5 ms·

Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years. Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to rec

Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years. Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to recover”) but still assume that technology and society will just remain the same.

wellpast 5y ago
Biodiversity requires incremental, organic evolution. Funny how humans think that our intellect can somehow solve every problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years.
  - ewmiller 5y ago
    Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      On a biological timeline, it’s almost completely irrelevant. Humans spent tens of thousands of years in small tribal groups. I think we’ll be fine. Besides that, most people in cities already live in a biodiversity wasteland.
      - cableshaft 5y ago
        So you're basically just arguing that technically humans will not go extinct, as long as there's at least two of them out there. Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most of us would prefer not to live or have children or grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population decline, which would still be 76 million people at the current population count.
        ceilingcorner 5y ago
        No, that isn’t what I wrote. Try again.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years This is better than nothing. But species don't exist in a vacuum. Re-introducing an extinct species to a biome could be as jarring to its neighbors as its original elimination was. The most conservative path would be to cauterize the would and let the system heal, even if it takes a few million years. For an absurd example, consider the effect of introducing a large number of saber-toothed tigers to their original habitats.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense. Humans and other organisms have been changing the environment since the beginning of life. Life is a process, not a state.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense There isn't a stable state, but there are multiple equilibria. We can quantify the robustness of an ecosystem, its resilience to exogenous shocks. That makes certain states "better" than others. That resilience is low and decreasing. "Healing" means helping it increase. Re-introducing extinct species may or may not build a more robust and more productive biosphere.
      - anigbrowl 5y ago
        I think you're confusing ecosystem (which word itself implies process) with equilibrium. It's quite fair to say that there was an actual ecosystem at least until the establishment of writing, at which point state information became transmissible across time and space beyond the capacity of individual organisms or eusocial colonies. While you are correct that evolution would sooner or later take over, whether with assistance via cloning or blind luck if humans were to go extinct, you do need to consider the possibility that under some circumstances systems can collapse rather than bouncing back over a relatively short timeframe. Life would eventually re-establish itself, just as life persists in extremely arid desert conditions, but there's no guarantee it will do si n a timely fashion, and by timely here I mean on a timescale short enough for a human civilization to flourish in parallel with it.
- francisofascii 5y ago
  Better to try to solve the problem, even if the solution is not perfect, rather than putting our heads in the sand.
- asdff 5y ago
  That's one way to get biodiversity, but you can also generate more diverse populations in the lab and plant them in the field. You can also seek out natural reservoirs of variation in the form of wild or land race cultivars, and introduce favorable traits into your elite commercial cultivar. I work in this field. This is where our food supply is going, where it has to go if we are to feed ourselves in a century, when changing conditions mean the crops being planted today will not achieve the same yields in the future.
hammock 5y ago
How does making identical copies of an animal increases biodiversity?
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  I meant cloning dead or extinct animals. Even then, if you cloned a small number of identical animals (100,000 pigs cloned from 100 originals) they would become biologically diverse in a fairly small amount of time.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    I think you might be underestimating the sheer amount of genetic diversity required to have a healthy base population. 100'000 pigs cloned from 100 originals would be susceptible to any number of pathogens. And because pathogens evolve so much faster than theirs hosts, chances are high that we will struggle very, very hard to keep them alive. Sex and horizontal gene exchange make it clear that life on earth cares very much for genetic diversity. And you can be sure that's not because it is woke. Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck a few hundred thousand years ago. It's still pretty much obvious in our genetic record; two random chimpanzee tribes have more genetic diversity between them than humanity as a whole. It takes a lot more knowledge then what we currently have for such a project to be reasonable. Maybe another hundred years until we are familiar enough with the metabolic pathways and all the idiosyncrasies that are present. But only if there's enough complexity left to study...
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      It was just an example. Obviously we would want more than 100 original pigs. The point is that biological diversity is a natural consequence of the evolutionary process.
mempko 5y ago
The biodiversity is going down because of habitat loss (global warming, human encroachment). How will cloning help when there won't be a habitat to sustain the clones? Global warming alone will destroy the vast majority of habitat for existing creatures. The change is faster than evolution can deal with.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  In 500 years, all energy may be clean energy. Enough societal change or depopulation can result in the re-establishment of nature biomes. I don’t see this as utopian or wildly unlikely.
  - crispyporkbites 5y ago
    In 500 years? It has to be 50 or there won’t be any societies to power in 500 years
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      As bad as climate change is, it’s not going to wipe out human civilization in 50 years.
      - riffic 5y ago
        But will it be extinct in 500/5000/50,000 years? There's an incredible arrogance in this thread of man's capabilities over natures. People better check themselves.
        ceilingcorner 5y ago
        I don’t think cloning animals is some kind of godlike technological power. It’s clearly something humans are already capable of doing to some extent. Projected 500-1000-5000 years into the future, it doesn’t seem arrogant to me to assume we will be able to clone extinct animals en masse.
pvaldes 5y ago
You would need to clone thousands species to restore the current links.

wellpast 5y ago

Biodiversity requires incremental, organic evolution. Funny how humans think that our intellect can somehow solve every problem.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ceilingcorner 5y ago
And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years.
- ewmiller 5y ago
  Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    On a biological timeline, it’s almost completely irrelevant. Humans spent tens of thousands of years in small tribal groups. I think we’ll be fine. Besides that, most people in cities already live in a biodiversity wasteland.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      So you're basically just arguing that technically humans will not go extinct, as long as there's at least two of them out there. Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most of us would prefer not to live or have children or grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population decline, which would still be 76 million people at the current population count.
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        No, that isn’t what I wrote. Try again.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years This is better than nothing. But species don't exist in a vacuum. Re-introducing an extinct species to a biome could be as jarring to its neighbors as its original elimination was. The most conservative path would be to cauterize the would and let the system heal, even if it takes a few million years. For an absurd example, consider the effect of introducing a large number of saber-toothed tigers to their original habitats.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense. Humans and other organisms have been changing the environment since the beginning of life. Life is a process, not a state.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense There isn't a stable state, but there are multiple equilibria. We can quantify the robustness of an ecosystem, its resilience to exogenous shocks. That makes certain states "better" than others. That resilience is low and decreasing. "Healing" means helping it increase. Re-introducing extinct species may or may not build a more robust and more productive biosphere.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I think you're confusing ecosystem (which word itself implies process) with equilibrium. It's quite fair to say that there was an actual ecosystem at least until the establishment of writing, at which point state information became transmissible across time and space beyond the capacity of individual organisms or eusocial colonies. While you are correct that evolution would sooner or later take over, whether with assistance via cloning or blind luck if humans were to go extinct, you do need to consider the possibility that under some circumstances systems can collapse rather than bouncing back over a relatively short timeframe. Life would eventually re-establish itself, just as life persists in extremely arid desert conditions, but there's no guarantee it will do si n a timely fashion, and by timely here I mean on a timescale short enough for a human civilization to flourish in parallel with it.
francisofascii 5y ago
Better to try to solve the problem, even if the solution is not perfect, rather than putting our heads in the sand.
asdff 5y ago
That's one way to get biodiversity, but you can also generate more diverse populations in the lab and plant them in the field. You can also seek out natural reservoirs of variation in the form of wild or land race cultivars, and introduce favorable traits into your elite commercial cultivar. I work in this field. This is where our food supply is going, where it has to go if we are to feed ourselves in a century, when changing conditions mean the crops being planted today will not achieve the same yields in the future.

hammock 5y ago

How does making identical copies of an animal increases biodiversity?

ceilingcorner 5y ago
I meant cloning dead or extinct animals. Even then, if you cloned a small number of identical animals (100,000 pigs cloned from 100 originals) they would become biologically diverse in a fairly small amount of time.
- esarbe 5y ago
  I think you might be underestimating the sheer amount of genetic diversity required to have a healthy base population. 100'000 pigs cloned from 100 originals would be susceptible to any number of pathogens. And because pathogens evolve so much faster than theirs hosts, chances are high that we will struggle very, very hard to keep them alive. Sex and horizontal gene exchange make it clear that life on earth cares very much for genetic diversity. And you can be sure that's not because it is woke. Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck a few hundred thousand years ago. It's still pretty much obvious in our genetic record; two random chimpanzee tribes have more genetic diversity between them than humanity as a whole. It takes a lot more knowledge then what we currently have for such a project to be reasonable. Maybe another hundred years until we are familiar enough with the metabolic pathways and all the idiosyncrasies that are present. But only if there's enough complexity left to study...
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    It was just an example. Obviously we would want more than 100 original pigs. The point is that biological diversity is a natural consequence of the evolutionary process.

mempko 5y ago

The biodiversity is going down because of habitat loss (global warming, human encroachment). How will cloning help when there won't be a habitat to sustain the clones? Global warming alone will destroy the vast majority of habitat for existing creatures. The change is faster than evolution can deal with.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
In 500 years, all energy may be clean energy. Enough societal change or depopulation can result in the re-establishment of nature biomes. I don’t see this as utopian or wildly unlikely.
- crispyporkbites 5y ago
  In 500 years? It has to be 50 or there won’t be any societies to power in 500 years
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    As bad as climate change is, it’s not going to wipe out human civilization in 50 years.
    - riffic 5y ago
      But will it be extinct in 500/5000/50,000 years? There's an incredible arrogance in this thread of man's capabilities over natures. People better check themselves.
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        I don’t think cloning animals is some kind of godlike technological power. It’s clearly something humans are already capable of doing to some extent. Projected 500-1000-5000 years into the future, it doesn’t seem arrogant to me to assume we will be able to clone extinct animals en masse.

pvaldes 5y ago

You would need to clone thousands species to restore the current links.