Should We Clone Extinct Animals?

A small number of long-lived trees still carry mammoth related adaptations. They're greatly reduced from historic ranges and will likely disappear without people planting them. Most plants species are not adapted to a mammoth environment.

Taking a very longterm view, nature is resilient. Despite our best efforts to destroy things, life will go on and and adapt to the changed environment. But that ecosystem will no longer be the one we are currently living in and the current ecosystem is the one which we value and want to preserve.

Releasing cloned mammoths is not a restorative effort. It's attempting to replace our existing ecosystem with one that's dead and gone for thousands of years and will likely cause severe damage with no real gain if we actually attempted it. There is no contradictions here.

And you are saying that the mammoth dying off was unnatural, but us bringing it back for it to kill off a few other species is entirely natural. I find spears more natural than cloning.

edited 26th May '15 8:48:11 PM by Mopman43

thousands of years is not enough time for a new ecosystem to appear. There wouldn't be a disaster; this world already IS a disaster ever since we messed up.

So exterminating species isn't playing God? And other species wouldn't be killed off, just trimmed down to normal levels. After all that was the way they evolved to live and they coexisted with mammoths.

edited 26th May '15 8:55:18 PM by Bk-notburgerking

Yes, humanity has fucked up, but mammoths isn't the answer either, nor one of the answers to the big problems right now.

I vote we bring this extinct plant back to life instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

I think it's technically an abortificant, but... (sighs) beggars can't be choosers.

Fuck it. I'm out. This thread has been going in circles for 20+ pages.

All right, lets talk specifics. What is the area the mammoth used to roam in in North America? After a quick google search, given my lack of proper education on the subject, the mammoth mostly lived in the mid west to the pacific, going all the way from Canada to Mexico. What lives here now? Is the prairie dog in danger from the mammoths? Their habitat might be altered by the introduction of mammoths into the ecosystem. Wolves live in these areas, to my understanding; would a pack of wolves be able to take down a mammoth? If not, the the increased competition among herbivores would serve to drive down wolf numbers, which are already low enough to begin with. Any deer, moose, or elk that live in these areas would be in danger, being rather more dependent on forests than on grasslands. And, here is the kicker of it, this land is also widely populated by another species; humans. To tell all the people in the area to move away somewhere else, to leave behind everything, for the sake of an extinct species, would be an undertaking that would be costly in time, money, and sanity. It is an impossible dream, you could never get all these people to leave their homes and go somewhere else, not even for money equivalent to the value of their property. And we would be doing all this, going through this massive expenditure, for what? To repay some moral debt our ancestors accumulated? Even though there are more important animals we need more that we can help much more reasonably with much less hassle? To bring back nature to some supposed 'natural state'? Nature, by its nature, is changing. It has had 11,000 years without mammoths. Were there going to be widespread collapse in the ecosystem because the mammoths are gone, some sign of it would likely have occurred by now. Can you link to a article in which they spell out just which species we can say goodbye to because we killed the mammoth? Which species which, having survived for 11,000 mammoth-less years, are suddenly now going to die off specifically because now is the time that the repercussions from that extinction will occur? As well, and I think this is an important point, how exactly do we bring back the mammoth? To my understanding, most samples of preserved mammoth were found in Russia; is there no appreciable difference between two populations that were separated for countless millenia? Would we be bringing back the North American Mammoth, which you seem to feel we need so badly.... or its Russian cousin?

edited 26th May '15 9:24:31 PM by Mopman43

Considering every species in the area that is native coevolved and coexisted with mammoths, they should have no trouble readjusting to normal (or they don't even need that). Wolves might take a young calf for two but would not be a major threat, while the mammoths would not cause problems since it coexisted with the animals the wolves feed on and would continue to do so.

Because the species in most of North America is M. columbi, yes we can't use the mammoths from Siberia (those should be limited to Siberia). What we CAN do is genetically reprogram those cells into M. columbi cells (which is what we're doing to get the genome for the Siberian species). Rehabilitation for reintroduction is certainly possible (it has been done with African elephants).

As for ecosystem changes, notice how in the Southwest mesquite and other tough plants are taking over? This is because there are no more giant herbivores to eat them. It's not just damaging to native biodiversity but also costs ranchers a lot of money.

edited 26th May '15 9:36:21 PM by Bk-notburgerking

Less circles and more everyone talking to a wall.

Dung clean-up: the species that once dealt with mammoth droppings are not likely to be adapted to do that any more. Most beetles, millipedes, flies, bacteria and fungi have had more than enough time to adapt to other food sources or die out.

That's a possible issue, because what is currently around may well not be enough to cope (and, no: what is currently around has changed: invertebrates are very climate sensitive as well as fast-adapting). African dung beetles are rather important critters for breaking down and distributing the stuff over wide areas without which the place would be knee-deep in very, very slowly rotting faeces in places.

It's all well and good insisting that many animals evolved with mammoths, but that's like saying that because sharks have been around for millions of years, they're the same sharks.

Even a modern coelacanth would most likely die out if you got a time machine and dumped it back with the dinosaurs. Mainly because they're no longer mud-loving, shallow-dwelling fish. For all they look the same.

edited 27th May '15 1:03:53 AM by Euodiachloris

But the timescale for this one is a lot shorter than millions of years, not enough time to evolve into new species. The exact same species alive back then are alive now. That's what I meant. Their ancestors lived with the mammoth's ancestors; they lived with the mammoths themselves. That's why we have puma and white-tailed deer skeletons found in the same layers as mammoths and sabretooths. They coexisted.

The main argument against cloning seems to be that our species didn't coexist with ice age species, but the species we have ARE ice age species themselves, so they did coexist. If they meet, it would be two native species meeting, not a native and a nonnative (in terms of temporal distribution) meeting.

Dung cleanup would be a problem if the decomposes didn't adapt, but pretty much everyone here agrees life is adaptable...

edited 27th May '15 5:33:57 AM by Bk-notburgerking

For mammals, a few thousand years can still make some changes to the unseen things... like aspects of the immune system, tweaks to blood cells, small changes in behaviour triggered by the environment ... That kind of thing.

For insects, bacteria, viruses and fungi, that's a lot of generations. How long did it take tuberculosis to start getting immunity to a broad range of antibiotics? Less than 70 years. That's a pretty big change for a small organism. And, it started to do that the minute refined penicillin was introduced.

Yes, some things could adapt to cope: but, you're pushing the "get the steppe ecosystem back!". Not everything there did evolve with mammoths in the first place. Not all insects from back then are the same as the ones there, now... even if they are the same species.

You'd be initiating change in the exact same way removing the mammoth has already done. Except, biology doesn't keep save points in the way you seem to believe it does.

As well as that: think on this... We are going though massive plains creation as it is. Perhaps the balance of the planet needs a little forest creation? The steppes, if they're going... may not be "bad".

edited 27th May '15 6:06:29 AM by Euodiachloris

So besides shits and giggles, why or what else could we bring back?

Maybe some plants or fungi for medicinal experimentation?

Plant life could become invasive easy, but plant life could also be kept in a more secure testing ground without as many ethical issues compounding it. And they would need less land and other resources to maintain.

Maybe we can use this to help cross breed more drought tolerant edibles?

I don't know.

To those more scientifically adept, what do you think?

If life can adapt that quickly to artificial changes, it can adapt when the changes are undone.

Remember, those cold-climate plains are not supposed to be forest. There are no native species capable of surviving in forests anyways.

edited 27th May '15 6:21:03 AM by Bk-notburgerking

We're wiping forests out to grow grasses and cities. This could be bad. We need forests: why not plant them in places that can sustain them? If the steppes can, why not?

Sure, why not? As long as we are aware that we're just hybridising using tech as a means to massively backcross instead of "bringing back" a species, I don't see the problem.

edited 27th May '15 6:12:45 AM by Euodiachloris

Because it's obviously a far better idea to reforest areas that had forests to begin with. Steppe is being lost even faster, mostly due to trees invading. Do we need to purposely eliminate an ecosystem just because we think a man-made forest is better for the environment (it isn't)? There IS such as thing as "trees in all the wrong places".

He problem with backcrossed hybrids is that much of their behavior is going to be very different from the real deal. They aren't acceptable substitutes.

edited 27th May '15 6:31:54 AM by Bk-notburgerking

It'd also be cool if the Sahara went back to being wet, the Sinai peninsula full of cypress forests and grasslands and Britain retreed to be the ancient forest it was before the Channel formed and/or the Black Forest be made to cover most of Germany and Poland as in back in the day. Scrubbing lead pollution away would be sweet, too.

Except, most of the world's population of humans would have to die first to turn the clock back like you seem to want to. And, it still won't "balance" things "back" for centuries — and, it certainly wouldn't be the same.

edited 27th May '15 6:42:26 AM by Euodiachloris

The difference between restoring GB and Siberia is that he former is densely populated, making it impossible, while Siberia is very lightly populated making it possible.

Can we speak of species brought to near extinction over the last 50 years instead of things that have been dead for 10 thousand years?

Both must be taken into consideration since that time difference is minuscule in the scheme of things. As long as we humans and not some external factor was responsible for their ultimate demise, I say let's do it.

You keep saying that, but you're using the wrong metric. >_< Generations per species, not "time".

Adapting to what is there is not wrong. But, adapting backwards doesn't happen. Archaic traits may resurface in any given species at any time, but they're not evolving backwards and it still takes time. Yes: I flipping know species adapt. I've sodding said that. But a whole ecosystem of many species has to flaming do it en mass (which means you will be losing some), and that takes more than you bloody seem to realise, no matter how many times we try to tell you that. That's a different ball game of multiple factors. <throws hands up in despair>

A species. Many species. An ecosystem of many interconnected bloody species, not all of whom adapt at the same pace because of their differing generational turnover rate. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

edited 27th May '15 8:15:04 AM by Euodiachloris

No homo.

You keep using that word.

And for some reason you think they cannot adapt while saying they adapted.

It's depressing that I think the best conservation method atm is collecting & cryo-freezing the eggs and sperm of endangered animals (and even the not endangered ones). At least there are already millions of (plant) seeds being kept in cold storage.

Oh well... if we run out of animals (except for cockroaches), we'll still have plants.

BRING BACK PANGAEA!!!

PRECAMBRIAN LIVES MATTER!