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De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking
- danrocks 4y agoI’m not, and don’t call me Shirley.
- jonnylynchy 4y agoGreat minds think alike.
- jonnylynchy 4y agoI AM serious. And don't call me Shirley.
- laszlojamf 4y agoHad to google it. Made my day
- swader999 4y agoGreat movie.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago>Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species, rather than de-extinct animals that have been dead for thousands of years. Maybe that’s true, but it’s extremely unlikely that this $150M would have gone to conservation otherwise! If rich people want to spend their money on de-extinction, and bolster reproductive technologies in the meantime, then we say “let ‘em.” There's a French idiom for that, "pompiers pyromanes", which means arsonist firemen. Seems appropriate.
- fastball 4y agoThat doesn't really sound like the same thing?
- BurningFrog 4y agoProtecting existing species is a different goal though. It's always true that if you have different goals you'd spend resources differently.
- IntrepidWorm 4y agoIn 1800's United States, fire departments in many large cities (Chicago and New York, to name two) were private for-profit industries. If a homeowner did not pay what was effectively protection money, the fire department would refuse to extinguish your property if it caught fire, and would sit around as the dwelling burned, in some cases with people still inside. Fascinating idiom, thanks!
- remote_phone 4y agoThat exists today in areas where you have to pay the fire department separately.
- Sayrus 4y agoTom Scott did a video[1] about this. For the UK at least, this may have been an urban myth rooted in the fact that only the fastest fire brigades were paid[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoDon't we had a lot of movies explaining how bad this could go? Don't we had enough self inflicted catastrophes to keep us entertained that we need another disruptive one?
- vinaypai 4y agoYou mean Jurassic Park, that famous parable of the need for better fences?
- tokai 4y agoNot a single one of those movies are an actual argument against a real de-extinction project.
- shukantpal 4y agoYes, because the parent comment's point was they are an argument _against_ not _for_ de-extinction
- tokai 4y agoObviously. Edited the missing words in my comment.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoWell, I find the arrogance in trying to undo Natural Selection quite cute. She'll win. Big time.
- autophagian 4y agoWhere's the line when it constitutes 'undoing natural selection'? Resurrecting extinct animals? Conservation efforts? Taking antibiotics?
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoIn the reversal of extintion part. There is the line. Your other examples are mere interference to produce artificial selection, which it doesn't have to be always undesirable, of course.
- ramraj07 4y agoI don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil - it’s as evil as the concept of death itself; killing something is evil (or is it not? Outside humans even this isn’t considered unnatural), but something dying naturally is not. Clearly many animals have gone extinct because of humans (many memorable ones before humanity developed a sufficiently profound collective consciousness that could ponder about this), but I don’t see how there’s any moral, ethical or natural urge to repent and offer reparations for this. Species die, that’s the natural order of things for species in general and if this round of mass extinction is humanity induced then we should focus on reducing its scale instead of trying to go undo it as if that absolves us of anything. This says nothing about the scientific ability to do this, anyway, which as this article points is mostly BS. My general experience is if you try to do something that doesn’t make full logical economical and moral sense, you end up with this charlatan group. Crypto is another example of the same.
- Ericson2314 4y agoThe article also illustrates the problem of the gap between research and development. We have a bunch of technologies mentioned that are perhaps out of the pure basic research stage, but need to be developed a bunch. Developing those can be done independently and in parallel, but is that happening? Trying to put them all together probably is premature as the article suggests, and yet this is the easiest way to raise money because it is catchy.
- mdavidn 4y ago> I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil It's because we care about our children and their children. Each extinction eliminates a species that our ancestors lived among or depended upon. Eventually, an extinction may fundamentally break a food chain that keeps our descendants alive.
- ramraj07 4y agoEach extinction eliminates a species yes, but long term it opens up a niche for a new species to evolve into. As a biologist I don’t see any fundamental problem with this ebb and flow. We as a species haven’t exactly put down our foot on actual individual suffering so it just seems hypocritical to ascertain extra value to extinction, which outside of some vague concepts we have made up have no real ecological relevance anyway.
- mkoubaa 4y agoIt isn't what the author intended but I come away from reading this more confident that mammoth de-extinction will happen.
- Robotbeat 4y agoMaybe the juicy headline was written by the editor?
- sklivvz1971 4y ago> Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species Ah, ye old whataboutism canard... it seems to be forgetting that this technology would have an immense value by itself! > True de-extinction is nowhere near possible. I'm not sure I can parse the convoluted English here. Are we saying it's impossible? I see no evidence in the article that it is correct. Are we saying it's really hard? Sure, but no one claimed otherwise. I am not the kind of person that tends to have starry-eyed faith into any appealing idea, and perhaps it is truly hard to "resurrect" a dead species. However it seems to me that it's obviously doable at some level: Craig Venter has created a synthetic bacterium so I don't see why a particularly simple life form can't be "de-extincted". I realize though that multicellular organism are much harder and quite far away from our current capabilities, but impossible? I don't see why.
- StrictDabbler 4y agoYes, and the technologies involved in attempting de-extinction are also useful in preserving existing species. A species that has dwindled to about ten living individuals has a shallow gene pool. Bringing in genes from recently deceased or preserved specimens could help deepen that pool. It has happened that only one female of a species was known to be alive. The ability to put together a viable egg for her to bring to term would be the difference between extinction and survival. We're also awfully mammal-centric. Frogs have already been de-extincted. The gastric-brooding frog was resurrected in 2013. Compared to mammals it is relatively easy to transfer DNA around between the eggs of related oviparous species and there's no real reason we can't make a large-scale DNA bank for them, protecting the endangered birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians of the world. These technologies are all part of one tech tree.
- vinaypai 4y agoThis reads like a typical hatchet job with the usual fallacy of extrapolating from "didn't immediately succeed" to "is impossible".
- mkoubaa 4y agoIt's even worse. The claim sounds like: "Billion dollar company needs to invent new things to succeed, surely it is doomed to fail."
- leidenfrost 4y agoI don't see the point of de-extinction other than naturist nostalgia. The problem around de-extinction is that you can't just shoehorn a new species into a habitat that already filled the void left by a past extinction. If some marsupial in Australia got extinct because it was replaced by feral cats, then that habitat won't welcome that marsupial anymore. And there's nothing we can do about it. Even if we somehow people organize themselves to hunt all the feral cats to extinction, it will either be replaced by new post-domestic cats or either some other, equally capable and already existing predator. The habitat wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed. It changed the same way it changed when all non-avian dinosaurs got extinct and then replaced with mammals and birds that filled the void left by them.
- Ensorceled 4y ago> The habitat wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed. That's an interesting way to describe the massive effect humans are having on pretty much every habitat on the planet ... "It just changed."
- mrits 4y agoI think my dog prefers her swimming pool and heart worm medication so she can live more than a few years. Humans have a negative effect on some ecosystems but it seems inevitable that viruses,fungi,etc will eventually take over without our intervention.
- kybernetyk 4y agoWhich isn't wrong. As humans are the product of evolution, humans changing habitats is just natural change.
- msm_ 4y agoThis is technically correct, but I think this misses the point. Unhabitable future Earth with molten icebergs and polluted gray sky may, technically, be a "natural change" and a consequence of "natural" human actions. But we, humans, want to avoid this future. The same goes for causing extinction of most wild animal species. Edit: to expand on GP's point: imagine your house burned down, and somebody said "> Your property wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed". Yeah, all the atoms are still there, but it changed in a way we find undesirable.
- Ruq 4y agoJurassic Park anyone?
- DarkContinent 4y agoIs there someone on HN who can speak to how fast gene editing technology is improving? I was a bit skeptical of the author's claim that construction of a mammoth genome would require 5000 years, but I couldn't find any information in a cursory search on what the technology improvement speed is.
- Robotbeat 4y agoWell it used to take ~infinity years as the technique didn’t exist to do it at all. Claims like “it’ll take 5000 years” are always funny because they’re so incredibly status quo biased, without the least bit of self consciousness of how remarkable the progress has been in the last 50 years on things like this. Humans overestimate progress in the near term and underestimate progress in the long term.
- remote_phone 4y agoThis author spends a lot of time pooh poohing the idea without considering the fact that research could result in techniques that don’t exist right now. That’s the whole point in science and investing in research! How about instead of bemoaning how “money could be better spent on conservation”, the author could pursue that route (they won’t) and let people who are interested in research do what they want to do?
- TheCaptain4815 4y agoI've always wondered what the end goal was for animal preservation. Halting evolution and keeping the same ecosystem around forever?
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago>Captain Cook’s Bean Snail [...] Today, they live only in zoos. Sadly, the last member of that particular species died in 2016, in Edinburgh Zoo[1]. However, they had some success with other Partula snails[2]. [1] - https://islandbiodiversity.com/faba.htm https://islandbiodiversity.com/faba.htm [2] - https://www.rzss.org.uk/conservation/our-projects/project-search/journey-to-the-wild/partula-snail-conservation/ https://www.rzss.org.uk/conservation/our-projects/project-se...
- M95D 4y agoI think the author missed one of the most important points: genetic variability to obtain the minimum viable population.[1] Let's say they make a perfect clone of an extinct animal. It can't reproduce by itself. It needs a mate. Let's say they clone a second animal of the other gender. Let's say they reproduce (low chance of that, but let's say they do). All their descendants need mates too, other than their siblings, otherwise it leeds to inbreeding.[2] They need dozens if not hundreds of different individuals to make a viable population that doesn't go extinct again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression
- Nasrudith 4y agoTechnically that could be overcome if you don't care about individual specimen welfare and mutate until you get viable specimens. It won't be quite the same but it would restore a viable species.
- M95D 4y ago> mutate until you get viable specimens Mutations are very rarely viable. In fact, the original cloned animal mutations must be eliminated in order to have viable future generation. The only thing that (may) benefit from mutations is the imune system. See the problem with cheetah's lack of genetic variability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah#Genetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah#Genetics
- mrozbarry 4y agoI think any attempt at "de-extinction" is quite literally a statement of disbelief of evolution. A core tenant (at least from my perspective) of evolution is survival of the fittest. I agree with all the other comments mentioning that the voids that extinct animals left have been filled and their ecosystems have changed, but that is different from their ecosystems being destroyed. Accept change, and move on. Also, humanity has a track record of trying to play god and that not going too well.
- pessimizer 4y agoEvolution isn't a doctrine that you're supposed to follow, that's social Darwinism.
- drc500free 4y agoAny attempt at "building anything at all" is quite literally a statement of disbelief in entropy.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> after scientists cloned an animal and watched it die, moments later, from a lung defect Moments after they cloned it? The immediate result of cloning is a single cell, not something with a lung. So that single cell grew into an organism with lungs, in moments? I stopped reading a few paragraphs after that.
- v3ss0n 4y agoTherenos 2.0?