5 ms·

Curious - the entire objection to this endeavor as mentioned in the OP was, "What's gone is gone" according to some 'expert'. Now, new species are often disrup

Curious - the entire objection to this endeavor as mentioned in the OP was, "What's gone is gone" according to some 'expert'. Now, new species are often disruptive in lots of ways. No reason to think an old one, reintroduced, would be less disruptive. But no mention of real issues like that. I think the writer was just fishing for something provocative to say.

99_00 2y ago
A species that was eliminated by hunter gatherers or sailors with clubs is going to have a hard time getting out control.
jfengel 2y ago
I feel like the main objections would be in terms of animal welfare. You're almost certainly gonna harm a lot of animals in the process. Not just animals born deformed but also dangerous pregnancies. We do that all the time of course. But I'd kinda like to take at least a moment to consider how we minimize suffering before we plunge ahead.
- arp242 2y ago
  And even if you clone a perfect mammoth on your first try, then what? We know elephants are very intelligent, emotional, and social animals. I see no reason to assume mammoths are significantly different. And of course what they're working aren't even mammoths, more like "hairy elephants". Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness. It would be nothing short of cruel. So you managed to clone a herd of hairy elephants, then what do you do with those? The mammoth steppes they once roamed no longer exist. There is no ecosystem to save or improve because that ecosystem is gone. That's what they meant with "what's gone is gone". Can you just re-introduce them to the wild? These are huge animals that need a lot of space. Other animals and people live there. You can't just have a bit of land; you need a huge amount of it. Cloning mammoths is just dumb. None of the logistics really work out and a bunch of mammoths spending miserable lonely lives in zoos is basically the best-case outcome we can hope for and after a few decades of this everyone will all realize it was pointless and mammoths will be extinct once more. All these notions are rekindling a lost ecosystem are nothing more than flights of fancy. For some other animals there is perhaps a slightly better case to be made; I don't know. But for mammoths the case is pretty bad.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    The goal of the project is absolutely to release them into the wild. And their historical range is still largely empty of humans. There is enough space for everyone if we are willing to do it.
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    > Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Small elephants bond also with humans.
    - seszett 2y ago
      > Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Would it be that easy? Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves. How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language? They might very well be totally unable to cooperate or survive at all, without a preexisting society to guide them. Even if they don't have societies as developed at humans do, I can imagine the same would happen to different degrees with elephants, mammoths, dolphins, crows even.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        > Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves. > How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language? https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sign-language https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sig... https://www.nature.com/articles/34646 https://www.nature.com/articles/34646 I'd say less than 0.1 centuries.
      - pvaldes 2y ago
        Neo-mammooths obviously will learn the language of their modern elephant mothers without any effort.
katbyte 2y ago
Well the thing about a large mammal like an elephant is population control is easy and the effects generally more understood Unlike a zebra muscle which one it’s in your local lake goooooood luck ever removing them and now your lake may die a toxic blue green algae death
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  You would think that, but we can't even agree to eradicate the hippopotamus from the Americas. Why? Animals rights groups think it is apparently an issue to just exterminate them. These are literal invasive species brought in by a drug lord. If it turned out that mammoths were actually a problem, we'd never agree to actually control the population.
  - hparadiz 2y ago
    Probably one of the few actual wins of human activity.
    - anon84873628 2y ago
      Why?
  - gweinberg 2y ago
    There's no reason we should be able to agree. Some people like them and want them protected, other people hate them and want them gone. If it were really clear that they were harmful, shooting them all would be super easy, I could probably do it myself. Why would the fact that the guy who introduced them is a drug lord matter? Hippos can't inherit original sin.
    - blackbrokkoli 2y ago
      Your comment made me laugh, but to actually answer: It matters from a Chesterton's Fence perspective: We know that the hippos were not brought for any good reason, inevitability, etc.
- 2y ago
kenjackson 2y ago
It’s more than that. They also say: “Both Asian and African elephants, which Colossal plans to use as surrogates to grow mammoth calves, are endangered, and every elephant gestating a "mammoth" calf can't grow babies of its own. "That's going to reduce population size," Lynch said.“ We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species.
- xhevahir 2y ago
  Well, it's not as if the surrogacy would continue indefinitely, putting a continuous strain on elephant reproduction. They would need surrogates only long enough to establish a breeding mammoth population, and there's even the possibility that, should elephants get even nearer extinction, future mammoths could return the favor, so to speak, by performing as surrogates themselves. If, as I've been told, grasslands are a better carbon sink than taiga, and mammoths are capable of converting the latter into the former, I'm hopeful for efforts like this.
- hparadiz 2y ago
  The range of the Mammoth currently includes massive chunks of Alaska, Canada, and Russia where few people live. They might thrive in that environment much more so than the Asian and African elephants we have alive today. Maybe would even give them more breeding partners in the long term.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  >We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species. Well, if the currently endangered species go extinct, we'll have the technology to bring them back too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- tim333 2y ago
  The elephant population is about 500,000. Using one or two as surrogates isn't going to change things much in itself. It's humans multiplying and taking their land which is more the issue.
  - 2y ago
Kye 2y ago
This doesn't seem any different from the reintroduction of horses to the Americas. Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now. This isn't like bringing a brachiosaurus back where there's no realistic way for them to live in the current biosphere. The risk to elephants in using them for this is a real concern though.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now. Some humans do on a single continent which has a human population density half that of Eurasia, and even that not particularly smoothly: https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/elephants/human_elephant_conflict/ https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_spec...
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    It seems the de-extinction efforts help reinforce the rewilding and land conservation efforts. If an area has been populated by these reintroduced species it may be more resistant (politically if not physically) to human development.
pizza234 2y ago
Further into the article, there's a section dedicated to the main objections ("Unintended consequences"). > For one, de-extinct animals may be sickly, given that the pool of available DNA for each species is relatively small. > It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-scale mammoth reintroductions went wrong. > Reintroductions can lead to clashes between humans and wildlife. > The makeup of the reintroduced population matters too > There's also no guarantee that animals will stay where we release them I have the impression that while each single point may be unlikely, there are (too) many unknowns in the project. In addition to the biological objections, there are the ideological ones, primarily: > Instead of using that money to bring back three extinct species whose ecological impact is unknown, the funds could be put toward saving roughly 100 species that are currently facing an uncertain future I agree that this is ultimately purely driven by profit: > "If they're successful — and I have no doubt that they will be — they're going to make a ton of money," he said.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Yes, an underlying motivation of the project is simply to fund more biotech research. Which, if it comes to fruition as imagined in sci-fi novels, could radically upend ecosystems and societies alike, in far more dramatic ways than discussed here.
  - JoeAltmaier 2y ago
    That cow is already out of the barn. There's precious little ecosystem left on this tired old iron ball that hasn't been radically upended. Funny how any effort to arrest the runaway catastrophe that's been caused is met with resistance that calls it 'further damage'. Like we aren't already facing tremendous risks by leaving it unchecked.
    - patall 2y ago
      In addition to that, societies and ecosystems could also upend differently if we do not develop this technology. As every technology, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad. But simple banning (or 'moratoria') do rarely stop a novel field from developing, and just end up pushing it in the less open grey zone of top secret research projects.
namlem 2y ago
[flagged]
Eridrus 2y ago
There's a real (small c) conservative bias where we should keep things as they are rather than changing them for all sorts of reasons. People who want to actually change the world are a bit of a rarity.

99_00 2y ago

A species that was eliminated by hunter gatherers or sailors with clubs is going to have a hard time getting out control.

jfengel 2y ago

I feel like the main objections would be in terms of animal welfare. You're almost certainly gonna harm a lot of animals in the process. Not just animals born deformed but also dangerous pregnancies. We do that all the time of course. But I'd kinda like to take at least a moment to consider how we minimize suffering before we plunge ahead.

arp242 2y ago
And even if you clone a perfect mammoth on your first try, then what? We know elephants are very intelligent, emotional, and social animals. I see no reason to assume mammoths are significantly different. And of course what they're working aren't even mammoths, more like "hairy elephants". Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness. It would be nothing short of cruel. So you managed to clone a herd of hairy elephants, then what do you do with those? The mammoth steppes they once roamed no longer exist. There is no ecosystem to save or improve because that ecosystem is gone. That's what they meant with "what's gone is gone". Can you just re-introduce them to the wild? These are huge animals that need a lot of space. Other animals and people live there. You can't just have a bit of land; you need a huge amount of it. Cloning mammoths is just dumb. None of the logistics really work out and a bunch of mammoths spending miserable lonely lives in zoos is basically the best-case outcome we can hope for and after a few decades of this everyone will all realize it was pointless and mammoths will be extinct once more. All these notions are rekindling a lost ecosystem are nothing more than flights of fancy. For some other animals there is perhaps a slightly better case to be made; I don't know. But for mammoths the case is pretty bad.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  The goal of the project is absolutely to release them into the wild. And their historical range is still largely empty of humans. There is enough space for everyone if we are willing to do it.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  > Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Small elephants bond also with humans.
  - seszett 2y ago
    > Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Would it be that easy? Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves. How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language? They might very well be totally unable to cooperate or survive at all, without a preexisting society to guide them. Even if they don't have societies as developed at humans do, I can imagine the same would happen to different degrees with elephants, mammoths, dolphins, crows even.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves. > How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language? https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sign-language https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sig... https://www.nature.com/articles/34646 https://www.nature.com/articles/34646 I'd say less than 0.1 centuries.
    - pvaldes 2y ago
      Neo-mammooths obviously will learn the language of their modern elephant mothers without any effort.

katbyte 2y ago

Well the thing about a large mammal like an elephant is population control is easy and the effects generally more understood Unlike a zebra muscle which one it’s in your local lake goooooood luck ever removing them and now your lake may die a toxic blue green algae death

sidewndr46 2y ago
You would think that, but we can't even agree to eradicate the hippopotamus from the Americas. Why? Animals rights groups think it is apparently an issue to just exterminate them. These are literal invasive species brought in by a drug lord. If it turned out that mammoths were actually a problem, we'd never agree to actually control the population.
- hparadiz 2y ago
  Probably one of the few actual wins of human activity.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    Why?
- gweinberg 2y ago
  There's no reason we should be able to agree. Some people like them and want them protected, other people hate them and want them gone. If it were really clear that they were harmful, shooting them all would be super easy, I could probably do it myself. Why would the fact that the guy who introduced them is a drug lord matter? Hippos can't inherit original sin.
  - blackbrokkoli 2y ago
    Your comment made me laugh, but to actually answer: It matters from a Chesterton's Fence perspective: We know that the hippos were not brought for any good reason, inevitability, etc.
2y ago

kenjackson 2y ago

It’s more than that. They also say: “Both Asian and African elephants, which Colossal plans to use as surrogates to grow mammoth calves, are endangered, and every elephant gestating a "mammoth" calf can't grow babies of its own. "That's going to reduce population size," Lynch said.“ We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species.

xhevahir 2y ago
Well, it's not as if the surrogacy would continue indefinitely, putting a continuous strain on elephant reproduction. They would need surrogates only long enough to establish a breeding mammoth population, and there's even the possibility that, should elephants get even nearer extinction, future mammoths could return the favor, so to speak, by performing as surrogates themselves. If, as I've been told, grasslands are a better carbon sink than taiga, and mammoths are capable of converting the latter into the former, I'm hopeful for efforts like this.
hparadiz 2y ago
The range of the Mammoth currently includes massive chunks of Alaska, Canada, and Russia where few people live. They might thrive in that environment much more so than the Asian and African elephants we have alive today. Maybe would even give them more breeding partners in the long term.
anon84873628 2y ago
>We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species. Well, if the currently endangered species go extinct, we'll have the technology to bring them back too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tim333 2y ago
The elephant population is about 500,000. Using one or two as surrogates isn't going to change things much in itself. It's humans multiplying and taking their land which is more the issue.
- 2y ago

Kye 2y ago

This doesn't seem any different from the reintroduction of horses to the Americas. Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now. This isn't like bringing a brachiosaurus back where there's no realistic way for them to live in the current biosphere. The risk to elephants in using them for this is a real concern though.

lolinder 2y ago
> Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now. Some humans do on a single continent which has a human population density half that of Eurasia, and even that not particularly smoothly: https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/elephants/human_elephant_conflict/ https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_spec...
- anon84873628 2y ago
  It seems the de-extinction efforts help reinforce the rewilding and land conservation efforts. If an area has been populated by these reintroduced species it may be more resistant (politically if not physically) to human development.

pizza234 2y ago

Further into the article, there's a section dedicated to the main objections ("Unintended consequences"). > For one, de-extinct animals may be sickly, given that the pool of available DNA for each species is relatively small. > It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-scale mammoth reintroductions went wrong. > Reintroductions can lead to clashes between humans and wildlife. > The makeup of the reintroduced population matters too > There's also no guarantee that animals will stay where we release them I have the impression that while each single point may be unlikely, there are (too) many unknowns in the project. In addition to the biological objections, there are the ideological ones, primarily: > Instead of using that money to bring back three extinct species whose ecological impact is unknown, the funds could be put toward saving roughly 100 species that are currently facing an uncertain future I agree that this is ultimately purely driven by profit: > "If they're successful — and I have no doubt that they will be — they're going to make a ton of money," he said.

anon84873628 2y ago
Yes, an underlying motivation of the project is simply to fund more biotech research. Which, if it comes to fruition as imagined in sci-fi novels, could radically upend ecosystems and societies alike, in far more dramatic ways than discussed here.
- JoeAltmaier 2y ago
  That cow is already out of the barn. There's precious little ecosystem left on this tired old iron ball that hasn't been radically upended. Funny how any effort to arrest the runaway catastrophe that's been caused is met with resistance that calls it 'further damage'. Like we aren't already facing tremendous risks by leaving it unchecked.
  - patall 2y ago
    In addition to that, societies and ecosystems could also upend differently if we do not develop this technology. As every technology, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad. But simple banning (or 'moratoria') do rarely stop a novel field from developing, and just end up pushing it in the less open grey zone of top secret research projects.

namlem 2y ago

[flagged]

Eridrus 2y ago

There's a real (small c) conservative bias where we should keep things as they are rather than changing them for all sorts of reasons. People who want to actually change the world are a bit of a rarity.