> “Even if they succeeded, the obvious question is, what would you do with it?” said Stuart Pimm, a professor at the conservation ecology research unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “If you had a Woolly mammoth, you would put it in a cage. It’s a colossal exercise in ego.”
This is my thought about all these efforts. The mammoth people talk like it's about a solution to climate change, but that's obviously working backwards from their goal (revive the mammoth for reasons) to some sort of reasonable-sounding justification. They set out with different motivations in mind.
I'd ask the same question here: why try to bring back a species we already killed off? These won't be descendants of the animals we killed, so it's hardly a form of reparations. If it's about preserving the ecosystems we already have, there have to be more efficient ways to do that than rebreeding less stripe zebras.
It's hard not to see this as just the same impulse that led to the poodle: because we can and because it will look cool and draw attention and make money. The only difference is there's a slight nostalgic bent to the aesthetic.
If you managed to prevent the extinction of the the African Bush Elephant, what would you do with it?
Species do not need to exists for a utilitarian purpose. Bringing back something that once existed can be a perfectly justifiable end in itself. Preventing a species from going extinct is not particularly controversial, even reintroducing species that have not been seen in a land in many generations is widely done and celebrated. The only difference between that and reintroducing a species that went extinct globally is the technical difficulty.
It's very reasonable to believe that there could be benefits to restoring ecosystems, and that might motivate some people to provide their effort and resources to the endeavor moreso than the restoration of nature, but it's perfectly fine to have multiple aligned motivations.
The world is a dynamic place, the true exercise in ego is to define the world as it happened to be when you were born into it as the status quo that ought to be maintained.
I think there's a stark difference between an animal that evolved to live in a world that no longer exists, versus an animal that was hunted to extinction, for which there exists a plausible environment in which it can thrive.
Mammoths were hunted to extinction and would otherwise do just fine in many wild parts of the world.
The "mammoth steppe" — the biome that supported mammoths — was a place that was cold (due to a glacial maximum) but bright (due to not being very polar.) Which made for endless fields of nutrient-dense grasses to graze on. Which made for lots of crazy-big grazing animals.
There is no modern-era equivalent to the mammoth steppe. Savanna biomes are too hot (thus, elephants — mammoths adapted for the heat); and tundra biomes don't get enough sun (thus only supporting very small herbivorous tundra animals, with even the apex predators of that food chain not being anything like megafauna.)
That’s just the steppe mammoth. There were other mammoth species that lived in less frigid environments.
Maybe stick to your day job.
Many megafauna existed outside the steppes. First example that comes to mind is the european forest elephant.
Okay? I wasn’t trying to make any claim in contravention of what you just said.
My points were these:
1. the steppe mammoth specifically (i.e. the one everyone means when they reference humans hunting mammoths to extinction) existed as it did because of the mammoth steppe’s unique biome;
2. megafauna that were endemic to the mammoth steppe are not transplantable to any biome we have today, because they were adapted specifically to those conditions (thus the being-endemic, rather than ranging elsewhere), and we no longer have those conditions. (They might survive, but they would quickly adapt out of the phenotype we recognize. You’d just get another elephant.)
I made no claim about the survivability of megafauna that did range outside of the steppe. Clearly, if they were out there, they were able to be out there; and we do have equivalent biomes to those today.
> 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.
I’m not sure the distinction you have between mammoth steppe and northwestern US wood bison habitat.
Wood bison are practically identical to steppe bison so the conditions must be very similar. Elephants aren’t cold adapted running into issues well above freezing (~42f), so anyplace that gets midwestern cold like say Mongolia isn’t going to result in them evolving into something roughly equivalent to elephants.
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!)
> Species that happen to present identically when put into the same habitat,
Your argument suggested that these are very different environments. “You’d just get another elephant.”
If convergent evolution is pushing the same adaptations then that suggests something already evolved to exist in a similar environment would be reasonably stable especially across human timescales. Kansas gets cold but it’s hardly the Arctic Tundra.
The idea that ecosystems haven't been in permanent flux forever is odd.
Things have been going extinct for millennia with no human intervention. The idea of the butterfly effect from human intervention causing ecosystem collapse is filled with hubris. There are some things that will obviously change a landscape. If we were to completely deforest the Amazon then there could be some disastrous consequences, sure.
But the Brazilian Three Eyed Skunkowl going extinct isn't likely to cause some devastating collapse outside of a poorly-done model.
Of course things have always been changing, but the current rate of extinction hasn't been equalled since the four or five largest mass extinction events. It's not an ordinary situation in life's history. Ultimately it depends what you care about but it's inarguable that the natural world is being greatly impoverished in ways that could take millions of years to recover from (e.g. in terms of species numbers)
I think one nuance that empasizes his point is that within millions of years, and likely much sooner (as we are already rather 'overdue'), there will almost certainly be another genuine mass extinction event that will once again strip most life from this planet.
The notion of rates is also quite a bit more contentious than many appreciate. The extremely high rates in modern times are based on modeling with rather debated assumptions. This is how you get claims of hundreds of extinctions per day even though there have only been about 800 'verified' extinctions in the past 400 years [1]. And, notably, a number of those verified extinct species ended up showing up elsewhere later on!
[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
This is exactly what confuses me -- we're modeling both the inputs and outputs, and not with particularly robust validation or verification.
Where is the utility?
We've established that things are changing. Sure. But if you gave someone a 'stock predictor' of similar quality, few people would choose to trust it with money. But in reality, we dedicate billions of dollars of resources collectively to the outputs of biome modeling.
The people who want to revive the woolly mammoth want to release them into the Siberian Steppe to restore grassland to fix carbon into the earth.
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh...
That sounds like a justification for something they want to do for other reasons (like attracting funding).
If it works it works and the original motivations don't really matter then. Now whether it would actually work is something else ofc.
well that's why I'm skeptical too, what are the odds that a big vanity project just happens to also be a great climate change fix? They also want to resurrect the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. It's hard enough to find climate solutions that work when you're motivated by that, when you're motivated by "doing cool stuff" you might stumble onto a solution, but the odds do seem rather low.
They would be trying to resurrect the mammoth either way, so it's not like there's any real incentive to actually research whether it will work.
> It's hard enough to find climate solutions that work when you're motivated by that, when you're motivated by "doing cool stuff" you might stumble onto a solution, but the odds do seem rather low.
Yes, it is critical to not let your focus split, and always stay true to the most important goal.
If you're a robot.
"Doing cool stuff" is one of the major, most basic drives behind progress of science and technology. Definitely more honest than "doing it for the money" or "doing it for social status", where you can always find ways to cheat if the going gets annoying. "Doing cool stuff" is up there with "doing it to save ourselves from an imminent, lethal threat" - the other highly reliable motivator that has little tolerance for bullshit, and was responsible for most of the rapid progress thorough history. Of the two, I'd prefer the one that doesn't involve violence and fear of death. It's probably more sustainable, too.
See also: something something Feynman on having fun in research.
Consider also: Most progress happens in small increments; the set of people motivated by wanting to solve climate is small, so it doesn't really hurt to also add the people motivated by doing cool shit in parallel. The chance of getting critical increment doubles; the chance of any one in any of the two groups having the full solution is ~zero.
I think it's great to have "help fix the climate" as a sort of stretch goal for someone's cool project, it's just not something I'm going to take particularly seriously. Maybe they'll produce a couple mammoths who get sold to zoos and then get bored and move on to their dodo resurrection instead.
I worry that they can use the climate change argument to deflect from the ethical arguments around whether it's even a good idea to resurrect a highly intelligent social animal like this. Imagine bioengineering a resurrected "Neanderthal" into a world without Neanderthals. There's something bleak about it. If the breeding/release idea doesn't work out you've just intentionally created some endlings[0] with no real future.
Asimov wrote an interesting story that has a similar premise.[0] Since I read it as a child I have wanted to see cloned hominids.
I think that in the near future we'll wealthy weirdos start to clone their ancestors, and things like native groups in colonized places like Canada or New Zealand start to clone their ancestors to buff up their population and strengthen their legal claims to territory. Think about what we'll be able to do with artificial wombs.[1]
As for your neanderthal endlings it probably will be pretty bleak for a lot of these hominids, but who knows, maybe some of them will end up being smarter than your average human and they'll have a role in society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-...
Also, recreation is technology. If it turns out that ten mammoths are more efficient and require less human maintenance to modulate tundra and encourage the ecocycle, we know how to do it. We don't need to start a 50 year investment in 2050 and hope it works. Mammoths are likely to be equally or more useful than AI image generation or gigantic warehouses that sequester carbon given various precision-machined parts and chemical engineering. Animals are more efficient and require fewer externalities than most human endeavors. Even if we just ignore the externalities and admire these new impressive technologies. Life is very efficient.
Agree with all, except for:
> Life is very efficient.
I mean, is it? It's a total tangent, but I've long been having a problem wrapping my mind around the topic of efficiency of life. At whichever scale I look, from ecosystems to inner workings of cells, I see systems held in balance by negative feedback loops, zero-sum games. That is, everything fights everything else for resources, and what we call "balance" is a temporary equilibrium between reproduction, destruction and starvation. Feels like the exact opposite of efficiency. And yet, I can't deny that life can and does a lot with very little. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.
I have this general image in my head wrt. efficiency. Imagine you want to put a box a meter above the ground. There are many ways to do it. You could strap a PLC controller and a rocket engine to it, and keep it up actively. You could put it on a floating platform, filled with hot air, or better, helium or hydrogen. Or, you could just put a mast in the ground and bolt the box to it. The first one is obviously the least efficient, and the last one the most.
When I look at life, I see a lot of things being balanced by means equivalent to the rocket engine approach.
Ok, so, try dividing time into a view of it repeating, and progressing.
Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.
Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.
It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.
Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely
H psi = ih d/dt psi
H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.
The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.
Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.
To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.
So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.
It's been a while since I took any classes about it, but I don't think i implies "repeating time." I'm pretty sure it's just from the fact that waves themselves are repeating, i.e. periodic. But Schrodinger's equation doesn't say anything about the nature of time itself IIRC.
Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.
To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.
you'd be absolutely right that the global warming justification is a retro-active "find a problem" situation. the true motivator lies in the technology that Colossal is attempting to accomplish the mammoth cloning with.
as it stands right now, cloning of any organism requires at the very least living fibroblast cells. Of course, you cannot get these from deceased mammals. Colossal's strategy is to essentially blast the host genome with fragments of the subjects DNA (which you can get from deceased/fossilized tissue) and hope that the end result is an elephant cell that's been reprogrammed into a mammoth-like cell from which to do cloning.
imo if they really wanted a mammoth, they could just make a hairy elephant. that would be 10x easier. but the whole idea is being able to resurrect...mammals.
From a certain point of view, the entire civilization beyond the absolute basics is a "big vanity project". Whenever you gaze at Notre Dame or Taj Mahal, or even an old Greek amphitheatre of which there are hundreds, you can say "this could have been used to feed the poor, no one needs a theatre to survive and a theatre won't help us solve climate change or whatever pressing problem is on the horizon".
But people in general don't want to live completely utilitarian life, and your "vanity" is someone else's "exploration of the possible" or "lifting up human mind". Both of you might even be right at the same time.
It's a bit like saying you're going to Mars to save the world. No, you're going to Mars because it would be cool.
Doing stuff because it would be cool is great, it's just kind of dumb to pretend you're doing it for a practical purpose. Just say you want to do the big thing because it would be fun, or inspiring, or you have a trillion dollars and can afford it.
Doesn't that line of thinking just lead to endless reductionism? Is anything besides literally curing cancer and feeding the starving worthwhile for you?
Maybe my view is a different one here (I have donated to Pleistocene Park before), but at least here in Europe most big ecological project seem to follow the megaherbivore theory, and try to implement it in some areas.
I mean isn't that what a lot of random robotics labs do as well (e.g. "some potential application for this feature includes search and rescue, etc.")? What's wrong with it?
[dead]
I mentioned that, but I think that's a pitch to get investors into a project that actually started because they read Jurassic Park and got the wrong message. It's a classic solution in search of a problem.
The problem is Siberia releasing carbon, that’s pretty clearly and well defined. I don’t know what other “more efficient” solution we could possibly have. Sometimes nature is the best solution to the problem.
It’s no different than reintroducing beavers into areas to reduce wildfires. Nothing we’ve invented so far is a better option.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/19/fighting-wildland-fire-wi...
No one looked at siberia's carbon emissions and said "let's revive the mammoth to solve that problem". They started with the mammoth resurrection program and then found a justification for it.
That doesn't mean the justification that they found is necessarily invalid, but the reason why solutions in search of a problem are problematic is that the chosen solution is rarely the optimal one because it wasn't designed for the problem—the problem was designed for the solution.
I dont think that is a fair criticism of solutions in search of a problem. I would argue that the vast majority of technology and innovation falls into this category.
The wheel and combustion engine weren't invented as a bespoke solutions for automobiles and trains. The internet wasn't invented as a platform for e-commerce.
History is full of examples of technology leading the application, with curious or enterprising individuals adapting the technology to a productive use.
History is also almost empty of positive climate change outcome. Photovoltaic might be an exemption.
EV batteries is still unresolved at scale and cars are still made of tons of extracted metals and oilchemestry. They are fun and new tech sell well and oil price go up. That’s the reasons EV were invented. Branding them as green works great because it’s look plausible and we all want to have greener cars (and/or continue using them, which is correlated).
>History is also almost empty of positive climate change outcome.
What would you consider positive a climate change outcome? I think there are tons of positive outcomes, but agree there is a lot of greenwashing as well.
Moving from coal to natural gas has a enormous positive outcome. PV is as well. US CO2 per capita and total emissions are down 25% in the last 20 years, which is a massive positive outcome. Global CO2 per capita has gone negative, which is another massive win.
It is too soon to tell, but we may even be at or have passed global peak emissions, which will be another massive milestone.
> moving from coal
We didn’t, and coal consumption even double since 80’s. What we did is add oil to it and then gaz [0]. Some could argue that without oil and gaz, coal might be even higher today. In that sense gas is more a “less bad” than a good one : it did not diminish the coal consumption neither out energy need.
Individual countries like the US absolutely have moved away from coal; US coal consumption has been cut in half in the past 20 years. These reductions have been more than offset by increases in other countries.
US Coal is half of what it was in 2007. Is that not progress? Would you rather we double it back to where it was? because that was the alternative alternative.
By “we” I don’t mean “USA” but “humans”. I’m very happy USA did cut its coal consumption.
What a weak, by-side-effect argument.
You present no evidence it won't work, but you oppose it because you think the method might be... sub-optimal? Maybe?
Ironically it sounds like you started with opposition to this project (I blame Jurassic Park) and then worked backwards in search of a justification for your opinion.
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
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.
> I don't know, but...
That's the thread, folks! Thanks for finally admitting your lack of a real evidence-based argument.
The mammoth-breeders aren't climate change experts either. They're genetic engineers. They don't know either, but they're selling it like they do.
Genetic engineers can't talk to / work with climate experts? News to me.
Specialization of labor within a project is hardly a new concept.
Well that's the thing, I don't think they care whether it would benefit the climate. They want to do it either way. They're also trying to de-extinct the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. So why should I trust them that they've done the research?
If it does work, that would be awesome. A wooly mammoth certainly sounds cool and it's not my money, so whatever.
Someone might trust them because they sat through a presentation, read the facts and have a background. Why should you trust them? I don't think you should. Save your trust for things you know about.
Quoting myself (missed it the first time?):
> You're again trying to change the subject to the distraction issue of original intent, not actual efficacy.
Come back with a real argument please. Until then we have nothing to talk about.
The giant problem leaping out at me is, what evidence do we have that mammoths could even survive in the wild today, let alone thrive to the extent necessary to change the ecology? They went extinct, after all.
If we knew the answer ahead of time, there would be no point in doing the experiment.
One can easily argue that Mammoths ought to be able to survive - they survived periods with climates similar to our current one and there are a lot fewer paleolithic hunters running about now. But we won't really know unless we try.
>a lot fewer paleolithic hunters
Modern poachers with modern technology beat paleolithic hunters, hands down.
Technology works, as it turns out... :D
Poachers aren't part of the natural environment. When people say "survive in the wild" they are typically referring to the case where the species' and its natural habitat are largely left alone by modern civilization. Any species could be wiped out if humans tried to do so, even humans.
Anyways, in this scenario we have the means of producing mammoths at will, so why would there be a market for mammoth poaching? If people do kill a mammoth, just add another mammoth. Technology works.
I wish semantics worked against actual poachers. :-(
>why would there be a market for mammoth poaching?
I don't think you understood what I was saying. Why would there be a market for poaching an animal that is mass-bred in captivity?
Let's be realistic though, if wooly mammoths we're released in Siberia, the first thing millions of trophy hunters would do is flock to Siberia and shoot them all.
Yeah, but this is far from putting them "in a cage". Watching the documentary on the lead of this, Stewart Brand, it is clear his goal is to build the technology to prevent species extinction and to re-introduce animals that have already been extinct. The parts about climate change are a justification for pursuing woolly mammoths specifically.
What's wrong with the elk that are already there? Is there something about the mammoth that makes them better at fixing carbon?
Well I had dinner with Ben Lamm[1] and he was very open in saying that for him the whole project was about setting up a big zoo attraction and charging people a bunch of money to come and see the mammoths.
[1] Co-founder of colossal, the company that is attempting the mammoth de-extinction.
I'm skeptical that would work. Animals aren't robots; their behavior isn't just programmed in to their DNA. Absent adult mammoths to teach the newly "revived" mammoth how to be a mammoth, I doubt it simply releasing them onto the steppe would work. Very likely, the mammoth would die.
So then this becomes an exercise in cruelty, bringing a creature to life only for it to suffer a painful, short existence. Reminds me of Frankenstein, honestly.
If only there was some kind of way to raise and train animals. Next thing you know people will try to harness fire and lightning, madness!
Is there a real-world example of raising an animal from birth, with no contact with any others of its kind, being released into the wild and successfully living there?
At least that would be useful
In my area, they've released long extinct (for the UK) long-horn cows, and it's improved the local ecosystem [1] Similarly with beavers in the UK as well.
Arguably mammoths would likely do the same after some period of time, and I'd hope other mega-fauna we've chased, killed and eaten into extinction.
[1] https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/after-year-bison-f...
Your source doesn't really back up your claim that it's improved the local ecosystem. It very firmly says that we'll need a few more decades to have any idea how beneficial it is.
Even the various officials say things that make it sound great, but quickly turn to saying they'll need more time to reach a result.
Similar story when wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone:
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
I'm 100% on board with concerted efforts to reintroduce species that already exist into habitats that they once roamed. That's a relatively low effort/high reward conservation project.
I'm unconvinced that the value we expect to gain from resurrecting an extinct species is worth the overhead of doing so, compared to using those same resources to keep the species that we haven't yet killed off alive and help them thrive.
There needs to be a term for the cognitive fallacy that, just because two endeavors are conceptually adjacent in your mind, that puts them in competition for resources in any real way.
That isn't how it works. Conserving megafauna and de-extincting the mammoth aren't competing with each other except in the very general sense that both are in competition with every other endeavour which is not explicitly engaged in profit seeking.
But if you were to say "I'm unconvinced the value we expect to gain from preserving old computers in working condition is worth it, relative to efforts to reduce child mortality in West Africa" it would obviously be a weak argument which few would entertain. But the situation is much more like that than you make it look here.
In concrete terms, woolly mammoths don't seem likely to starve endangered Siberian animals, and if they turned out to be an ecological problem (for example, they might eat important plants to an excessive degree) they would be fairly easy to capture, move and confine.
In abstract terms, there is only a small difference of degree between capturing, reproducing and dispersing rare animals to increase a small population (for example, small raptors in cities as a defense against obnoxious birds); reestablishing a recently extinct population with imports from a place where an animal isn't extinct yet (for example wolves and bears in various places in central Europe); reestablishing a less recently extinct population with artificial marvels of genetic engineering (mammoths, aurochs); introducing completely foreign animals (for example rabbits in Australia, a major bad idea from a conservation point of view); introducing artificial animals that never had a population anywhere (hopefully all fiction, but for example photosynthesis would be impactful).
> There needs to be a term for the cognitive fallacy that, just because two endeavors are conceptually adjacent in your mind, that puts them in competition for resources in any real way.
Perhaps: "The more roads you build, the fewer sidewalks"? On second thought, perhaps not, since they are a little too closely related.
False dichotomy covers that, but is perhaps too broad.
When faced with people like that, I ask them what have you done to cure cancer?
Sure. But I'm pretty sure we're not done driving species to extinction. The benefits of bringing back the quagga may not outweigh the immediate costs, but developing the ability to revive extinct species in general very well might.
Sure, being able to revive extinct species might benefit […] only if we also become good at not driving them to extinction.
This second ability is a must for the first one to be useful, and might even work alone. eg: just let the existing bisons grow new herds.
But the wolves released weren't the same as the ones that once roamed. The Canadian wolves were chosen because they were from a healthy population that lived in similar habitat and preyed on similar species, not because they were just dropping in the same subspecies.
Why are you assuming there is a competition for resources at play?
Some people would rather spend resources developing technology to resurrect species. Why not use that technology for conservation?
Of course there is: money, which is arguably not infinite, neither does (unarguably) the ressources/human time you could buy with it.
The two types of projects don't compete for the same pool of money. There's some overlap, but there's some funding that goes to specific goals on their merits, and then there's some funding that could be pulled in if the project captures someone's interest (including public). As for buying human time, happily that often comes with a big discount for work on cool stuff (a fact routinely abused by businesses in some sectors, such as game development or entertainment in general).
There's also an extra discount for trustworthiness - it's much harder to fake results when the evaluation criteria include whether or not it's the cool stuff that was promised.
Agree. The part "that goes to specific goal" is the one at competition between parties playing for that goal.
Finite time and money doesn't mean there is competition in real practice. If you think canceling one automatically means more support for another, you have a broken model of reality.
If I save $5 on beer, that doesn't mean the nature conservancy budget gets more funding. It will almost assuredly stay in my bank account or get spent on chips.
> 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€.
I'm pretty sure there was a more comprehensive study than the rivers video that showed it wasn't the wolves, but rather the fencing put up to prevent grazing that restored the forests and therefore beaver materials in Yellowstone park.
Large, charismatic megafauna have many uses. Their coats, their tusks, their meat can be extremely valuable. It's debatable whether humans are responsible for the deaths of most of the large megafauna that died out over the past million years. There were probably many factors.
There don't need to be any other reasons other than, "it's interesting and will make money".
Why bring up breeding for poodles in context to reviving extinct animals?
Poodles have Non-shedding fur and don't bark much two HUGE benefits over something like a wolf or husky.
As for the mammoths, we learn by doing. Going to space was an exercise of ego, exploring the new world, taking flight, developing nuclear weapons...
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.
Maybe we have a moral obligation to undo the damage we’ve done?Not necessarily talking about mammoths here, but more recent species that we’ve made extinct. If it can be done in a way that’s not just to make zoo animals, but actually restore them in the environment like we’ve reintroduced some animals into areas they’ve been driven out of.
Might as well put that effort towards halting the ongoing mass extinction of more animals, before worrying about bringing back facsimiles of the ones we've already eliminated
This is the "lump of labor" fallacy.
You can simultaneously prevent ongoing extinctions and work to undo past ones. The resources to do one likely are not transferrable to the other.
It's weird that people think we can't do two or even three things at the same time isn't it?
> If it's about preserving the ecosystems we already have
If it went extinct then likely its ecosystem is already destroyed, so bringing it back won't do much good in itself, cause where would it thrive?
Climate changes and populations are not equally spread
You can pass off practically any attempt to control reality as an “exercise in ego”. There’s very little harm to be done and very much to learn when it’s done at a small scale. I’d be more cautious with mass mammoth deployments, though.
That said, in this particular instance, they should have started with horses and painted some stripes for a roughly equivalent result.
The immediate question that comes to mind for me is where would they live? Usually if they die off it's because they lost their habitat to some destructive force. Their evolutionary advantage or balance is gone. So even if they were the original animal brought back from extinction, what's to keep them from dying out again.
Like a lot of mega-fauna a likely cause is humans wiped them out, not that their habitat does not exist. Mammoths only became complete extinct a few thousand years ago.
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.
> to some destructive force.
If that destructive force was humans then there is a possibility at least for change ( cf the rebounding of the whale population post hunting ban ) - however in this case I'd agree that in terms of needing a think woolly coat - probably not a good time to bring something like that back.
Why parts of the earth are covered in snow and ice and will still be at 2 degrees hotter.
Places like the Russian tundra are heating up more than 2 degrees - 2 degrees is an average. For reasons beyond my expertise it appears places like the near artic are seeing the biggest effects - much much bigger than 2 degrees.
See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/un-confirms-hottes...
Even if they heat up 8c you are dealing with an average temp of -40 to -16
The poodle doesn't shed as much as other breeds, thus I can have a dog while being also allergic to dogs.
Exactly - it's all about maintaining a diverse gene pool across the whole of the tree of life, rather than focussing on particular things like a hairy elephant ( mammoths are 99% similar to current elephants at the genome level ).
There is no point in bringing back a mammoth when the environment it would require to thrive doesn't really exist anymore - particularly with the rapid warming of the Russian tundra.
However sometimes you do need high profile mascots in order to get the funds/build broad support for, the more mundane work. It's a balance.
No one else wants to eat it? (I want to eat it)
It might be a way to reverse the biodiversity loss caused by humans. Biodiversity is important for various reasons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Role_and_benefits...).
Selectively breeding in a small population for specific traits that happen to have been shared by an extinct species seems like an odd way to pursue biodiversity.
Isn’t that just artificially creating new diversity?
As I understand it, the damage done by inbreeding would outweigh the benefits of selecting for new externally-visible traits not present in the mainline population.
Poodles were bread to be cold water hunting dogs. That’s why the traditional cut has large poofs around joints. Over time smaller breeds of poodle were bred for companionship. Neither of these purposes are some sort of frivolous waste.
A good reason to bring back extinct animals is furthering our understanding of biological life and animal genetics. There are other justifications such as carbon fixing, improving of the ecology in thawing tundra regions, etc but those are bonuses to the primary reason I listed. Science, basic science, is the foundation upon which all applied science is built. That is its own justification. Not every act must have a practical and monetizable outcome in the immediate present.
> Neither of these purposes are some sort of frivolous waste
It is a huge frivolous waste! Dogs produce CO2, they eat tons of meat, they pollute environment and kill wild life!
And there are negative side effects to other people. Lack of sleep from constant barking, dog attacks, not being able to walk or cycle outside, stepping into dog shit, parasites spread from dog excrements...
Saying there is "no waste", just means dog owners do not have to pay negative expenses associated with their animal upkeep. They outsource all bad stuff to society!
When Jon Stewart was on the Late Show talking about the possibility of a covid lab leak [1], he gave a quip along the lines of “science says ‘why did curiosity kill the cat? let’s kill 10,000 cats and find out.’” and that if science can do it, it will do it, and it’s uncommon for people to ask “should we be doing this?” before it’s too late. I think that ego and scientific urge to understand are sometimes hard to distinguish because they sometimes lead to similar outcomes.
The description reminds me of the criticisms of panda breeding, where more pandas have been removed from the wild than released into it, and zoos have injured or killed pandas trying to get them to breed. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/15/world/asia/pa...
Like the space program; while it is an ego excercise the journey created a ton of useful tech.
Not that I don't think they can figure out how to fund mundane stuff, politics (as we just saw in america) isn't about facts, figures, and boring reality; it's about energizing people to get off their ass and do something.
The last part, “because it will make money”, is entirely a valid reason to de-extinct animals that once already attracted human interest, but were lost due do it unfortunately. It’s entirely the premise of Jurassic park. People already spend money on safaris, so the premise is not far fetched.
One can argue that there’d be perverse incentives that would arise from this model.
> because we can and because it will look cool
Well, yes. That's science at its best :).
See also: my favorite moment from 12 Moneys TV show:
> I'd ask the same question here: why try to bring back a species we already killed off?
Maybe the people working on it think it's interesting.
Hey, what's with this poodle slander? The poodle was created hundreds of years ago as a working water dog.
Yes, I've learned that from several other commenters. It was a badly informed throwaway line—s/poodle/bulldog/.
Babylon AD comes to mind, which depicted this weird tendency to hold onto past animals.
> why try to bring back a species we already killed off?
To observe and study them, for one. Also, to see if we can (and learn how to and how not).
> same impulse that led to the poodle
What’s wrong with poodles (or domesticated dogs in general)?
(You could have said French bulldog. But you chose a very intelligent, hypoallergenic breed with few health issues compared to other pure breeds.)
I'm sure OP just threw out poodle as a reference to all inbred (purebred) dogs. I have actually had this on my mind a lot lately, and I was telling my wife about how the wild dogs I've had experience with in the Middle East and Africa seemed so much stronger and capable than pretty much any dog in the west, probably because there is still some survival-of-the-fittest going on there.
I used to have an AKC golden retriever that died of osteosarcoma at 14, and had a non-functioning pancreas since he was about 2, which meant he had to be supplemented with enzymes his entire life. The eugenics movement in the couple hundred years really has ruined dogs in the western world. There are so few people who breed responsibly that finding them is a huge chore. I'm inferring that what OP meant by "same impulse that led to the poodle" is this impulse that created all these genetic monstrosities. People need to let go of the "pure bred" idea in my opinion.
AKC golden retrievers are very badly inbred (they are 27.3% inbred, according to the raw data from this study: https://cgejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40575...) — two random "unrelated" golden retrievers are more closely related to each other than human siblings are — and they are prone to serious health problems, especially cancer. It is not a breed I would ever recommend due to these issues, especially from AKC lines — which are bred for competition and therefore have a very limited stud pool.
But that doesn't mean all dog breeds are equally inbred and equally prone to health problems.
Poodles are in MUCH better shape than golden retrievers.
Golden retrievers are twice as inbred as poodles. And unlike golden retrievers, poodles have not been bred toward an unhealthy type; they have a slim, primitive body shape and a non-brachycephalic head shape that is associated with good health and long lifespan in dogs.
If I were seeking an example of a pointless, harmful breeding program in dogs, I would not have chosen poodles. There are endless other breeds (pugs, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, etc.) that have been wrecked by thoughtless breeding practices.
>hypoallergenic breed
There's no such thing - certain breeds being "hypoallergenic" is a straight up lie that was made up by breeders to sell dogs.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-67491201380-2/fullt...
I wouldnt be so conclusive. I'm open to the idea that hypoallergenic branding is garbage, but non-shedding certainly is a phenotype, which can have an impact independent of allergens in hair samples.
It is also worth nothing that the cited study showed 4-5 orders of magnitude difference between allergen samples from different animals (0.1 to 1000 ug/g). The results just didn't group well across breeds. IF someone showed me this data at work, I would say they are either failing to isolate causes of variability or have a shitty measurement system.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(12)00793-2/ful...
I would bet to differ here. I've got pretty strong allergies to dogs, i couldn't even stay a night at a girlfriends house without medicating myself to sleep, waking up with a crusty throat, red eyes, and a blocked nose for days straight. But i grew up with a dog who would only ever give my nose a slight itch if i rubbed my face on him for a bit.
The difference? Breed. She had an Australian shepherd (i think), large and shredded a ton absolutely all the time. There were drifts of hair on every corner in the house if she didn't vacuum for a week. We had a havanese poodle mix, small guy, barely shed at all. So sure, if you take the absolute most extreme position possible that hypo means completely no allergens whatsoever at all, then it doesn't exist. But in reality i can live with one dog and can't with another, that's the only definition of hypoallergenic that actually matters to people
> To observe and study them, for one. Also, to see if we can (and learn how to and how not).
The thing is that they are not actually bringing a species back. Rather, they are creating something that superficially resembles an extinct species based on an equally superficial set of selection criteria. Genetically speaking their "quagga" is still going to be much, much closer to the population of zebras from which it was bred, compared to actual quaggas. So whatever we learn from those "quaggas" is unlikely to be transferable to the historical quagga
I don't have a problem with poodles, but breeding them wasn't a conservation effort. Not everything we do needs to be, but I'm concerned that programs like this one suck air from programs that could actually make progress towards real conservation.
If they framed it as a poodle-breeding effort I would be unconcerned.
Do you really think bringing in the types that find reviving extinct animals 'sucks the air' from conservation efforts? It gives an interesting visual story that protecting a rodent species in the middle of nowhere can't.
> What’s wrong with poodles
Poodles have similar issues to French Bulldogs because they have a genetic bottleneck as well.
> To observe and study them, for one. Also, to see if we can (and learn how to and how not).
I can understand the reasoning of trying it for the sake of trying (ethical considerations aside), but I'm not sure if an extinct species that is resurrected via some form of cloning would even be a representative sample to observe actual behavior.
> Poodles have similar issues to French Bulldogs because they have a genetic bottleneck as well
Source?
I thought small and toy breeds make up most of the problematic breeds. Standard poodles’ hip dysplasia, like retrievers’, is mostly a product of early spaying and neutering leading to deformed hips. It’s environmental, in other words, not genetic.
> not sure if an extinct species that is resurrected via some form of cloning would even be a representative sample to observe actual behavior
It would be a guide into what behavioural factors in modern elephants were evolved versus learned. Obviously not pristinely. But it’s another data point.
> Source?
https://cgejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40575...
> It would be a guide into what behavioural factors in modern elephants were evolved versus learned. Obviously not pristinely. But it’s another data point.
But couldn't you do the same thing with an RCT?
> couldn't you do the same thing with an RCT?
Maybe, maybe not.
You certainly wouldn’t refine your genetic and artificial gestation techniques that way.
Fair point.
All breeds have breed-specific issues, but saying that Poodles have similar issues to brachycephalic breeds is just silly, those are different orders of magnitude of suffering.
We can also prep them up with good times economy money in some reservation and then have them poached off when bad times roll around.
The question of 'Why bring back extinct species?' is fundamentally the same as 'Why save species from extinction?'. It's unspoken but seems to be widely understood that biodiversity and preventing its permanent loss has inherent value. It sometimes has economic or ecological value too, or the potential in the future, but even when that's not the case most would agree we should aim to minimize extinction of other animals - if for no other reason than it being easier to drive a species to extinction than revive any of the billions of extinct species out there. (at least for now)
It's curious that the response to bringing back mammoths and less-stripey-zebras is so lukewarm when there's very little of the same criticism directed at efforts to save obscure species that are in decline. Say it was discovered that a small herd of quagga had survived since we thought they died out in 1883, but without human intervention they will soon due to habitat loss. Imagine: "Why would we want to save them? The world is inhospitable to them now, their population declined for a reason. They have no use to us, and their niche isn't one that couldn't be filled by living species that we could import. To keep them from going extinct would be a cruel and irrational act of ego."
Seriously. This can be visual, stunning, imagination engaging possible success that can be leveraged for more support for conservation. You won't build that kind of awareness with obscure rodents, that's just not how human civilization is wired to direct it's energy/attention.
Should this logic also apply to human beings?
Some are more ‘visual, stunning, imagination engaging’ than others…
It probably shouldn't. But in reality it does. Most spokespeople are above the human beauty/engaging norm.
I don't think it is fundamentally the same question. If someone was about to throw a brick through a window I would say "Hey! Don't do that". But I wouldn't walk past a smashed window and think to myself "Better go fix that window".
Separate to that I also think that the question of bringing back a species like the Quagga is very different to bringing back the Mammoths. The Quagga went extinct recently and directly because of our hunting them. If we breed new ones, they'll likely fit into the ecosystem as it is today and may even thrive. Mammoths went extinct an extremely long time ago, the environment is totally different to when they were alive, we have no idea how they would impact the ecosystem today. Maybe they'd be totally unfit and would only exist as pets, or maybe they'd fit in great and drive some other animal or plant to extinction as their population explodes as an invasive species.
The question of "Why bring back extinct species" is the same as "Why not bring some new different species into Australia"
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 every copy of a film was slowly being erased from the records, you'd rather preserve copies of the film than have the director's cousin remake it based on some pictures and your grandpa's diaries. you can obviously do both, but option 1 is clearly going to be more popular
any number of analogies are applicable: breeding extant animals to resemble extinct ones based on what some self-appointed human reckons they were like is not comparable to preservation.
it's nostalgia, it is ego, it's a vanity project, essentially. no surprise it was inspired by the Nazis
If your article has a question mark in the title, and you work for wapo, you haven't done your job as a journalist.
What if they work for the wsj?
> Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker
Haha, no.
The real answer at the end of the article is, "Maybe, we don't know yet, but we will soon."
> Some of the criticism of the Quagga Project could be put to rest next year. That’s when Annelin Molotsi, a molecular biologist working on the project, plans to sequence the genome of the re-bred quaggas.
> “I think it will answer a lot of questions,” Molotsi said.
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