Comment by schainks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schainks | Hacker News Reader

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There was a good Oxford style debate on NPR about whether resurrecting the mammoth is a good idea. The most interesting point I heard _against_ doing something like this was along these lines:

If we were to use an elephant mother host to grow the fetus, once the mammoth is born, it is possible the herd will immediately recognize the baby as an anomaly and abandon it. Thus, this child is born into a world of suffering, not just for the herd that rejects it, but for the individual who is raised alone with no family, possibly by humans only. What will we do when the next one is born? Just put the two individuals in a space together and hope for the best?

De-extincting such a creature carries additional costs we don't know how to quantify. Once that first, lonely, individual is sexually mature, will it even want to mate? Will it have the social skills to accept other future artificially-born mammoths as part of its herd? We have no way of "recreating" the social environment a mammoth would need to thrive in order to bring a self-sustaining herd of the species into balanced existence.

A wooly mammoth calf will look similar enough to an elephant calf that this would not be an issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/13/firm-bring-b...

That's a claim they made without any evidence to support it, which is a troubling trend with this team. Personally I see them as engaging in unethical behavior by their misleading statements like that one where they genuinely can't know whether the hybrid would be rejected.

Sure - I was just providing the link so one could see what a wooly mammoth calf might look like. Elephants are extremely bonded and very caring of their/their group's young, they take care of sick or injured elephants in their group - clearly there is no evidence for how an elephant would behave but I have my suspicion that a mammoth calf born would be readily accepted.

Is an optimistic suspicion _enough_ to risk inflicting a lifetime of suffering if our suspicion was completely wrong on multiple levels? Even if the genes we splice work as expected, do we know they correctly produce an individual who can correctly socially mature?

And of course, my next favorite argument from the anti-resurrection team was, "ok, we've produced a herd of socially functioning individuals who can reproduce and grow their own population. How long until we start using them for food again or straight up industrially farming them?"

Well, we could just euthanize the mammoth. These concerns didn't stop us from cloning dolly, or doing hundreds of other genetic experiments. Or millions of other instances of animal testing.

On the eve of being able to reverse extinction itself, the progressive/environmentalist/animal-rights-advocates crawled so far up their own asses that it became morally unacceptable to even try.

You can't make this shit up, it's absolutely hilarious.

Fools laugh at what they don't understand. To begin with, a formal debate requires exploring arguments against the proposition for the side that is assigned to oppose it.

Of all the extinct species you might attempt to resurrect, a mammoth is about the least economical option because when things go wrong (as they do) every problem will be massively expensive. If it gets born successfully but develops a health problem that requires surgery of some sort? $10,000 minimum. There will likely be a string of very expensive problems.

Maybe it would be wiser to start with something a little more manageable, like an extinct dog breed - we understand dogs better than we do elephants, for obvious reasons. There's a long list of extinct animals, most of which are a lot more manageable than woolly mammoths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_species

Are you judging that from the one photo of a 10,000 year old preserved carcass that looks like a baby elephant?

I don't know what features elephants use to tell their calves apart, but in an alternate universe I would bet that elephants would say the same about a 10,000 old preserved carcass of a baby Homo Habilis and us.

Yes, and from being somewhat familiar with the behavior of elephants. I'm not saying my hunch has any basis to it, but if I was thinking about investing in Colossal Biosciences, calf rejection from the birth mother would be very low on my list of concerns.

In that alternate universe, I suspect that 99% of mothers would not just leave their newly birthed baby out in the elements to die if it happened to be a homo habilis

Is there any evidence of this sort of acceptance between African and Asian elephants (say, in zoos)? I wouldn't be surprised if that had been attempted, and they appear further removed from one another than mammoths and Asian elephants are.

There was a zoo crossbred elephant. I think Motty was its name. It didn’t survive long after birth. But it shows that African and Asian elephants will breed at least, which implies they’d probably raise a mismatched calf.

Asian and African elephants are both commonly carriers for a virus (different strains of EEHV) which is very deadly to elephant calves of the other species. They used to be housed together more often before zoologists figured this out.

That seems wildly optimistic to me. Suppose they look the same but they smell quite different? I'm thinking this is something we would be largely oblivious to but that an elephant would not, for reasons I hope are obvious.

Well, the calf would have spent 22 months in the uterus of the mother, and passed through the mother's birth canal. I suspect anything spending that much time there would smell approximately similar. Also, I find it unlikely that the elephant is doing some "does it smell like an elephant" test on the thing that it knows it just birthed. Maybe some creatures with less intelligence might actually behave that way, because they might be happy eating the babies of an unrelated mother of the same species, but don't want to eat their own. But I suspect elephants don't have that evolutionary pressure, especially considering that they help raise the calves of other members of their group, and have been known to adopt orphaned baby elephants that they're presented with in one way or another.

There are observed cases of mammals raising a different species of mammal, including wet-nursing them, so it does not seem to be the problem it's purported to be.

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