People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.
Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.
Ben Lamm is a forty-three-year-old serial entrepreneur who has already had five “exits”—acquisitions of startups by other companies. He lives in Dallas; his estimated net worth is $3.7 billion. Lamm is dyslexic, and when he was younger he found reading difficult. He tended toward graphic novels and video games, but over time he taught himself, he says, to “read for concepts.” Among the interesting figures he has run across is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Church has endorsed using gene therapy to improve human resistance to radiation, thus facilitating interplanetary travel; he has also written about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals back into existence.
In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals.
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We're headed for a nasty collapse where a lot more extinctions are gonna take place unfortunately. Hell the rate of extinction as we speak right now is terrifying.
This is why need to establish de-extinction techniques. Bringing back 10,000 year gone megafauna is cool (and good for funding) but we're gonna need to spend more time bringing back 500 species of frog that went extinct in our lifetime.
Just imagine the creatures we haven't discovered that have gone extinct as well.
It'd be so much easier to just keep the frogs alive in the first place than it would be to splice together a memory of the thing with five individual genomes and a barely-related extant relative.
But we aren't keeping them alive. Many of them are already gone. And I mean genuine de-extinction - cloning an animal that is no longer alive, not this fucked up genetic manipulation to create a half-assed copy.
tasmanian tigers when?
Yeah the problem is the fucked up genetic manipulation is typically all you can do with the data at your disposal. Genetic diversity is needed to maintain a population, which is why functional extinction typically hits when a population is down to 50-100 individuals. There just isn't enough information in the gene pool for adaptation to continue successfully. So we'd need to have a bunch of sequenced genomes, then either stitch those together from scratch or modify an existing relative (which requires the relative to exist and knowledge of which differences are salient), then hope there's nothing important happening epigenetically. It's an extremely tall order.
Is de-extinction useful? From what I know, species will naturally deviate and diversify themselves with time, given enough distance and differences in habitat one species can become many, and exploit the homogeneity of their environment through new niches.
I'm totally for rewilding but the idea that we need X amounts of Y species seems like a fools errand. We didn't need to manually invent species before, and any ecological system that necessitates we do so in the future is surely prone to collapse.
if you make a mess should you clean it up?