8 ms·
Scientists are working to bring the woolly mammoth back
- Tao3300 3y agoOn one hand it would be amazing to revive an extinct species, but the reasons given seem like crap. Reintroducing it into the wild? How is that a good idea? Something something climate change? They went extinct because the pre-Industrial climate shifted. It doesn't even make nonsense; it's just word salad.
- BurningFrog 3y agoI think the more common theory is that our distant ancestors hunted them to extinction.
- BirAdam 3y agoYeah. The last mammoths died just 4000ya. They were on a remote island with no ppl.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoThere were so many remains in the Siberian north, the 'hunting to extinction' doesn't work in the Arctic. Given the voluminous evidence, it took something else. "These islands were full of mammoth bones, and the quantity of tusks and teeth of elephants and rhinoceroses, found in the newly discovered island of New Siberia, were perfectly amazing, and surpassed anything which had as yet been discovered.... Hedenstrőm started from Ustyansk, near the mouth of the Yana, on March 19th, 1809, taking with him two companions, and for three consecutive seasons they examined the islands. Hedenstrőm found that the quantity of fossil ivory on the first island found by Liakoff (i.e., Liakoffs Island) was so enormous, that, although the ivory diggers had been engaged in collecting ivory from it for forty years, the supply seemed to be quite undiminished." https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/alaskan-muck-ivory-islands-in-the-arctic/ https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/alaskan-muck-ivor... It's a long and forgotten story (from more than a century ago)... these might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Lyakhov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Lyakhov https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.10.017 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.10.017
- dotnet00 3y agoWell, since we're all speaking in hypotheticals anyway, if recreated Mammoths start being a problem, we're even more capable of wiping them out than last time.
- brutusborn 3y agoWhat makes you so sure their demise is due to climate? I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong but this kind of arrogant certainty based on limited data is rarely justified.
- trilbyglens 3y agoAnd with Russia as the target environment lol.
- redeux 3y agoI have to think that if we can clone Wooly Mammoths back from extinction and we can clone monkeys[1] that we can, and probably have, clone humans. 1. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Healthy_cloned_monkeys_born_in_Shanghai https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Healthy_cloned_monkeys_born_in_...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gremlinsinc 3y agowe can certainly clone humans. not like in some movies where the clone is all magically grown up. it'd still start as an infant and you can speed that up. The only reason nobody has (that we know about) is because of the ethical concerns. That and what real utility does human cloning give if you can't have a replica with your same age, skills, and experience?
- redeux 3y agoNobody is suggesting that clones are "magically grown up." I'm not sure where that comment is coming from... What utility does cloning any anime give you if you can't have a replica with the same age, skills, and experience?
- goplayoutside 3y agoProject page from the company doing the engineering: * https://colossal.com/mammoth/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/ The following statement from the same page appears to be their support for the claim that bringing the mammoth back from extinction will benefit the environment: >The loss of these large cold-tolerant Mammoths over the past 10,000 years has stripped this ecosystem of the grasslands that once efficiently absorbed carbon. Instead, there are mossy forests and wetlands, which aren’t as helpful with combating rising temperatures. However, if the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem could be revived, it could help in reversing the rapid warming of the climate and more pressingly, protect the arctic’s permafrost - one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs. >Re-establishing an ecosystem filled with grasslands will help to create a cycle that prevents the thaw and release of stored greenhouse gases within the arctic permafrost. With cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids grazing the grasslands and roaming comfortably during the winters, they scrape away layers of snow, so that the cold air can reach the soil. This also allows grasslands to thrive and since they’re lighter than forestry, the snow won’t melt as quickly. Making way for another benefit - a surface that reflects the Sun’s radiation.
- gslepak 3y agoHow is bringing back the Mammoth going to do any of that?
- jbotz 3y agoRead up on Allan Savory; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory
- anon84873628 3y agoIt's an appealing theory but unfortunately doesn't hold much water. That Wikipedia article covers the criticism. Savory himself conveniently believes HPG can't be proven with science, which is a pretty big red flag. Studies suggest it is better than unmanaged grazing but not as good as no grazing. So, a useful idea but not the claimed panacea.
- 3y ago
- gizajob 3y agoIt did make me think that elephants are very social matriarchal animals - the elephant that gives birth to the mammoth is going to want to keep it around, and the mammoth can’t really be separated and kept in some kind of isolation. But then they need to birth more mammoths, and even breed the mammoths (could be quicker) so I wonder how they’re going to manage a combined elephant-mammoth herd. Doesn’t make much sense to have a solitary mammoth wandering around on its own in Siberia, it’ll take a bunch of them. And then to convince them they’re not elephants.
- ggm 3y agoBison could probably do the job, or moose/elk. I'd love to see a mammoth but I think it's specious reasoning they'd be functionally important in tractable time. Building up a herd in an animal with slow gestation takes decades
- NegativeLatency 3y agoMight be helpful to have those big wide feet?
- ggm 3y agoI don't think I understand their impact on the landscape. The methane risks in the melting steppes might be something which is affected by how large animals behave in the landscape, and sure their feet would play to that. Cattle and horses are notably destructive to landscape by their feet. Sheep and Goats I think its over grazing mostly, but all of them can cause massive erosion gullies, I think thats likely to be an issue anywhere.
- throwuwu 3y agoElephants don’t have hooves.
- selcuka 3y ago> Building up a herd in an animal with slow gestation takes decades We can clone them in numbers, no need to wait for the nature.
- tmountain 3y agoWhat about genetic diversity? Is there enough quality DNA to establish a hardy herd?
- AlotOfReading 3y agoThere isn't a hard threshold of genetic diversity you need to cross to build a successful population. It's entirely possible to succeed from bottlenecks of as few as two individuals. This has been demonstrated several times with invasive species that went on to produce tens of thousands of descendants. The feral pigs of the gulf coast and Caribbean are a good example as many of their original populations were in the double or single digits. There's no true "minimum viable population size" as far as we know, just a continuum of increasing extinction risk as the effective population size decreases.
- brap 3y agoSuppose they manage to create a mammoth zygote, where is it going to grow? Can they just put it in an elephant’s womb? Will it grow just the same? Are wombs universal?
- technick 3y agoThey've been saying this since Jurassic Park came out in the mid 90's, still nothing has ever materialized. I'll believe that when pigs fly...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BirAdam 3y agohttps://media.tenor.com/images/9119ca5271780a7f2d3b9e3a8b784bb0/tenor.gif https://media.tenor.com/images/9119ca5271780a7f2d3b9e3a8b784...
- robwwilliams 3y agoImpressive genetics hubris. Given 200 years we might have the technology to do this. If this team wants to prove they can do this then why not start with two closely related rodent species as proof of principle? In my opinion—-and speaking as as a statistical geneticist who studies microevolutionary differences and change (variation with species)—-this is simply a PR stunt by a group that does not understand population genetics very well and takes Mendelian models of gene action much too seriously. I actually hope I am totally wrong!
- soligern 3y agoIt’s honestly not that hard to get the gene set you’re looking for in a single cell. It’s may take tens of thousands of attempts for it to be exactly what they’re looking for but it’s possible with current technology.
- robwwilliams 3y agoIt is not just the gene set. That is what I meant by Mendelian thinking. Just this week in a paper in Nature and after 30 years of intensive sequencing we added 30 million basepairs to the human Y chromosome assembly. The genomes of mammoth and Asian elephant are not nearly of as high quality as the human genome. The mammoth genome and Asian elephant genome will be much more divergent in non-coding sequence than in protein-coding sequence, so the reference to 99.9% similarity figure in the original post is an inaccurate and highly ascertainment bias. And yes, non-coding sequence differences will matter for phenotype difference. If they are lucky they will end up with a hairy Asian elephant, but it won’t know what to do or how to survive in Alaska or Finland. The evolution and divergence of species involves much more than just tweaking a few protein-coding genes. Thinking otherwise without proof of principle in much more tractable species (rodents, flys, arabidopsis, corn) is genetic hubris.
- soligern 3y agoDo they explicitly say they’re only looking to match protein coding regions? I would imagine attempting the entire genome as much as possible.
- s5300 3y ago[dead]
- sublinear 3y agoAbsolutely looking forward to those steaks, ribs, burgers, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smoyer 3y agoIf only your sig was fredflintstone!
- molticrystal 3y agoMaybe they can do the North American Camel that went extinct 12,000 years ago next. Lots of great candidates, both recent and prehistoric.
- henjodottech 3y ago> The woolly mammoth’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match of the Asian elephant If humans and mice share 85% DNA, how useful are these metrics?
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoOur DNA is shared more than 98 percent with chimpanzees and bonobos, our next of kin.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- arp242 3y agoLet's say you have two 20k line Python programs: those 20k lines are all different. But the Python interpreter is identical. The Python stdlib is identical. libc is identical. The Linux kernel is identical. Your 20k lines of Python code is a small part of this all, and most Python programs are probably >99% identical when you count it all up. Of course, this is not really all that meaningful of a number.
- insaider 3y agoNice analogy!
- HFguy 3y agoGood thinking!!!
- xwdv 3y agoIncredible analogy, very air tight.
- tetris11 3y agoSimilarly ``` def get_neanderthal () ## Retrieves 2% of the your genome ``` Has been implemented hundreds of different times by hundreds of different developers. If you cat and uniq their Neanderthal implementations together: ``` def global_get_neanderthal(): ## Retrieves 20% of a consensus genome ```
- nicechianti 3y ago[dead]
- Flatcircle 3y agoI love the climate change angle to justify de-extincting the mammoth. That's a stretch.
- spacecadet 3y agoYeah, cringe really. Wait for it to fail and they go extinct round 2 + it really fucks that ecosystem. This screams laking of robust externality thinking.
- trilbyglens 3y agoSeems like it's all just window dressing on "because we can"
- brutusborn 3y agoSince climate change is so hard to model it has basically become a synonym for ‘undesirable environmental event.’ This is why things like fires started by power lines are ‘caused by climate change’ and why any research that is related to the environment can be justified by ‘helping solve climate change.’ Like adding ‘machine learning’ to a project, it’s a buzzword that helps raise interest and cash. No rational justification required! Tenuous conjecture is welcome because it is so easy to justify and is so hard to argue.
- lolinder 3y ago> The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast. This makes very little sense to me. They seem to be comparing this to the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but we did that less than a hundred years after we exterminated them, so the other species in the ecosystem were still the same ones that co-evolved with the wolves. The wooly mammoth has instead been extinct for over 4000 years—at this point won't reintroducing it be more akin to introducing a new species, with all the ecosystem risks involved in such an endeavor?
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- hackerlight 3y agoIs 4000 years long enough for that to be a concern? Humans haven't changed that much in 4000 years, probably most other species haven't either. I suppose 4000 years could be long enough, because the climate has changed and evolution can happen quickly, but we'd need to actually analyze the ecosystem to come to that determination.
- AussieWog93 3y ago4000 years should be long enough for another species to come along and occupy whatever niche the mammoths were in.
- lolinder 3y agoThe whole premise of their argument is that the ecosystem is completely different than it once was. Humans are unchanged because we've been the primary changers, but the Arctic ecosystem would be unrecognizable to a mammoth: > The loss of these large cold-tolerant Mammoths over the past 10,000 years has stripped this ecosystem of the grasslands that once efficiently absorbed carbon. Instead, there are mossy forests and wetlands, which aren’t as helpful with combating rising temperatures. [0] It seems like the most likely outcome is the mammoths don't take. If they do take, it's pretty hubristic to assume that we'll get grasslands back instead of just ruining the ecosystems that do exist there now. [0] https://colossal.com/mammoth/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/
- midoridensha 3y agoAfter they bring back the mammoth and repopulate the Arctic with it, they should bring back the Velociraptor.
- Dban1 3y agoCan we bring back the Dodo too
- sillywalk 3y agoI wonder what it tastes like, and also if a billionaire could make one to find out and tell us.
- imagetic 3y agoHow to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-clone-a-mammoth-the-science-of-de-extinction-beth-shapiro/8960843?ean=9780691209005 https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-clone-a-mammoth-the-scie...
- RamblingCTO 3y agoI really like this idea, but what about population control? I'd hate to see bug game hunting as a paid sport as a solution. So we need sabertooth tigers as well? Hell no
- thiht 3y agoI remember reading about this when I was a kid, maybe close to 20 years ago. This is one of these things that you keep hearing about but never comes to completion. Like human teeth regrowth, or graphene.
- KevinMS 3y agoWhat is with all this wooly mammoth bias, who will speak for the mastodon?