Did scientists revive an extinct animal or just breed a less stripey zebra?
wsj.com
wsj.com
This is my thought about all these efforts. The mammoth people talk like it's about a solution to climate change, but that's obviously working backwards from their goal (revive the mammoth for reasons) to some sort of reasonable-sounding justification. They set out with different motivations in mind.
I'd ask the same question here: why try to bring back a species we already killed off? These won't be descendants of the animals we killed, so it's hardly a form of reparations. If it's about preserving the ecosystems we already have, there have to be more efficient ways to do that than rebreeding less stripe zebras.
It's hard not to see this as just the same impulse that led to the poodle: because we can and because it will look cool and draw attention and make money. The only difference is there's a slight nostalgic bent to the aesthetic.
Species do not need to exists for a utilitarian purpose. Bringing back something that once existed can be a perfectly justifiable end in itself. Preventing a species from going extinct is not particularly controversial, even reintroducing species that have not been seen in a land in many generations is widely done and celebrated. The only difference between that and reintroducing a species that went extinct globally is the technical difficulty.
It's very reasonable to believe that there could be benefits to restoring ecosystems, and that might motivate some people to provide their effort and resources to the endeavor moreso than the restoration of nature, but it's perfectly fine to have multiple aligned motivations.
The world is a dynamic place, the true exercise in ego is to define the world as it happened to be when you were born into it as the status quo that ought to be maintained.
There is no modern-era equivalent to the mammoth steppe. Savanna biomes are too hot (thus, elephants — mammoths adapted for the heat); and tundra biomes don't get enough sun (thus only supporting very small herbivorous tundra animals, with even the apex predators of that food chain not being anything like megafauna.)
Many megafauna existed outside the steppes. First example that comes to mind is the european forest elephant.
My points were these:
1. the steppe mammoth specifically (i.e. the one everyone means when they reference humans hunting mammoths to extinction) existed as it did because of the mammoth steppe’s unique biome;
2. megafauna that were endemic to the mammoth steppe are not transplantable to any biome we have today, because they were adapted specifically to those conditions (thus the being-endemic, rather than ranging elsewhere), and we no longer have those conditions. (They might survive, but they would quickly adapt out of the phenotype we recognize. You’d just get another elephant.)
I made no claim about the survivability of megafauna that did range outside of the steppe. Clearly, if they were out there, they were able to be out there; and we do have equivalent biomes to those today.
The steppe mammoth became extinct 200,000 years ago, it likely never encountered homo sapiens. The name is also a bit of a misnomer - they were associated with the steppe but were not confined to them.
When people talk about mammoths hunted to extinction by humans, they are usually referring to the woolly mammoth, which had a much wider range. They've been found from southern Spain to Kentucky. They might also be talking about the Columbian mammoth which resided in lower latitude parts of North America as far south as Costa Rica. Both the woolly and columbian mammoths are descended from the steppe mammoth, and both went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene with pygmy populations surviving on islands into the Holocene. Both survived numerous previous interglacial periods.
The "mammoth steppe" is just a poetic name for a biome common at the time, indeed the most common biome on Earth during the age of the woolly mammoth, it's not actually a term for a region the woolly mammoth was endemic to. It is by definition distinct from currently existing steppe climates, but the differences are mostly academic and does not explain the extinction of the mammoths. Indeed it is believed that the decline of the steppe was likely caused by the extinction of the mammoth (and other large herbivores), as they prevented trees from becoming too large or numerous, and in their absence much of the steppe turned into forest.
Wood bison are practically identical to steppe bison so the conditions must be very similar. Elephants aren’t cold adapted running into issues well above freezing (~42f), so anyplace that gets midwestern cold like say Mongolia isn’t going to result in them evolving into something roughly equivalent to elephants.
Note that maps that claim to depict the "mammoth steppe", that you might find when searching, mostly aren't; they are actually usually maps depicting the range of the set of megafauna we associate with the steppe. But many of those megafauna have ranges that exceed the extent of the mammoth-steppe biome — i.e. they're not endemic to the steppe. So these depictions exaggerate the size of the steppe.
For example, these maps show areas within the arctic circle as part of the steppe — but they definitely were not part of the steppe biome. They were tundra then, just as they are now.
If you divide "megafauna you could find on the mammoth steppe" into "endemic to the steppe" vs "ranged to other biomes, such as tundra", I'm not sure what the precise ratio of the two groups would be; but AFAIK, the species that vanished along with the steppe (mostly not from human predation!) constituted at least a majority of such megafauna.
Which should be obvious — we'd have a lot more megafauna otherwise!
Also,
> Wood bison are practically identical to steppe bison so the conditions must be very similar.
This is an argument from phenotype, and that really doesn't work.
Species that happen to present identically when put into the same habitat, are just doing (over the course of a generation or two) the epigenetic equivalent of convergent evolution — flipping all the methylation switches to activate similar developmental strategies that they both happen to have evolved at some point in the past, either independently or in some common ancestor. (In the case of the wood and steppe bison, that would be the "it's cold, but there's lots of food; so I should get big, get strong enough to defend myself, grow lots of heavy fur, and minimize surface area per volume" strategy.)
But if you take two such "phenotypically identical" species out of the same habitat, and place them into a different habitat, they may have wildly different responses to that adaptive pressure. One species may not have the adaptations the other does, and so one species may do well while the other fails to thrive. Or the two species may have very different adaptations, such that they end up inhabiting different ecological niches in their new habitat, when previously they fit into the same slot.
Which is to say: steppe bison died out (long before the sort of en masse human predation that drove the plains bison to extinction), but wood bison survived. There's probably some good reason for that. (I'm not a zoologist, but I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the wood bison also being known as the mountain bison — i.e. with their ability to range beyond flat plains/steppe!)
Your argument suggested that these are very different environments. “You’d just get another elephant.”
If convergent evolution is pushing the same adaptations then that suggests something already evolved to exist in a similar environment would be reasonably stable especially across human timescales. Kansas gets cold but it’s hardly the Arctic Tundra.
Things have been going extinct for millennia with no human intervention. The idea of the butterfly effect from human intervention causing ecosystem collapse is filled with hubris. There are some things that will obviously change a landscape. If we were to completely deforest the Amazon then there could be some disastrous consequences, sure.
But the Brazilian Three Eyed Skunkowl going extinct isn't likely to cause some devastating collapse outside of a poorly-done model.
The notion of rates is also quite a bit more contentious than many appreciate. The extremely high rates in modern times are based on modeling with rather debated assumptions. This is how you get claims of hundreds of extinctions per day even though there have only been about 800 'verified' extinctions in the past 400 years [1]. And, notably, a number of those verified extinct species ended up showing up elsewhere later on!
[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
Where is the utility?
We've established that things are changing. Sure. But if you gave someone a 'stock predictor' of similar quality, few people would choose to trust it with money. But in reality, we dedicate billions of dollars of resources collectively to the outputs of biome modeling.
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh...
They would be trying to resurrect the mammoth either way, so it's not like there's any real incentive to actually research whether it will work.
Yes, it is critical to not let your focus split, and always stay true to the most important goal.
If you're a robot.
"Doing cool stuff" is one of the major, most basic drives behind progress of science and technology. Definitely more honest than "doing it for the money" or "doing it for social status", where you can always find ways to cheat if the going gets annoying. "Doing cool stuff" is up there with "doing it to save ourselves from an imminent, lethal threat" - the other highly reliable motivator that has little tolerance for bullshit, and was responsible for most of the rapid progress thorough history. Of the two, I'd prefer the one that doesn't involve violence and fear of death. It's probably more sustainable, too.
See also: something something Feynman on having fun in research.
Consider also: Most progress happens in small increments; the set of people motivated by wanting to solve climate is small, so it doesn't really hurt to also add the people motivated by doing cool shit in parallel. The chance of getting critical increment doubles; the chance of any one in any of the two groups having the full solution is ~zero.
I worry that they can use the climate change argument to deflect from the ethical arguments around whether it's even a good idea to resurrect a highly intelligent social animal like this. Imagine bioengineering a resurrected "Neanderthal" into a world without Neanderthals. There's something bleak about it. If the breeding/release idea doesn't work out you've just intentionally created some endlings[0] with no real future.
I think that in the near future we'll wealthy weirdos start to clone their ancestors, and things like native groups in colonized places like Canada or New Zealand start to clone their ancestors to buff up their population and strengthen their legal claims to territory. Think about what we'll be able to do with artificial wombs.[1]
As for your neanderthal endlings it probably will be pretty bleak for a lot of these hominids, but who knows, maybe some of them will end up being smarter than your average human and they'll have a role in society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-...
> Life is very efficient.
I mean, is it? It's a total tangent, but I've long been having a problem wrapping my mind around the topic of efficiency of life. At whichever scale I look, from ecosystems to inner workings of cells, I see systems held in balance by negative feedback loops, zero-sum games. That is, everything fights everything else for resources, and what we call "balance" is a temporary equilibrium between reproduction, destruction and starvation. Feels like the exact opposite of efficiency. And yet, I can't deny that life can and does a lot with very little. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.
I have this general image in my head wrt. efficiency. Imagine you want to put a box a meter above the ground. There are many ways to do it. You could strap a PLC controller and a rocket engine to it, and keep it up actively. You could put it on a floating platform, filled with hot air, or better, helium or hydrogen. Or, you could just put a mast in the ground and bolt the box to it. The first one is obviously the least efficient, and the last one the most.
When I look at life, I see a lot of things being balanced by means equivalent to the rocket engine approach.
Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.
Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.
It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.
Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely
H psi = ih d/dt psi
H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.
The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.
Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.
To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.
So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.
To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.
as it stands right now, cloning of any organism requires at the very least living fibroblast cells. Of course, you cannot get these from deceased mammals. Colossal's strategy is to essentially blast the host genome with fragments of the subjects DNA (which you can get from deceased/fossilized tissue) and hope that the end result is an elephant cell that's been reprogrammed into a mammoth-like cell from which to do cloning.
imo if they really wanted a mammoth, they could just make a hairy elephant. that would be 10x easier. but the whole idea is being able to resurrect...mammals.
But people in general don't want to live completely utilitarian life, and your "vanity" is someone else's "exploration of the possible" or "lifting up human mind". Both of you might even be right at the same time.
Doing stuff because it would be cool is great, it's just kind of dumb to pretend you're doing it for a practical purpose. Just say you want to do the big thing because it would be fun, or inspiring, or you have a trillion dollars and can afford it.
It’s no different than reintroducing beavers into areas to reduce wildfires. Nothing we’ve invented so far is a better option.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/19/fighting-wildland-fire-wi...
That doesn't mean the justification that they found is necessarily invalid, but the reason why solutions in search of a problem are problematic is that the chosen solution is rarely the optimal one because it wasn't designed for the problem—the problem was designed for the solution.
The wheel and combustion engine weren't invented as a bespoke solutions for automobiles and trains. The internet wasn't invented as a platform for e-commerce.
History is full of examples of technology leading the application, with curious or enterprising individuals adapting the technology to a productive use.
EV batteries is still unresolved at scale and cars are still made of tons of extracted metals and oilchemestry. They are fun and new tech sell well and oil price go up. That’s the reasons EV were invented. Branding them as green works great because it’s look plausible and we all want to have greener cars (and/or continue using them, which is correlated).
What would you consider positive a climate change outcome? I think there are tons of positive outcomes, but agree there is a lot of greenwashing as well.
Moving from coal to natural gas has a enormous positive outcome. PV is as well. US CO2 per capita and total emissions are down 25% in the last 20 years, which is a massive positive outcome. Global CO2 per capita has gone negative, which is another massive win.
It is too soon to tell, but we may even be at or have passed global peak emissions, which will be another massive milestone.
We didn’t, and coal consumption even double since 80’s. What we did is add oil to it and then gaz [0]. Some could argue that without oil and gaz, coal might be even higher today. In that sense gas is more a “less bad” than a good one : it did not diminish the coal consumption neither out energy need.
You present no evidence it won't work, but you oppose it because you think the method might be... sub-optimal? Maybe?
Ironically it sounds like you started with opposition to this project (I blame Jurassic Park) and then worked backwards in search of a justification for your opinion.
> maybe
I don't even have a dog in this fight one way or another, I just call out terrible and weak logical arguments when I see them. This thread is rife with bad arguments.
It seems people here thought "Jurassic Park bad," then twisted themselves into knots to come up with something to complain about. Bad form guys.
If you want to fool people (in a durable way that's immune to logic), write a book or movie they watch as a kid.
Maybe they are coincidentally right and it will work, but they definitely seem less interested in rigorously investigating whether it will work than investigating the cool parts of engineering a mammoth.
"Really about" climate change is a different issue from whether or not it works. You're again trying to change the subject to the distraction issue of original intent, not actual efficacy (for which you clearly have no evidence, only insinuation).
Instead of bringing back mammoths, maybe help genetically engineer existing species to help them adapt faster, like people are doing with coral. I don't know, but "resurrecting the mammoths" is probably far down the list of useful climate change projects these people could be putting effort into.
That's the thread, folks! Thanks for finally admitting your lack of a real evidence-based argument.
Specialization of labor within a project is hardly a new concept.
If it does work, that would be awesome. A wooly mammoth certainly sounds cool and it's not my money, so whatever.
> You're again trying to change the subject to the distraction issue of original intent, not actual efficacy.
Come back with a real argument please. Until then we have nothing to talk about.
One can easily argue that Mammoths ought to be able to survive - they survived periods with climates similar to our current one and there are a lot fewer paleolithic hunters running about now. But we won't really know unless we try.
Modern poachers with modern technology beat paleolithic hunters, hands down.
Technology works, as it turns out... :D
Anyways, in this scenario we have the means of producing mammoths at will, so why would there be a market for mammoth poaching? If people do kill a mammoth, just add another mammoth. Technology works.
>why would there be a market for mammoth poaching?
[1] Co-founder of colossal, the company that is attempting the mammoth de-extinction.
So then this becomes an exercise in cruelty, bringing a creature to life only for it to suffer a painful, short existence. Reminds me of Frankenstein, honestly.
Arguably mammoths would likely do the same after some period of time, and I'd hope other mega-fauna we've chased, killed and eaten into extinction.
[1] https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/after-year-bison-f...
Even the various officials say things that make it sound great, but quickly turn to saying they'll need more time to reach a result.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
I'm unconvinced that the value we expect to gain from resurrecting an extinct species is worth the overhead of doing so, compared to using those same resources to keep the species that we haven't yet killed off alive and help them thrive.
That isn't how it works. Conserving megafauna and de-extincting the mammoth aren't competing with each other except in the very general sense that both are in competition with every other endeavour which is not explicitly engaged in profit seeking.
But if you were to say "I'm unconvinced the value we expect to gain from preserving old computers in working condition is worth it, relative to efforts to reduce child mortality in West Africa" it would obviously be a weak argument which few would entertain. But the situation is much more like that than you make it look here.
In abstract terms, there is only a small difference of degree between capturing, reproducing and dispersing rare animals to increase a small population (for example, small raptors in cities as a defense against obnoxious birds); reestablishing a recently extinct population with imports from a place where an animal isn't extinct yet (for example wolves and bears in various places in central Europe); reestablishing a less recently extinct population with artificial marvels of genetic engineering (mammoths, aurochs); introducing completely foreign animals (for example rabbits in Australia, a major bad idea from a conservation point of view); introducing artificial animals that never had a population anywhere (hopefully all fiction, but for example photosynthesis would be impactful).
Perhaps: "The more roads you build, the fewer sidewalks"? On second thought, perhaps not, since they are a little too closely related.
When faced with people like that, I ask them what have you done to cure cancer?
This second ability is a must for the first one to be useful, and might even work alone. eg: just let the existing bisons grow new herds.
Some people would rather spend resources developing technology to resurrect species. Why not use that technology for conservation?
There's also an extra discount for trustworthiness - it's much harder to fake results when the evaluation criteria include whether or not it's the cool stuff that was promised.
If I save $5 on beer, that doesn't mean the nature conservancy budget gets more funding. It will almost assuredly stay in my bank account or get spent on chips.
I don’t, neither do I think competition means a close system. But it’s definitely a system where parties influence each others.
Your beer does not share any goal with mammoth, but other environmental projects does. Let’s say you want to invest 5€ to fight climate change. During your search of projets to support, you might encounter the cool-mammoth one. Now there’s competition for those 5€.
I dont want to sound harsh but I see this type of thought quite often. I think it is a major irrational distortion to conflate possibility and theory for reality.
It is unclear if money targeted for environmental work has ever gone to mammoths, or ever will. Why should the mere possibility dictate anything or drive any action?
> It is easy to construct "just so" stories for anything
You lost me.
> Why should the mere possibility dictate anything or drive any action?
It shouldn’t. Revive and Restore communication/branding/marketing, probably does. From their website:
> "WHY BRING BACK THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH? 1) AN ECOSYSTEMS APPROACH TO CONFRONTING CLIMATE CHANGE"
Im saying "just so" stories should not be a valid basis for concern.
Branding isn't evidence that proposals are in competition for funding opposed to additive.
The only evidence is your "just so" story, and even that doesn't mean it is meaningful.
It strikes me similar to a runaway precautionary principle or concern trolling. It doesnt matter if you can imagine a scenario where something bad happens. What really matters is if that bad scenario actually happens, and how often.
There don't need to be any other reasons other than, "it's interesting and will make money".
Poodles have Non-shedding fur and don't bark much two HUGE benefits over something like a wolf or husky.
As for the mammoths, we learn by doing. Going to space was an exercise of ego, exploring the new world, taking flight, developing nuclear weapons...
If it went extinct then likely its ecosystem is already destroyed, so bringing it back won't do much good in itself, cause where would it thrive?
That said, in this particular instance, they should have started with horses and painted some stripes for a roughly equivalent result.
You can simultaneously prevent ongoing extinctions and work to undo past ones. The resources to do one likely are not transferrable to the other.
De-extinguishing species is interesting as a scientific exercise and will probably lead to advances in fields of genetic engineering, medicine, the history of life, etc...
We don't have to do it with woolly mammoth, we probably could do it with some other unremarkable specie. But doing it with woolly mammoths will certainly attract a lot more attention and therefore money for the researchers.
There is also an advantage of doing it with a large animal we have already killed off. That is that if we lose control of our (re)creation, we can easily kill it off again, assuming it doesn't happen naturally. It is better than to de-extinguish a specie that is small and particularly well suited to human environments, we have already made enough of a mess with existing invasive species that we don't want to bring new ones.
I do think returning the Quagga or Whooly Mammoth is probably pointless, but they are high profile proof of concept.
If that destructive force was humans then there is a possibility at least for change ( cf the rebounding of the whale population post hunting ban ) - however in this case I'd agree that in terms of needing a think woolly coat - probably not a good time to bring something like that back.
See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/un-confirms-hottes...
So a temperature of 100F in Siberia isn't necessarily good - even for a short period.
There is no point in bringing back a mammoth when the environment it would require to thrive doesn't really exist anymore - particularly with the rapid warming of the Russian tundra.
However sometimes you do need high profile mascots in order to get the funds/build broad support for, the more mundane work. It's a balance.
A good reason to bring back extinct animals is furthering our understanding of biological life and animal genetics. There are other justifications such as carbon fixing, improving of the ecology in thawing tundra regions, etc but those are bonuses to the primary reason I listed. Science, basic science, is the foundation upon which all applied science is built. That is its own justification. Not every act must have a practical and monetizable outcome in the immediate present.
It is a huge frivolous waste! Dogs produce CO2, they eat tons of meat, they pollute environment and kill wild life!
And there are negative side effects to other people. Lack of sleep from constant barking, dog attacks, not being able to walk or cycle outside, stepping into dog shit, parasites spread from dog excrements...
Saying there is "no waste", just means dog owners do not have to pay negative expenses associated with their animal upkeep. They outsource all bad stuff to society!
One can argue that there’d be perverse incentives that would arise from this model.
Not that I don't think they can figure out how to fund mundane stuff, politics (as we just saw in america) isn't about facts, figures, and boring reality; it's about energizing people to get off their ass and do something.
Well, yes. That's science at its best :).
See also: my favorite moment from 12 Moneys TV show:
Maybe the people working on it think it's interesting.
To observe and study them, for one. Also, to see if we can (and learn how to and how not).
> same impulse that led to the poodle
What’s wrong with poodles (or domesticated dogs in general)?
(You could have said French bulldog. But you chose a very intelligent, hypoallergenic breed with few health issues compared to other pure breeds.)
I used to have an AKC golden retriever that died of osteosarcoma at 14, and had a non-functioning pancreas since he was about 2, which meant he had to be supplemented with enzymes his entire life. The eugenics movement in the couple hundred years really has ruined dogs in the western world. There are so few people who breed responsibly that finding them is a huge chore. I'm inferring that what OP meant by "same impulse that led to the poodle" is this impulse that created all these genetic monstrosities. People need to let go of the "pure bred" idea in my opinion.
But that doesn't mean all dog breeds are equally inbred and equally prone to health problems.
Poodles are in MUCH better shape than golden retrievers.
Golden retrievers are twice as inbred as poodles. And unlike golden retrievers, poodles have not been bred toward an unhealthy type; they have a slim, primitive body shape and a non-brachycephalic head shape that is associated with good health and long lifespan in dogs.
If I were seeking an example of a pointless, harmful breeding program in dogs, I would not have chosen poodles. There are endless other breeds (pugs, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, etc.) that have been wrecked by thoughtless breeding practices.
There's no such thing - certain breeds being "hypoallergenic" is a straight up lie that was made up by breeders to sell dogs.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-67491201380-2/fullt...
It is also worth nothing that the cited study showed 4-5 orders of magnitude difference between allergen samples from different animals (0.1 to 1000 ug/g). The results just didn't group well across breeds. IF someone showed me this data at work, I would say they are either failing to isolate causes of variability or have a shitty measurement system.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(12)00793-2/ful...
The difference? Breed. She had an Australian shepherd (i think), large and shredded a ton absolutely all the time. There were drifts of hair on every corner in the house if she didn't vacuum for a week. We had a havanese poodle mix, small guy, barely shed at all. So sure, if you take the absolute most extreme position possible that hypo means completely no allergens whatsoever at all, then it doesn't exist. But in reality i can live with one dog and can't with another, that's the only definition of hypoallergenic that actually matters to people
The thing is that they are not actually bringing a species back. Rather, they are creating something that superficially resembles an extinct species based on an equally superficial set of selection criteria. Genetically speaking their "quagga" is still going to be much, much closer to the population of zebras from which it was bred, compared to actual quaggas. So whatever we learn from those "quaggas" is unlikely to be transferable to the historical quagga
If they framed it as a poodle-breeding effort I would be unconcerned.
Poodles have similar issues to French Bulldogs because they have a genetic bottleneck as well.
> To observe and study them, for one. Also, to see if we can (and learn how to and how not).
I can understand the reasoning of trying it for the sake of trying (ethical considerations aside), but I'm not sure if an extinct species that is resurrected via some form of cloning would even be a representative sample to observe actual behavior.
Source?
I thought small and toy breeds make up most of the problematic breeds. Standard poodles’ hip dysplasia, like retrievers’, is mostly a product of early spaying and neutering leading to deformed hips. It’s environmental, in other words, not genetic.
> not sure if an extinct species that is resurrected via some form of cloning would even be a representative sample to observe actual behavior
It would be a guide into what behavioural factors in modern elephants were evolved versus learned. Obviously not pristinely. But it’s another data point.
https://cgejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40575...
> It would be a guide into what behavioural factors in modern elephants were evolved versus learned. Obviously not pristinely. But it’s another data point.
But couldn't you do the same thing with an RCT?
Maybe, maybe not.
You certainly wouldn’t refine your genetic and artificial gestation techniques that way.
It's curious that the response to bringing back mammoths and less-stripey-zebras is so lukewarm when there's very little of the same criticism directed at efforts to save obscure species that are in decline. Say it was discovered that a small herd of quagga had survived since we thought they died out in 1883, but without human intervention they will soon due to habitat loss. Imagine: "Why would we want to save them? The world is inhospitable to them now, their population declined for a reason. They have no use to us, and their niche isn't one that couldn't be filled by living species that we could import. To keep them from going extinct would be a cruel and irrational act of ego."
Some are more ‘visual, stunning, imagination engaging’ than others…
Separate to that I also think that the question of bringing back a species like the Quagga is very different to bringing back the Mammoths. The Quagga went extinct recently and directly because of our hunting them. If we breed new ones, they'll likely fit into the ecosystem as it is today and may even thrive. Mammoths went extinct an extremely long time ago, the environment is totally different to when they were alive, we have no idea how they would impact the ecosystem today. Maybe they'd be totally unfit and would only exist as pets, or maybe they'd fit in great and drive some other animal or plant to extinction as their population explodes as an invasive species.
The question of "Why bring back extinct species" is the same as "Why not bring some new different species into Australia"
If the cost of a chicken egg was $10,000 it would likely not be worth the trouble. At $0.15 or $0.60, though, chicken eggs provide an excellent value and are nice to have around!
The real question here is why intervene to keep a species from extinction? The answer is that genetic diversity is massive valuable. The trouble is that the value assessment is very hard to calculate concretely and that value is also very hard to extract in the form of direct profits.
Let’s take the banana as an example.
The global banana market had sales of about $140B in 2023… clearly people value bananas. Today 99% of global trade in bananas is in a single variety, the “Cavendish” banana. But it was not always so. Until the 1950’s the world’s dominant banana was the “Gros Michel”. Over the course of the 1950’s the Gros Michel went commercially extinct as a result of “Panama Disease”. Researchers scoured the world to find a banana not susceptible to Panama Disease that could replace the Gros Michel in commerce. What they found is the Cavendish.
Today, a new strain of Panama Disease has evolved to target the Cavendish. Extinction of Cavendish is proceeding more slowly than that of the Gros Michel, but it seems more or less inevitable at this point.
The fact that we are likely to see 2 varieties of banana go commercially extinct within a single century, is kind of nuts. It seems that the half-life of a commercial banana variety is less that 50 years. The only reason we still have commercial bananas today is because of the rather deep genetic diversity in bananas the earth continued to possess in the 1950’s. That genetic diversity is significantly diminished today.
If we value the banana market as a perpetual annuity with the 2023 growth rate of 7% and a discount rate of 3%, the net present value of the banana market to the citizens of the world is approximately $3.5 Trillion.
How much is it rational to spend preserving this perpetual annuity? Anyway you slice it, the answer is very big… and very much bigger than is currently being spent to preserve the genetic diversity of the banana today.
What was the value of the American Chestnut tree? Hard to say, but it is clear that the loss was massive. I've read estimates that the American Chestnut provided (as fodder) something like 10% of the energy for the pre-extinction American transportation system as well as a substantial winter food source for all kinds of livestock, game and people. Just as transportation energy the yearly value of the American Chestnut would have been about 2% of US GDP.
any number of analogies are applicable: breeding extant animals to resemble extinct ones based on what some self-appointed human reckons they were like is not comparable to preservation.
it's nostalgia, it is ego, it's a vanity project, essentially. no surprise it was inspired by the Nazis
Haha, no.
> Some of the criticism of the Quagga Project could be put to rest next year. That’s when Annelin Molotsi, a molecular biologist working on the project, plans to sequence the genome of the re-bred quaggas.
> “I think it will answer a lot of questions,” Molotsi said.