Scientists Monkey With Evolution, Produce "Snouted Chicken"

[Treblaine]

Wait, why is one of the genes named sonic hedgehog?

How is killing the eggs "ethical" but letting them hatch not? And compared to what we do to chickens daily...

Why aren't there any pictures?

So many questions...

I studied biochemistry and I can tell you it is a joke name... the worst joke ever, one only a biochemist can find funny and most groan at this one. It's complicated, it has to do with how the cells of an embryo are arranged someone first noted that they looked hedgehog like. The "sonic" variant turns out to be rather important.

I will stay though that (in biochemistry at least) the discoverer can name it pretty much whatever the hell they like and no peer-review board can force him/her to use a more sensible name.

This is all well and good in the lab but it becomes a real problem when a doctor has to explain to a mother carrying child that their foetus has a deformity from a fault in their "Sonic the Hedgehog" gene...

 

[Panzervaughn]

"...Yes, thats a very nice dinosaur, but you were SUPPOSED to be working on making ipods smaller..."

 

[lolmynamewastaken]

awesome. can i keep one?

 

[Verlander]

Because there is so much more room for more species on this planet...

There's a reason there are ethics and legal restrictions on science, because scientists, while very clever in their own unique fields, are NOT very good at the whole big picture thing. I reckon this is pretty cool, but for the sake of common sense I hope this gets shut down, or at least confined to where he is now.

 

[Treblaine]

I think if things like "scientific ethics" are restricting him he should pitch cavemen supersoldiers to North Korea. I don't think they would let anything that mundane stand in their way.

Most of the knowledge at the moment is figuring out how things go wrong, like Cancer, deformity and viruses like HIV.

We're decades away from possibly improving anything at the biochemical level, we struggle to fix things when they go wrong. Yeah, there will always be anabolic steroids like testosterone but they cause your nuts to shrivel up or even get testicular cancer!

And what's the point in making someone 20% stronger? A bullet will make them just as dead just as easily. The main focus is stopping the "dead from bullets" part and a lot of research is going into battlefield survival such as advanced clotting factors and also stem-cells to repair chronic soft-tissue injuries.

Can't grow entire legs back yet.

But they ARE working on it.

 

[oktalist]

"Their ethical inflexibility has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider."

[http://www.moddb.com/mods/project-hdtp/images/greasel]

They only altered embryonic development through mechanical intervention, though; they haven't made any changes to the chickens' genes. So if these snouted chickens could breed, their offspring would be normal chickens. Compare it with antennapedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennapedia] genetically modified flies with legs where their antennae should be.

 

[Treblaine]

Mmm, as excited as I am at the idea of prehistoric species coming alive, there's quite a few issues. The animals could never live in the wild as they would distrupt the 'balanced' ecosystem (as balanced as it can be with humans constantly mucking with it).

The idea of a "balanced" ecosystem is a myth.

Even discounting things like humans and the meteor that probably kileld the dinosaurs 99.9% of all the species that have ever existed are extinct.

Ecosystems are not stable, they are in a near constant state of flux. What is a rainforest on millennia could be a desert the next, then another thousands years and it is grassland then rainforests again.

The idea of eco-systems in "Balance" went out with ideas like "Spaceship earth", the idea that our planet could be managed like the life support systems of a spaceship.

[small](this has been somewhat of a problem in commerce as many economic models have been based on emulating nature and ideas such as natural selection based on the presumption of nature being essentially ordered. I think we've seen since the 2008 crash that the "self regulating" new economy is an illusion)[/small]

And now it has entered quite widespread acceptance in the scientific community that we are living in the anthropocene era and have been so for centuries. Anthropocene means "age of man", up till now we were in the "Heliocene" or "age of sun" such ages are named after the single largest force shaping the earth, it was considered to be the sun and its heating, evaporation of water for rain and all that erosion, etc. Before that it was the ice age, the effect of ice shaping things.

But now it is mankind, human's have left such an enduring mark on every part of nature it is pointless to deny it. We have moved more rock, channelled more rivers and moulded more of the planet in a shorter time than any other force on this planet since the the first cellular life started oxygenating our atmosphere.

Humans should no longer be considered something that can be cordoned off and away from a "perfect and eternal" nature. Human's aren't "mucking things up", nature doesn't have a plan.

 

[Dalek Caan]

Does this mean we can make dinosaus? My inner child is squealing with joy right now...

You will be squealing with terror when they attempt to eat you. "Humans, Om Nom Nom". This is rather interesting though how long until we do this to humans? "Mammoths, Om Nom Nom"

 

[Treblaine]

"Their ethical inflexibility has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider."

[http://www.moddb.com/mods/project-hdtp/images/greasel]

They only altered embryonic development through mechanical intervention, though; they haven't made any changes to the chickens' genes. So if these snouted chickens could breed, their offspring would be normal chickens. Compare it with antennapedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennapedia] genetically modified flies with legs where their antennae should be.

Yeah you can modify the crap out of flies and no body cares. After all they are annoying ugly bastards that eat crap and are just really hard to swat.

But chickens... people get all personal about those. People have banner waving campaigns about chickens being killed for meat for gawd sakes. Names a kids cartoon with a talking fly that is in any way presented in a good light?

A fly has to be considered the lowest form of life, the very phrase:

"he wouldn't hurt a fly"

is an evocative way of saying he wouldn't hurt any living creature, even something as lowly as a fly.

Biochemists love them though, their bodies are very expressive of their genes and have an extremely short breeding cycle, 2 days compared to humans that take 18 years + 9 months at the very least.

 

[King Toasty]

Let's be abundantly clear about this:

He did not regress a chicken to an earlier evolutionary state. I know it's convenient to say that, but he didn't. He stopped the expression of signalling molecules in the center of the chicken's face, which caused the chicken to express features similar to a hypothesized earlier evolutionary state.

Just wanted to make sure we were all clear about that.

Fuck that shit, he's making dinosaurs.

 

[the spud]

Once again the brilliant scientiists are held back from achieving their full potential because of petty "ethics".

 

[Fusionxl]

Let's build him Rapture.

 

[oktalist]

They only altered embryonic development through mechanical intervention, though; they haven't made any changes to the chickens' genes. So if these snouted chickens could breed, their offspring would be normal chickens. Compare it with antennapedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennapedia] genetically modified flies with legs where their antennae should be.

Yeah you can modify the crap out of flies and no body cares. After all they are annoying ugly bastards that eat crap and are just really hard to swat.

But chickens... people get all personal about those.

But there's no technical reason why chicken genes couldn't be modified in a similar way to how other organisms have been. Wasn't there an accusation once that KFC had done such a thing? Ethically there's not really a difference between mechanically influencing embryonic development and modifying genes; the end result is the same: a modified organism. The two approaches probably both have advantages and disadvantages and each would be best suited to different circumstances.

Biochemists love them though, their bodies are very expressive of their genes and have an extremely short breeding cycle, 2 days compared to humans that take 18 years + 9 months at the very least.

Indeed, Drosophila is a classic model organism for geneticists (mad scientists).

 

[novixz]

Isn't their a general rule of thumb that humans shouldn't play God? Not speaking as a religious fanatic,I just kinda see this going in a bad direction.

 

[kidd25]

He wants to create...dinosa- Screw ethics and Jeff Goldblum! Let this man do his job damn it!

you know i think that what the nazi thought when they were experimenting.

 

[kidd25]

Isn't their a general rule of thumb that humans shouldn't play God? Not speaking as a religious fanatic,I just kinda see this going in a bad direction.

don't worry God never mention anything about screwing with DNA so i say we should go full speed ahead, but people were saying that their is some ethics to it, but i haven't fully read the thing.

 

[ShindoL Shill]

I wonder if this could be applied to humans too. Just find a way to de-evolve us back to the "missing link."

For Science!

or we could do that to chimpanzees...
OT: i dont see how de-evolving animals evolved from dinosaurs could be bad. because there wasnt a series of films about a similar situation that went balls up. /sarcasm.
but seriously this is a good situation for evolution. we has some proof, religion!
now, can we evolve humans into super-people yet?

 

[PinochetIsMyBro]

And what's the point in making someone 20% stronger?

For the same reason as everything else - FOR SCIENCE

 

[Alar]

He wants to create...dinosa- Screw ethics and Jeff Goldblum! Let this man do his job damn it!

you know i think that what the nazi thought when they were experimenting.

I'm fairly certain the Nazis were thinking, "Hey, let's create a superior being that can replace all the people we hate and are in the process of torturing and killing!"

You're a little bit off there, mate.

 

[winter2]

Give me a call once you have made a dragon.