Should We Clone Extinct Animals?

Not to mention that your claim that Mammoths can create their own living space is inherently flawed.

We cannot bring a Mammoth who would be able to do that back into the world. This is *learned* behavior which has been lost with the last in vivo Mammoth. Any Mammoth we could clone is a blank slate on this kind of behavior, and honestly, if we could teach them that there are way easier ways to use this for environmental benefit than cloning them.

The idea a species is useless has no merit. Plus nothing is actually going to be endangered. If something does decline, that's because it's supposed to. You yourselves keep saying things change all the time, yet you don't accept this.

Those three show it was our fault and that things happened because of it, and that needs to be readjusted IMO.

edited 5th May '15 7:33:55 AM by Bk-notburgerking

I'm all for humanity becoming better stewards of this planet.

But first, we need someone to be on the verge of discovering warp technology so that more advanced aliens can ignore their prime directive and teach us how to make anything (including meat) from algae.

Whatever viable DNA of extinct species (and nearly extinct species) will have to be kept on ice until we get hold of replicator tech.

Answer my questions.

I have.

1 Fluff piece and 2 Papers, none of which truly support the statements you are giving.

And no one is questioning that we were involved in it. I am questioning why human-caused extinction is supposedly unnatural so that we need to reboot earths species catalogue to an earlier version

edited 5th May '15 7:41:43 AM by 3of4

I do not think anyone said that a species is useless.

What they are saying is that it can be dangerous to other species and the environment.

Allow me to grab the example of the cane toad in Australia. It was introduced so it would eat certain pests but it ended up overreproducing. No one said the toad is not useful. It manages to THRIVE in the environment. It thrives too well.

At the cost of others. The question here is who are we to fuck up some other species, animal or vegetable, just because we find mammoths cooler?

Australia really has a bad track record with those sort of things...

No you didn't BK.

The cane toad never was native to that area. This doesn't apply to extinct native species. And this isn't for Rule of Cool, but for ecosystem-scale repair.

edited 5th May '15 7:46:52 AM by Bk-notburgerking

Maaaan I need to finish that book. WTB time.

But yeah, seriously. What gives us the responsibility and/or right to bring back a species that could possibly fuck others over? If they fuck them over, whom do we blame? do we clone THOSE back into existence? For them to die again? Or do we kill the ones who made them extinct?

Then allow me to repeat a question that has been posed before. If you want to bring back the mammoths...where are you going to put them? Geographically? It is not practical politically speaking. Good luck convincing Russia to take any of this crap. And environmentally speaking, what specifically are they going to eat when there is a distinct lack of knowledge of their diet, sustainability, and not even taking into account what introducing a cold weather megafauna would do to it with global warming?

edited 5th May '15 7:52:29 AM by Aszur

You are not proposing repair. You are proposing attempting to set back the clock. Those are very different things.

Last Chance BK,

Where would you propose setting them up?

Whose land needs to be reformed to support this?

How many species are considered acceptable loses in bringing this creature back?

-For mammoths, there's already plans underway in Russia for a Pleistocene Park. T suggest that location.

-since it already exists for that purpose it doesn't need to be reformed.

-There will be no losses. Every species alive today was alive in the Ice age. Therefore, since they already coexisted with mammoths, they wouldn't go extinct because of them.

You obviously haven't seen Blackfish.

You don't have to go Jurassic Park to know that a Prehistoric Zoo is a bad idea.

Again, bringing back a creature just to put them in a bell jar is a dick move.

Pleistocene Park is several hundred acres and is a conservation area, not a zoo...

And unlike dinosaurs mammoths are native to the modern world....

Do some research before assuming it's a zoo.

edited 5th May '15 8:16:33 AM by Bk-notburgerking

Not really. They are native to a very different environment than the modern world is.

And hey, Glenn Beck and his consorts are planning a John Galt-style Retreat off the grid for true objectivists.

Just because someone has the plans to make an enclave about something doesn't mean the idea behind is a good one.

edited 5th May '15 8:21:04 AM by 3of4

In this case you are not proposing anything resembling enviromental reconstruction. If your argument is that this megafauna's existence is a boon to the environment then keeping them pinned in that location (which is, by the way, a study case instead of an actual experiment) is counter productive to that argument.

It's just a bragging right. A zoo. It's making a showcase out of them.

Also if the Pleistocene Park is the only place in the world that is faithfully recreating the steppe grassland ecosystem, then yes, I agree that it is the only place where the Mammoths could survive...

And do absolutely nothing for anyone else. They would have to be pinned down there for their own survival corraling them and dwindling their herds so they do not overreproduce. And without roaming such an area their restrictive population would be incredibly small, dangerously close to making a population bottleneck that'd fuck up their DNA (more than cloning would already do).

No, the idea is that if it works out (and it will) the same thing can be done in other locations.

No, dude. The idea for it is just to prove a hypothesis.

Sergey Zimov is one of the proponents of the hypothesis that Mammoths went extinct due to hunting. He is using the Park as an experiment. Only 160 kilometers wide, by the way.

If the experiments proves a success, it simply is an argument that overhunting might have brought their extinction. Not that big poop will save the world from global warming.

Citation Please.

Where do you take this certainty. How do you have the expertise to make this assumption.

Why do you think I posted the papers?

I don't think you can put a Mammoth in (a different location such as) Brazil...

None of your papers seem to argue on why we have to reintroduce the extinct animals. Only on causes of extinction.

edited 5th May '15 8:29:53 AM by Quag15

For Brazil we're going to have to use South American species, yes.

Look at the third link I posted. It shows the consequences of that extinction.

edited 5th May '15 8:30:36 AM by Bk-notburgerking

None of the papers suggested *anything* in the vein you are.