Is there space in a creature’s DNA to consider the prospect of no next?
March 30, 2017 10:35 AM Subscribe
The Sense of an Endling is an essay on the extinction of species and the work toward de-extinction and "making new beasts to tread on the bones of what are not quite their ancestors" excerpted from Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello.
It's more than just genes. Restoring the Passenger Pigeon is probably a non-starter. They simply wouldn't breed unless they were in gigantic flock of other Passenger Pigeons - that was simply a part of what they were. Charles O. Whitman tried for years to figure out a way to breed the small flock of survivors he kept at the University of Chicago until he was down to one pigeon and sent Martha to the Cincinnati Zoo.
So either somebody figures out how to clone millions of Passenger Pigeons all at once, or someone revives their genes by cross-breeding them with another species, fundamentally changing their behavior so that they breed, and fundamentally changing what a Passenger Pigeon is.
posted by lagomorphius at 12:21 PM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]
So either somebody figures out how to clone millions of Passenger Pigeons all at once, or someone revives their genes by cross-breeding them with another species, fundamentally changing their behavior so that they breed, and fundamentally changing what a Passenger Pigeon is.
posted by lagomorphius at 12:21 PM on March 30, 2017 [1 favorite]
Heartbreaking.
I hope some of them manage the de-extinction It makes me shudder to think I may one day see some Russian girl on YouTube playing with her new thylacine pup though.
posted by BoscosMom at 12:53 PM on March 30, 2017
I hope some of them manage the de-extinction It makes me shudder to think I may one day see some Russian girl on YouTube playing with her new thylacine pup though.
posted by BoscosMom at 12:53 PM on March 30, 2017
I misread the title and thought this was about the Julian Barnes novel and thought we had very, very different takes on it for a second.
posted by Gymnopedist at 4:07 PM on March 30, 2017
posted by Gymnopedist at 4:07 PM on March 30, 2017
Biologist here. I am not an ecologist, I am not your ecologist, and I am a PhD student, so take this with an appropriately sized grain of salt.
Here is a pretty good Discover Magazine blog post on the subject.
The perceived benefits are mostly human-centric and otherwise only applicable to the earth in the abstract or at least at the ecosystem level. The cons are much more animal-centered and applicable to smaller levels of organization. I think this reveals, in part, that proponents of de-extinction either (at best) have not given adequate thought to either their own fundamental hierarchy of motivations for this or done things like reviewed the literature on species reintroduction, which is not uniformly full of successes or (at worst) genuinely don't give a damn about the animals they want to de-extinct, they just want to play around without giving thought to ethical considerations, and I say this as someone whose general frame of mind is strongly opposed to the sort of person who screams about science playing (insert deity here) and upending civilization with its discoveries and inventions like GMOs and vaccines and cell phones and automation and stuff.
Personally, I am fundamentally opposed to this for the species that most people would like to de-extinct, which are generally charismatic mammalian megafauna - woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, thylacines, and others. Why? They're mammals, and as such they're creatures with complex brains, social structures, and some sort of emotional life. Odds are you're probably familiar to some degree with elephant social lives, for example, just from what you've heard in passing; they're not all that different from ours in a ton of fundamental ways. What happens when a woolly mammoth figures out it's not just an ugly elephant, or if it's rejected by its elephant mother? What happens when you can't scrounge up enough money or elephants to generate an adequate founder population? What happens when you've got a bunch of emotionally-damaged woolly mammoths trying to do woolly mammoth things?
On the other hand, if you want to de-extinct some sort of soil nematode with only a few hundred neurons in its nervous system a la Caenorhabditis elegans, it's basically non-conscious and all you have to consider is the ecological impact. Nobody realistically cares about the emotional life of a roundworm.
posted by actionpotential at 7:20 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]
Here is a pretty good Discover Magazine blog post on the subject.
The perceived benefits are mostly human-centric and otherwise only applicable to the earth in the abstract or at least at the ecosystem level. The cons are much more animal-centered and applicable to smaller levels of organization. I think this reveals, in part, that proponents of de-extinction either (at best) have not given adequate thought to either their own fundamental hierarchy of motivations for this or done things like reviewed the literature on species reintroduction, which is not uniformly full of successes or (at worst) genuinely don't give a damn about the animals they want to de-extinct, they just want to play around without giving thought to ethical considerations, and I say this as someone whose general frame of mind is strongly opposed to the sort of person who screams about science playing (insert deity here) and upending civilization with its discoveries and inventions like GMOs and vaccines and cell phones and automation and stuff.
Personally, I am fundamentally opposed to this for the species that most people would like to de-extinct, which are generally charismatic mammalian megafauna - woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, thylacines, and others. Why? They're mammals, and as such they're creatures with complex brains, social structures, and some sort of emotional life. Odds are you're probably familiar to some degree with elephant social lives, for example, just from what you've heard in passing; they're not all that different from ours in a ton of fundamental ways. What happens when a woolly mammoth figures out it's not just an ugly elephant, or if it's rejected by its elephant mother? What happens when you can't scrounge up enough money or elephants to generate an adequate founder population? What happens when you've got a bunch of emotionally-damaged woolly mammoths trying to do woolly mammoth things?
On the other hand, if you want to de-extinct some sort of soil nematode with only a few hundred neurons in its nervous system a la Caenorhabditis elegans, it's basically non-conscious and all you have to consider is the ecological impact. Nobody realistically cares about the emotional life of a roundworm.
posted by actionpotential at 7:20 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]
So either somebody figures out how to clone millions of Passenger Pigeons all at once, or someone revives their genes by cross-breeding them with another species, fundamentally changing their behavior so that they breed, and fundamentally changing what a Passenger Pigeon is.
Just give them parthenogenesis. I see no way that can go horribly wrong.
posted by happyroach at 11:06 PM on March 31, 2017
Just give them parthenogenesis. I see no way that can go horribly wrong.
posted by happyroach at 11:06 PM on March 31, 2017
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posted by Joe in Australia at 11:57 AM on March 30, 2017