as the reason why amputees should be denied functional prosthetics.

Evolution isn't a doctrine that you're supposed to follow, that's social Darwinism.