Woolly Mammoth Clones: Arriving Soon

[PinkiePyro]

I can almost hear Jeff Goldblum rambling about natural selection and chaos theory.

Uh, Life, uh, finds a, uh, way.

OT: So will we get Ice Age Park? If so, I'm in.

*yawn* this is old news NatGeo covered this months ago, and kenbo apparently you are not aware of the fact many beleve our early ancestors drove them to extinction

and according to NatGeo the mammoths if they succeed are planned to go to a zoo in japan

 

[TheSYLOH]

With all the Jurassic Park references going around.
I think its worth pointing out that these won't be mammoths, they'll just be theme park monsters that look like mammoths.
A bio-mechanical entertainment system if you will.

Considering I'll pay $10+ to see an electro mechanical entertainment system throw photons at a wall.
I think I'd pay $40+ to see these creatures.
Even more if they include some of those spiffy transgenic glow in the dark cats!

Because what we're creating is something new, it's no more unethical then the creation of those aforementioned transgenic animals.
Granted there are legitimate arguments regarding animal rights; almost all of which I disagree with, but recognize their validity.

As for "Nature selecting these animals to die", this betrays an anthropomorphism of an impersonal process.
Sort of like saying "Nature intended that San Francisco be hit by an earthquake".
Even if this was a case of nature making a conscious choice.... who cares?
Nature selects millions of people to die every year from disease, but we do not see an ethical dilemma in saaaaay driving the polio virus into extinction and making sure children don't meet their evolutionary fate. Hell the only dilemma is that we can't do more of both.

 

[Bke]

By surviving you survive. Rights don't come into it. I don't need to have permission to keep breathing, I merely need to keep breathing.

There is no such thing as a implicit right to survive. Nothing has an implicit right to survive, not even the living, so you can't use the lack of right to survive as an argument to not clone or re-engineer an extinct animal.

You can claim it is unethical to bring an animal or thing into a world that will is inhospitable to it. Inhospitably simply being whatever reasons for their demise. But that is a different argument on ethics...

Well that's the thing isn't it? the animal is extinct and by bringing it back we have to invoke the ethical argument. That's what I was getting at. And don't forget this was only one part of my argument, I did express converse sentiments. Or did no one read the rest of my post?

That sounds so arbitrary. Who made up that rule?

What I was getting at with this whole thing is that when a species is killed off it's usually for a good reason. When you bring back "obsolete" biological factors into the environment you're not actually helping the progress of evolution. And usually the only reason I can see we would bring something back is because we feel bad that its gone... now while our compassion does have to factor in I do feel its detrimental to the aforementioned progress.

Consequently from my standpoint, unless we found something useful that the animal in question provides, we can't really justify bringing it back. And even then it's tenuous as most of the time our interference will ensure that whatever we resurrect will get a decent foothold, which will, in turn, deny the ecological niche the resurrected animal occupies to other creatures that might come to occupy it through natural evolution.

Again I'm all for doing this, really I chastised someone for saying we shouldn't if you read back. Just remember that once we do it we will need to decide where we draw the line. Resurrecting every animal whose DNA we get our mitts on might not be the best idea.

 

[ToxicPiranah]

I wish this was a stunt rather than an attempt to reintroduce a species. Creating a super-rare breeds zoo would be fine, you could create tourism and jobs it would allow you to fund other species perhaps. But to reintroduce an extinct species into the wild without a proper study of whether it is suitable for reintroduction would be as irresponsible allowing a species to go extinct.

Just take the reintroduction of the sea eagle into Scotland. Yes it has been a success, if you listen to conservationists and the press. However I have family friends who are crofters in the highlands and they will tell you an absolutely different story, the sea eagles are a dangerous pest now that have caused many crofters to loose so many lambs and sheep that they have had to move away ruining generations of family heritage. This is because the salmon stocks that make up the primary food source for the sea eagle no longer exist in the rivers naturally, they're all salmon farms. Therefore the eagles have turned to other sources of food: The sheep and lambs. Conservationists will tell you that a sea eagle won't do this but I have see evidence of a sheep with its side slashed to ribbons by a sea eagles talons when the sheep was protecting its lamb. Crofters have seen eagles attacking their stock, the conservationists have asked for picture/video proof but that's because they seek to avoid the issue rather than admit they may have made a mistake. Also catching a sea eagle close enough to identify it properly is rather difficult when your a crofter and don't have access to high end zoom lenses.

A case where reintroduction has worked however is the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone park, this worked because the wolves main source of food: elk had reached population numbers that were wrecking the ecosystem.

A passenger pigeon maybe OK but will it cause a boom of predators that will then whittle down other species they use as a food source? The pigeon has been extinct for over a 100 years now so the ecosystem balance has adapted to not having it in.

"We're bringing back the mammoth to restore the steppe in the Arctic. One or two mammoths is not a success. 100,000 mammoths is a success."

What predators exist to prevent over population? The polar bear may be big but do you really see it bringing down a mammoth? Does that mean we then need to introduce a saber tooth tiger hybrid? What happens if one of those gets loose in a human population center? (it will happen as people will want to keep one for it's exotic nature and rarity and they will get out). This is wear a publicity stunt would be fine in my eyes, a reintroduction of multiple species that have been extinct for thousands of years is irresponsible as they could get.

 

[TheSYLOH]

What I was getting at with this whole thing is that when a species is killed off it's usually for a good reason. When you bring back "obsolete" biological factors into the environment you're not actually helping the progress of evolution. And usually the only reason I can see we would bring something back is because we feel bad that its gone... now while our compassion does have to factor in I do feel its detrimental to the aforementioned progress.

Consequently from my standpoint, unless we found something useful that the animal in question provides, we can't really justify bringing it back. And even then it's tenuous as most of the time our interference will ensure that whatever we resurrect will get a decent foothold, which will, in turn, deny the ecological niche the resurrected animal occupies to other creatures that might come to occupy it through natural evolution.

Again I'm all for doing this, really I chastised someone for saying we shouldn't if you read back. Just remember that once we do it we will need to decide where we draw the line. Resurrecting every animal whose DNA we get our mitts on might not be the best idea.

Ok so bringing back the mammoth is not "helping" evolution?
You know whats not helping evolution?
Saving those critically endangered animals.
After all those tigers are obviously not necessary, their so few that they must have a negligible impact.
Pharmacological everything they do is no better than placebo, why are we preserving them?
Why not resume hunting and finish the job?
After all all those insects we regularly try to kill have evolved marvelous resistance methods! Clearly attempting to wipe out everything is the best course.


Now reintroducing the mammoth is clearly a bad idea. Invasive species always are.
But why not have a few thousand of them distributed over various zoos?

 

[loa]

Oh dear.
Some day we'll succeed with this and completely fuck up one or 2 ecosystems.

 

[Starik20X6]

At this point, I'll take anything better than an elephant covered in carpet samples.

So will we get Ice Age Park? If so, I'm in.

That comes after we clone Sabre-tooth cats and Neanderthals...!

 

[Nokturos]

Our ancestors wiped out the mammoth species. I think they did so for a reason, and bringing back this cruel, oppressive breed of super-elephant will only spell doom for all of humanity.

 

[Sarge034]

Maybe it's because I'm not a scientist, but isn't the simple solution to the problem of putting more mammoth into the hybrid just doing the process over again with the mammoth DNA and the new hybrid's eggs, and then repeating until you're satisfied?

That's not how genetics work. Every time you fertilize an egg there is a percent probability that one characteristic will be chosen. An elephant trait could be dominant while a trait all mammoths had could be recessive. No amount of added mammoth DNA, or RNA, will ever bring that recessive trait out.

Examples

Dominant traits are denoted by capital letters
Recessive traits are denoted by lower case letters
Elephant traits are denoted with "a"
Mammoth traits are denoted with "b"

>Pure Bb & Bb / 75% chance of dominant trait & 25% chance of recessive trait

BB Bb
bB bb

>50/50 splice Aa & Bb / 50% chance of genetic anomaly (two different dominant or recessive genes together), 25% chance elephant dominant, and 25% chance of mammoth dominant

AB Ab
aB ab

>50/50 splice all dominate elephant AA & Bb / 50% chance genetic anomaly & 50% chance elephant dominant

AB Ab
AB Ab

>50/50 splice all dominate elephant & all recessive mammoth AA & bb / 100% chance elephant dominate

Ab Ab
Ab Ab

>worst case scenario- 50/50 split all dominate (or recessive aa & bb) AA & BB / 100% chance genetic anomaly

AB AB
AB AB

OT- I'm all for genetic modification, cloning, genomic sequencing, and genetic R&D in general but what would the consciences be if we re-introduced an extinct animal into an ecosystem that has long forgotten their existence? This particular application of the science is concerning to me.

 

[Spacewolf]

Maybe it's because I'm not a scientist, but isn't the simple solution to the problem of putting more mammoth into the hybrid just doing the process over again with the mammoth DNA and the new hybrid's eggs, and then repeating until you're satisfied?

That's not how genetics work. Every time you fertilize an egg there is a percent probability that one characteristic will be chosen. An elephant trait could be dominant while a trait all mammoths had could be recessive. No amount of added mammoth DNA, or RNA, will ever bring that recessive trait out.

Just going to quote you since it's the most relevant but doesn't the egg donor usually have their genetic material removed from the egg and replaced by whatever is meant to replace it? So while the egg would be from an Asian elephant the genetic code that dictates the babies chromosomes would all be mammoth.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

What I was getting at with this whole thing is that when a species is killed off it's usually for a good reason. When you bring back "obsolete" biological factors into the environment you're not actually helping the progress of evolution. And usually the only reason I can see we would bring something back is because we feel bad that its gone... now while our compassion does have to factor in I do feel its detrimental to the aforementioned progress.

Consequently from my standpoint, unless we found something useful that the animal in question provides, we can't really justify bringing it back. And even then it's tenuous as most of the time our interference will ensure that whatever we resurrect will get a decent foothold, which will, in turn, deny the ecological niche the resurrected animal occupies to other creatures that might come to occupy it through natural evolution.

Again I'm all for doing this, really I chastised someone for saying we shouldn't if you read back. Just remember that once we do it we will need to decide where we draw the line. Resurrecting every animal whose DNA we get our mitts on might not be the best idea.

Ok so bringing back the mammoth is not "helping" evolution?
You know whats not helping evolution?
Saving those critically endangered animals.
After all those tigers are obviously not necessary, their so few that they must have a negligible impact.
Pharmacological everything they do is no better than placebo, why are we preserving them?
Why not resume hunting and finish the job?
After all all those insects we regularly try to kill have evolved marvelous resistance methods! Clearly attempting to wipe out everything is the best course.


Now reintroducing the mammoth is clearly a bad idea. Invasive species always are.
But why not have a few thousand of them distributed over various zoos?

thank you, I was trying to sum up a response to Bke, that'll do it I think.
I really don't think the way humans destroy eco-systems and wipe animals out can really be called natural selection

 

[Plasticaprinae]

God, I do not hope they plan to put this species in the wild. The world has been fine without then for millions of years. It would be fine to have a park with them in it, but just plopping them in the wild and expecting everything to be nice is not how things go. Polar bears don't have a clue what to do with Mammoths anymore. And the mammoths wont magically know how to survive in a changed earth. All of this seems to be hogwash. And how about they help animals that are becoming endangered instead?

 

[RyQ_TMC]

Passenger pigeons on the other hand would still be alive and well today if not for human interference, so I'm all for bringing them back. It's amazing reading accounts about them from settlers. They were once so numerous that flights of them would blot out the sun, sometimes for hours. The noise produced was deafening, and when they roosted branches would sometimes break under their collective weight. It's astounding and more than a little depressing that it was forced to extinction in such a short span of time, and I feel it only right that we try to bring them back to make amends for such wanton exploitation and destruction.

The problem with bringing back the passenger pigeon is that it needed those massive numbers to even survive as a species. By the time it was hunted down to a few million individuals, measures were actually put in place to prevent all the overexploitation of the species, but by then, it was too late. They could only survive as those massive, billion-strong flocks. So if you even manage to make a population of several hundred individuals (might already be tricky to keep sufficient genetic variability) it won't be enough to set up a wild population, very likely not even enough to study behavioural patterns.

I got the thing about the numbers from a popular science book by David Quammen called Song of the Dodo. The broader argument here is that very few species, usually apex predators, can be "brought back" by saving a small number of individuals. Mauritius kestrel was a big success. The wisent maybe even bigger. But it might be too late for the kakapo.

In general, I'm skeptical about those "bring back an extinct species" projects. There's a pretty well publicized initiative in Europe (the Netherlands and Spain in particular) which aims to breed back the aurochs. But assuming we manage to do it... Where do we stablish those wild populations? Will a genetically-aurochs calf living among domestic cows revert to "proper" behavour simply because of the genetic code?

My very broad point is: in most instances, you can't bring a single species back. You need a whole ecosystem. Red deer wreak havoc on the foliage of predator-free Scotland. And to an extent, many ecosystems which were damaged over the past few thousand years survived in a state sufficient to revive them through species management. I'm a big proponent of the rewilding initiatives which aim at restoring ecosystems to a state from a few hundred years back. There is admittedly some romanticism in that and I also believe that a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem is a value in and of itself. But the ecosystem in which the woolly mammoth lived was drastically different to anything we have in the modern era. Elephants, rhinos, sabertooth tigers and so on were all part of that ecosystem, and North America doesn't have all those other species either. At best this initiative is a possible curiosity, with MAYBE some potential for behavioural research.

And I don't think "we drove them to extinction, we should bring them back" is a sound argument. Under that logic, the mass culling of the bison was also justifiable, because the species thrived thanks to environment changes brough about by humans (hunting off the megafauna included forest-maintaining species, and their destruction led to the massive spread of the praire), not out of its own miraculous ability to breed into huge herds.

 

[RA92]

... from my standpoint, unless we found something useful that the animal in question provides, we can't really justify bringing it back. And even then it's tenuous as most of the time our interference will ensure that whatever we resurrect will get a decent foothold, which will, in turn, deny the ecological niche the resurrected animal occupies to other creatures that might come to occupy it through natural evolution.

See, that's a good argument I can get behind, as we have already seen what kind of ecological havoc a foreign predator can wreak when brought over by humans, only here it's foreign in terms of chronology instead of geography...

But the one thing you said I disagree with vehemently...

What I was getting at with this whole thing is that when a species is killed off it's usually for a good reason.

No. We have wiped out thousands of species and upset countless ecologies for no bloody good reason. Like settlers bringing in domestic cats and dogs in new continents, which started predating upon local fauna. And wiping out species like birds can disrupt the spread of flora, etc. Human-caused extinctions have happened largely because of our population growth destroying habitats. We are reducing biodiversity and genetic diversity, and I hardly think the spirit of natural selection applies to these extinctions.

 

[Megalodon]

But the ecosystem in which the woolly mammoth lived was drastically different to anything we have in the modern era. Elephants, rhinos, sabertooth tigers and so on were all part of that ecosystem, and North America doesn't have all those other species either.

So? They're not planning on putting the Mammoths in North America.

We're bringing back the mammoth to restore the steppe in the Arctic.

Not saying you're necessarily wrong in principle, but that does kind of make it look like you didn't read the article thoroughly.

OT: I approve of this. We need more crazy awesome future science.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

So? They're not planning on putting the Mammoths in North America.

We're bringing back the mammoth to restore the steppe in the Arctic.

Not saying you're necessarily wrong in principle, but that does kind of make it look like you didn't read the article thoroughly.

1) "The Arctic" includes the northern part of NA, so unless they specifically mean Eurasian part of the Arctic, NA is still right.

2) (this is where I admit my error) Yeah, my post started with the passenger pigeon thing and I kinda kept the continental US in my head throughout when I was writing it, so I forgot about the Arctic.

3) All my reservations about the ecosystem and multiple extinct species which would need to be revived too apply to the Arctic as well.

In general, I consider most of "bring back an extinct species" initiatives to be nothing more than a fancy. We won't be able to recreate their original environment on a scale sufficient to maintain a wild population (and even if we do, what about the wild species which live there now?), and any data we would be able to collect would probably not be worth the cost of such project.

The thylacine was already extinct in mainland Australia due to competition with the dingo by the time sheep farmers arrived and we drove the species to extinction in Tasmania. If we bring it back (as it's another of the revival projects getting more media attention), do we restrict it to Tasmania or bring it back to its full historical range? If we bring the thylacine to mainland Australia, what do we do about the dingo? Do we cull them, or are those 20 thousand years or so sufficient for them to have a right to live in Aus? Should we recreate a placenta-free Australia?

Anyway, that was something of a tangent. My question is: where is the cutoff? What is the point in history we should be aiming for with those "reviving" initiatives? I think rewilding to a point several hundred years ago is reasonable. The climate is similar and those ecosystems are in relatively good shape. Often, it's a question of increasing the amount of protected areas, bringing in some species extinct in a particular area which survived elsewhere and learning to live side-by-side with nature. It takes time and resources, but can be done in a reasonable timeframe. But species extinct for several thousand years? That's juvenile fancy, is what that is. A yearning to see creatures from our picturebooks moving around and making all the sounds.

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

Why splice mammoth DNA with elephant eggs when you can do it with a specific species of frog that can change gender under certain conditions?

Just kidding. This is interesting stuff, though I don't really think our species is smart enough to get any real benefits from bringing back extinct species.

 

[Bke]

Ok so bringing back the mammoth is not "helping" evolution?
You know whats not helping evolution?
Saving those critically endangered animals.
After all those tigers are obviously not necessary, their so few that they must have a negligible impact.
Pharmacological everything they do is no better than placebo, why are we preserving them?
Why not resume hunting and finish the job?
After all all those insects we regularly try to kill have evolved marvelous resistance methods! Clearly attempting to wipe out everything is the best course.


Now reintroducing the mammoth is clearly a bad idea. Invasive species always are.
But why not have a few thousand of them distributed over various zoos?

This is a slippery slope argument. I really don't want to reply to this run on fallacy, but I shall. There is a difference between hunting something to extinction and systematically destroying it, something we do with bacteria and viri.

I don't see how pharmaceuticals are related to this.

And I would agree that if something is going extinct then we must let it, but I did also say that our compassion does play a role in this process, so it is difficult to say what really constitutes evolution in that regard. However I will say that whatever the outcome, whether our compassion or destruction wins out, we must accept the results.

ToxicPiranah conveys what I'm trying to communicate far better than what I have.

However I must explain more what I mean by Human driven natural selection that yourself, Mr Ink 5000 and RA92 bring up.

I'll use RA92 to summarize your argument if that's fine with you?:

No. We have wiped out thousands of species and upset countless ecologies for no bloody good reason. Like settlers bringing in domestic cats and dogs in new continents, which started predating upon local fauna. And wiping out species like birds can disrupt the spread of flora, etc. Human-caused extinctions have happened largely because of our population growth destroying habitats. We are reducing biodiversity and genetic diversity, and I hardly think the spirit of natural selection applies to these extinctions.

Firstly, to clarify what I mean by "good reason", I intended that phrase to convey the idea that the creatures we've come into contact with were unable to adapt to our disruption, so according to the principles of natural selection they became extinct on justifiable grounds.

And secondly we don't like to think it but we are part of the worlds Eco-systems. Usually we base this misconception on the fact that we are sentient and should "know better", however I feel that this intelligence, being naturally evolved, is in fact part of the ecosystem. This intelligence, in its current form, makes us the next challenge nature must face; no different from a meteor or volcanic eruption. It is highly unlikely that we will bring about the end of all life, even with our nuclear weapons and other destructive capabilities, there are things that will still survive; however we probably won't. Self destructive tendencies don't tend to remain in the gene pool for long.

With that said, we straddle an odd position where we can see what we are doing is wrong and harmful to ourselves, and other animals, yet our naturally evolved intelligence is stymied when we don't learn from mistakes; mistakes that cost the existence of whole species. As our intelligence grows and evolves damage is caused, and in the wake of this damage other creatures evolve to fill the gaps we leave behind. This is all part of evolution.

To further draw this comparison out, when a bloom of red algae occurs entire reefs are destroyed. Though we don't fault the algae, it's just part of nature.

Now, to draw this thought to a close: we ourselves must evolve with regards to how our intelligence projects the force it wields. This is because, as has been mentioned, we end up harming ourselves in the long run. Creatures from which we could have learned much are simply lost to the sands of time. But resurrecting these creatures puts in danger those that would come to replace them, and so we would have to decide whether to atone for the destruction of our own evolution, or leave nature to manage itself. I feel in the former situation of atonement we really would be "playing god", which is something I will ill advise for the foreseeable future.

 

[EHKOS]

Maybe it's because I'm not a scientist, but isn't the simple solution to the problem of putting more mammoth into the hybrid just doing the process over again with the mammoth DNA and the new hybrid's eggs, and then repeating until you're satisfied?

I was thinking this too, seeing as how we breed dogs the same way. We made a couple breeds by breeding the ones with the traits we wanted.