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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 becom
by 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 agoI 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 agoIt 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.