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The sad fact is that woolly mammoths are gone. I mean you might be able to extract DNA and gestate it in an elephant or whatever but it won’t be a woolly mammot
by cletus 6y ago
The sad fact is that woolly mammoths are gone. I mean you might be able to extract DNA and gestate it in an elephant or whatever but it won’t be a woolly mammoth, not a wild one anyway. Why? Because it won’t know what to do.
They’ve shown this when species are repopulated in an area. All the herd knowledge about where to migrate, where to find food, where to find water and so on is lost. It’s akin to a total loss of culture.
Just look at farmed salmon that escape into the wild. They don’t know to swim upstream to spawn.
Life just isn’t a stateless function of DNA.
- hirundo 6y agoFeral children are sometimes raised by a species like wolves, more different from us than mammoths are from elephants. Some of them can never acculturate with other humans, but they are generally viable creatures. They are still human. That's better than extinction.
- kypro 6y agoTo be honest I didn't even realise this was the goal. Surely the larger issue here is the lack of genetic variance? Although, I guess you could take a herd of elephants and splice some woolly mammoth DNA into their genome and get the genetic variance that way. To your question though, presumably they could slowly reintroduce them to the wild in a controlled way? If humans gave them everything they needed to begin with then gradually restricted their food supply, etc? Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SaintGhurka 6y ago>Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient? Maybe, but do we even know for sure why they died out and wouldn't their problems be the same or worse now?
- jessaustin 6y agoWe know for sure they died out because humans kept hunting them and eating them. Humans seem less interested in hunting now, and though we'd pay lots of money to hunt these, some would be left over to continue the species.
- BurningFrog 6y ago> Surely the larger issue here is the lack of genetic variance? Dead mammoths are preserved in Siberian ice by the thousands. Sometimes so well that the meat is edible. So there is a lot of different individuals to grab DNA from.
- saberdancer 6y agoWith time they would rebuild that knowledge.
- patall 6y agoCulture is not static. Yes, the clan rituals of all the mammoth families from 4,000 years ago are forgotten forever, but most, if not all, of it would have been lost by now anyways. Instead, new cultures develop and will develop if we release cloned mammoths in the arctic. It will take generations to return to a natural like state, but it could get there. As for salmon, yes, the farmed salmon does not remember the stream it spawned. Nevertheless, you can take the progeny of those salmon and relocate them to a river that has been renaturalized, like it is happening in many places in Europe. Sure, the salmon will not be the same, but once the bears recognize it as a food source again, they will play the same role in the ecosystem as their distant relatives once did.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThey also don't have the pasture they would expect. Nor the gut biome to digest it. A living organism is also an entire context. Just look at the trouble we have getting wild animals to thrive in a zoo, where we can control the environment. The idea that an extinct megafauna could be released into whatever environment and survive, is unlikely.
- tim333 6y agoBut their offspring would figure that out before long.