Should We Clone Extinct Animals?

I'm half convinced you necro'd the thread just to see if that opening would happen.

/slowclap

To two of the above posters:

It works because a modern species wiped out by humans will restore connections to an ecosystem. A mammoth is a perfect example.

The thing is mammoths didn't go extinct because of natural habitat change; rather, habitat change happened because mammoths went extinct for anthropogenic reasons. So if we put them back, they can again trample down all the trees and fertilize the soil, and their habitat (the mammoth steppe) will return (in fact, these areas still remain in their last strongholds where humans didn't arrive until after the rise of civilization).

Another example is the overpopulation of kangaroos in Australia and the lack of any native predator that can kill them, which will be solved easily once we bring back the five predators that could have done so.

edited 1st May '15 3:53:17 PM by Bk-notburgerking

As Mr. Bison once said: "OF COURSE!!"

I think it's very likely way too late for Mammoths to rediscover their lost ecological niche. That plain you want them to trample is already inhabited, by human farmers.

That.

Introducing invasive species to existing habitats under the premise of "retaking" their habitats will only serve to wipe out more ecosystems. They can never "reclaim" their habitat. They can only destroy the habitat that has arisen in their absence, and the consequences of that destruction are unforeseeable.

Ecology is constantly changing. Animals are driven to extinction by a failure to adapt to the changing circumstances of their world. Reintroducing them would, at best, leave them to die out again and, at worse, introduce new extreme changes to existing habitats that would drive more species to extinction.

And before you say "what about the ones wiped out by man," man is a changing circumstance. We are the ultimate invasive species, and we aren't going anywhere. Take, for instance, the rhino. We try to bar hunters from hunting ivory, but the value outweighs the risk for enough people to make that fruitless, and the rhinos are dying out. As a consequence, some rhinos are being born without horns, as their species adapts to the hunters by removing the target of their hunt.

If you were to clone more rhinos with horns back into the wild, you would not save the horned rhino; you would only provide more targets for ivory hunters. Their only hope is for their species to adapt to the new predator that has invaded their habitat.

Nature is not so simple as "Wildlife, and Us." We are a part of the system, for all it entails.

edited 2nd May '15 7:54:21 AM by TobiasDrake

Not to mention that I. Cloning them is complicated and II. You can't just clone them and pt them in the wild. Without mature ones to teach them proper behavior (hunting etc) they will not simply be able to "refill" a niche.

If they don't simply die, they will make a new niche and changing the entire system again.

Destroy the habitat that has arisen in their absence is exactly what's supposed to happen. Those habitats shouldn't even exist in the first place and if they get destroyed, that's what we need.

Yes there will be changes to the ecosystem. And that's the point. Whatever happened in their absence cannot and should not be preserved, it isn't natural at all.

edited 2nd May '15 10:16:56 AM by Bk-notburgerking

I have a feeling that the people living in those places might have a different opinion about that.

"It isn't natural" is, with all politness, bullcrap. It assumes there is some "standard natural state" from which we humans deviated and to which we can somehow return by applying the proper content patches.

We can adapt. And I believe a lot of farmers in the Southwest would be glad to see mammoths eat all the mesquite trees.

Because there is.

edited 2nd May '15 12:26:42 PM by Bk-notburgerking

Just before they shoot all the Mammoths for game.

Well then they'd once again have no more mammoths to eat the mesquite, and it becomes a lose-lose situation.

Species come into existence and die out constantly. There is no such thing as a default state for the natural world. Nature is a brutal and constant competition for survival; that's just the way of things.

edited 2nd May '15 2:07:55 PM by TobiasDrake

Yeah, but humanity kind of god-moded their way to victory, and has the ability to think about the damage they cause. Seeing if we can undo such damage is at least a conversation worth having.

Not to mention that, since we are kind of dependant on a functioning ecosystem ourselves, it is in our best interest to do so.

It is extremely important that humanity consider how best to preserve the health of the global ecosystem we all depend upon. But "restore all extinct animals" is overly simplistic, even if we limit ourselves to species that we ourselves made extinct. The door has closed on the age of the Mammoths.

Exactly that.

The dead are dead and are never coming back. Even if you cloned extinct species back into the world, they would not be the species we killed. They would be a new species made in a lab in the shape of the dead with no guarantee of being capable of surviving in the strange new habitat we're attempting to introduce them to, every opportunity to cause even greater ecological damage than the original extinction did, and no particular benefit to anyone but humans - by soothing our guilty conscience and letting us pat ourselves on the back and say we put the Mammoth back so everything's cool now.

But we didn't. Every member of the Mammoth species that was once alive is still dead. You can never put the dead back.

edited 2nd May '15 3:08:59 PM by TobiasDrake

The door hasn't closed on the age of the mammoths. Why? Because that is OUR era. The door has closed on the non-avian dinosaurs, but it hasn't on ice age species, since every species alive today is an ice age species.

And why exactly are you saying reintroducing a species native to an ecosystem is bad to said ecosystem? Because it changes? That's the whole point; the current state is not normal at all, even if it seems so. We have to change it back to normal.

So it's playing God to undo what we did but it isn't playing God to wipe out species and keep them that way even though they are supposed to be alive? In other words, isn't it playing God to decide some species shouldn't be alive because we wiped them out?

And de-extinction is about putting the dead back after reviving them, so your last idea is a non-starter.

And yes, there IS a default state (or, more accurately, default states, since nature does change) for nature. The current state isn't one of them.

edited 2nd May '15 3:34:15 PM by Bk-notburgerking

A few, sure, with very careful consideration for the environment and the effects of repopulation, preferably those that have gone extinct recently and so we know exactly how they interact with the environment and vice versa.

Dreams of cloning dinosaurs or other long extinct soecies should remain just a dream. It would be a disaster waiting to happen, and likely they would have great difficulty surviving without either an artificial setting or continual human interference, which strikes me as being the opposite of what we would be aiming for.

This. Anything older than 50000 years gets booted off the revival list.

50000 is too much. At least, propose the Holocene calendar as a measure.

But we already wiped out every large animal in Australia before the holocene began.

Before you say climate, this was before the end of the ice age on a continent whose climate didn't really change much since then.

edited 2nd May '15 5:08:08 PM by Bk-notburgerking

Because the environment has, and we dont know how to change it back e en if we wanted to, which we dont, because there are people living there now. There is no physical space for a self-sustaining Mammoth herd in the central North America anymore, on top of the fact that environmental and ecological conditions have changed in so many ways since then. The flora has changed earthworms, bees, air, soil and water quality, new diseases, the presence of livestock, widespread use of pesticides, new mix of preditors, and on and on. We have very incomplete information regarding what conditions prevailed before the arrival of humans in North America, and even if we did know, we couldn't restore it without an overwhelming disruption to American agriculture. Not happening. For better or for worse, the world we have created is the one we have to work with.

You are severely overestimating the degree of changes. Because you assume animals that long ago went extinct for natural causes, when they went extinct because of us.

And just because the environment changed doesn't mean they could not survive, either. The end of the ice age was a boon to megafauna, until humans messed up.

edited 2nd May '15 5:14:47 PM by Bk-notburgerking

If someone plans to (properly) clone extinct animals and pamper them in a large enough and well-run zoo. Like for example, how the Chinese do it with pandas. I'm not opposed to it, especially since trying to save the pandas has increased protection of their preferred forests so many other animals also benefit.

Though it does seem stupid to clone extinct animals when we can't even control humanity enough to stop other animals from going extinct in the meantime. Like, I fully expect to wake up one day to headlines that the last rhino is dead.

This article has something to say about that.