While in most cases I fully agree with this, I think there are some key examples that were simply lost to over-hunting/poaching. Ones that comes to mind are the various white rhino species, Dodos, some Mega turtles of Galapagos mentioned in the article. In the case of the Rhinos, there has been a concerted effort to maintain their habitat, but that also makes protecting against poachers near impossible. In the case of artificial repopulation efforts like these, they are protected by the breeding program, with a lofty goal of producing enough specimen to return to their original habitat.
I do think returning the Quagga or Whooly Mammoth is probably pointless, but they are high profile proof of concept.
Woolly mammoths look cool. In all honesty, I think that's the main reason.
De-extinguishing species is interesting as a scientific exercise and will probably lead to advances in fields of genetic engineering, medicine, the history of life, etc...
We don't have to do it with woolly mammoth, we probably could do it with some other unremarkable specie. But doing it with woolly mammoths will certainly attract a lot more attention and therefore money for the researchers.
There is also an advantage of doing it with a large animal we have already killed off. That is that if we lose control of our (re)creation, we can easily kill it off again, assuming it doesn't happen naturally. It is better than to de-extinguish a specie that is small and particularly well suited to human environments, we have already made enough of a mess with existing invasive species that we don't want to bring new ones.
This is an excellent question. Firstly, there are some very major differences between bringing a species back from extinction and saving a species from extinction. Perhaps the most radical difference is cost, with resurrecting an extinct species being likely impossible but best case costing at least 4 orders of magnitude more.
If the cost of a chicken egg was $10,000 it would likely not be worth the trouble. At $0.15 or $0.60, though, chicken eggs provide an excellent value and are nice to have around!
The real question here is why intervene to keep a species from extinction? The answer is that genetic diversity is massive valuable. The trouble is that the value assessment is very hard to calculate concretely and that value is also very hard to extract in the form of direct profits.
Let’s take the banana as an example.
The global banana market had sales of about $140B in 2023… clearly people value bananas. Today 99% of global trade in bananas is in a single variety, the “Cavendish” banana. But it was not always so. Until the 1950’s the world’s dominant banana was the “Gros Michel”. Over the course of the 1950’s the Gros Michel went commercially extinct as a result of “Panama Disease”. Researchers scoured the world to find a banana not susceptible to Panama Disease that could replace the Gros Michel in commerce. What they found is the Cavendish.
Today, a new strain of Panama Disease has evolved to target the Cavendish. Extinction of Cavendish is proceeding more slowly than that of the Gros Michel, but it seems more or less inevitable at this point.
The fact that we are likely to see 2 varieties of banana go commercially extinct within a single century, is kind of nuts. It seems that the half-life of a commercial banana variety is less that 50 years. The only reason we still have commercial bananas today is because of the rather deep genetic diversity in bananas the earth continued to possess in the 1950’s. That genetic diversity is significantly diminished today.
If we value the banana market as a perpetual annuity with the 2023 growth rate of 7% and a discount rate of 3%, the net present value of the banana market to the citizens of the world is approximately $3.5 Trillion.
How much is it rational to spend preserving this perpetual annuity? Anyway you slice it, the answer is very big… and very much bigger than is currently being spent to preserve the genetic diversity of the banana today.
What was the value of the American Chestnut tree? Hard to say, but it is clear that the loss was massive. I've read estimates that the American Chestnut provided (as fodder) something like 10% of the energy for the pre-extinction American transportation system as well as a substantial winter food source for all kinds of livestock, game and people. Just as transportation energy the yearly value of the American Chestnut would have been about 2% of US GDP.
If you started at the problem and worked in the other direction, maybe there are half a dozen ideas for solutions that are cheaper and more likely to work than "engineer mammoths." Like, is the engineering project even likely to work, if it works will they actually be bred in any number, if they are will anyone be willing to let them roam free, if they roam free are they likely to survive and breed more, if they do are they likely to have a positive impact, etc.
> maybe
What is this, National Argument By Insinuation Day? :-\
I don't even have a dog in this fight one way or another, I just call out terrible and weak logical arguments when I see them. This thread is rife with bad arguments.
It seems people here thought "Jurassic Park bad," then twisted themselves into knots to come up with something to complain about. Bad form guys.
If you want to fool people (in a durable way that's immune to logic), write a book or movie they watch as a kid.
The point is that when someone comes up with an expensive vanity project with a promise that it's really about climate change, you don't have to believe them.
Maybe they are coincidentally right and it will work, but they definitely seem less interested in rigorously investigating whether it will work than investigating the cool parts of engineering a mammoth.
...and you don't have to disbelieve that it will work either. It gives you no evidence either way.
"Really about" climate change is a different issue from whether or not it works. You're again trying to change the subject to the distraction issue of original intent, not actual efficacy (for which you clearly have no evidence, only insinuation).
The odds that a vanity project that someone picked because they thought it was cool will fix climate change seems substantially lower than a project that was picked because they really think it will fix climate change. Those two things are pretty closely related, since it's much easier to come up with a cool project with a vague promise of a climate change goal than a project that will really work.
Instead of bringing back mammoths, maybe help genetically engineer existing species to help them adapt faster, like people are doing with coral. I don't know, but "resurrecting the mammoths" is probably far down the list of useful climate change projects these people could be putting effort into.
> If you think canceling one automatically means more support for another
I don’t, neither do I think competition means a close system. But it’s definitely a system where parties influence each others.
Your beer does not share any goal with mammoth, but other environmental projects does. Let’s say you want to invest 5€ to fight climate change. During your search of projets to support, you might encounter the cool-mammoth one. Now there’s competition for those 5€.
The wood bison's range included tundra! I.e. they were hardier than the steppe-endemic megafauna that were killed off by the retreat and vanishing of the steppe, being able to survive (though probably not thrive) on the sort of scrub brush that grows at the taiga-tundra perimeter (which in turn is all that grows there, because of the lack of enough sun-warming for much of the year.)
Note that maps that claim to depict the "mammoth steppe", that you might find when searching, mostly aren't; they are actually usually maps depicting the range of the set of megafauna we associate with the steppe. But many of those megafauna have ranges that exceed the extent of the mammoth-steppe biome — i.e. they're not endemic to the steppe. So these depictions exaggerate the size of the steppe.
For example, these maps show areas within the arctic circle as part of the steppe — but they definitely were not part of the steppe biome. They were tundra then, just as they are now.
If you divide "megafauna you could find on the mammoth steppe" into "endemic to the steppe" vs "ranged to other biomes, such as tundra", I'm not sure what the precise ratio of the two groups would be; but AFAIK, the species that vanished along with the steppe (mostly not from human predation!) constituted at least a majority of such megafauna.
Which should be obvious — we'd have a lot more megafauna otherwise!
Also,
> Wood bison are practically identical to steppe bison so the conditions must be very similar.
This is an argument from phenotype, and that really doesn't work.
Species that happen to present identically when put into the same habitat, are just doing (over the course of a generation or two) the epigenetic equivalent of convergent evolution — flipping all the methylation switches to activate similar developmental strategies that they both happen to have evolved at some point in the past, either independently or in some common ancestor. (In the case of the wood and steppe bison, that would be the "it's cold, but there's lots of food; so I should get big, get strong enough to defend myself, grow lots of heavy fur, and minimize surface area per volume" strategy.)
But if you take two such "phenotypically identical" species out of the same habitat, and place them into a different habitat, they may have wildly different responses to that adaptive pressure. One species may not have the adaptations the other does, and so one species may do well while the other fails to thrive. Or the two species may have very different adaptations, such that they end up inhabiting different ecological niches in their new habitat, when previously they fit into the same slot.
Which is to say: steppe bison died out (long before the sort of en masse human predation that drove the plains bison to extinction), but wood bison survived. There's probably some good reason for that. (I'm not a zoologist, but I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the wood bison also being known as the mountain bison — i.e. with their ability to range beyond flat plains/steppe!)
> 1. the steppe mammoth specifically (i.e. the one everyone means when they reference humans hunting mammoths to extinction)
The steppe mammoth became extinct 200,000 years ago, it likely never encountered homo sapiens. The name is also a bit of a misnomer - they were associated with the steppe but were not confined to them.
When people talk about mammoths hunted to extinction by humans, they are usually referring to the woolly mammoth, which had a much wider range. They've been found from southern Spain to Kentucky. They might also be talking about the Columbian mammoth which resided in lower latitude parts of North America as far south as Costa Rica. Both the woolly and columbian mammoths are descended from the steppe mammoth, and both went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene with pygmy populations surviving on islands into the Holocene. Both survived numerous previous interglacial periods.
The "mammoth steppe" is just a poetic name for a biome common at the time, indeed the most common biome on Earth during the age of the woolly mammoth, it's not actually a term for a region the woolly mammoth was endemic to. It is by definition distinct from currently existing steppe climates, but the differences are mostly academic and does not explain the extinction of the mammoths. Indeed it is believed that the decline of the steppe was likely caused by the extinction of the mammoth (and other large herbivores), as they prevented trees from becoming too large or numerous, and in their absence much of the steppe turned into forest.