De-extinction

[Tobe404]

I was just going off a Doco I saw recently featuring Bryan Fry - About Megelania - Monsters Resurrected Giant Lizard.

 

[Sheldoncooper]

Believed to be egg layers however we're talking about an animal that is probably a minimum of 20 times the body mass of a lacie or komodo. Surely if your putting that DNA inside a lacie the egg couldn't survive the time needed to develop

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[Imported_tuatara]

i completely forgot it was an egg! bahaha, well it wouldn't be done the same as mammoths then.

 

[Flaviemys purvisi]

Bring back Madagascar's Elephant bird.

 

[Imported_tuatara]

so basically smaller terror bird? moa would be cool tho

 

[pinefamily]

Two word answer why not : Jurassic Park.

 

[Foozil]

Jurassic Park is impossible

 

[pinefamily]

What they did in the movie with DNA is exactly the same as what they are doing with the mammoth and the thylacine. My point is look how that turned out. Scientists are only doing it because they can, and want the glory of being the first. Wait and see, they will clone mammoths, then breed them for food production.

Over-population of humans will destroy this planet. Already food production is stretched, drinking water is scarce for large parts of the world, and pollution of various kinds is killing ecosystems.

 

[Foozil]

Only problem is there is no dinosaur DNA left (apart from birds)... I agree with you, most of them would be doing it for glory, but there are some scientific values in de-extinction-ing prehistoric animals (if it were possible)

 

[pinefamily]

By all means recreate the DNA for study and research, but there is no scientific benefit in recreating the actual animal. The negatives have been clearly pointed out above on this thread. It's a slippery slope to say they will do just one, in a controlled environment. First the mammoth, then what next? I seem to recall reading they had the DNA of the sabretooth tiger too.
Let's worry about what we've already got, and make sure they don't become extinct.

 

[Imported_tuatara]

the reason the passenger pigeon is being revived is to help the oaks and such where it traditionally lived, as the passenger pigeon and the trees worked together, and currently the forests are just getting smaller and smaller, so no, not everything is for glory, a lot is though.

 

[Foozil]

Imported Tuatara is right. A lot of our native dasyurids that have gone extinct in the past few hundred years were helping with the germination of seeds and keeping insect populations down, and now those ecosystems are falling apart.

 

[Stompsy]

Im probably way off, but when you clone an animal, doesn’t it begin its life with any imperfections from the DNA it was created from? And also, doesn’t it start it’s life from the age of said DNA? (Or the age of the animal it was extracted from)

I don’t see how this would be beneficial in any way. And if they did recreate enough of a species, how far would the genetics stretch for any beneficial breeding program anyway?

I think we should start focusing a lot more of our energies on fixing what we have broken, rather than bringing more life into a planet we are literally destroying.

 

[pinefamily]

Agree, Stompsy. Like saving the world's bee populations.

 

[Imported_tuatara]

no, as they're making an embryo, the only reason it's really called cloning is that they have to use the dna of the mammoths that were frozen, and no, they won't only use the mammal dna so it should be fine.
[doublepost=1514934338,1514934243][/doublepost]but yes, i think we should focus on current events rather than reviving/cloning mammoths, but i see it as a bit selfish to expect everyone to only work on current problems.

 

[Foozil]

I don't see why if we had the option to get those extinct species back we wouldn't? Sure, we are still killing other species, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still try to bring back others.

And yeah I do agree that we should only focus on recently extinct animals if we were to de-extinct animals

 

[pinefamily]

I saw a piece the other week about the thylacine project. They said it was going to cost billions. Billions better spent elsewhere, IMO.

 

[Imported_tuatara]

wait, if some smaller reptiles were revived and were native from here and cloned here, could we keep them or no? if not then NO to spending billions. if yes still NO to spending billions.

 

[Foozil]

Good point... but if we could and it didn't cost that much then sure.

 

[Stompsy]

I don't see why if we had the option to get those extinct species back we wouldn't? Sure, we are still killing other species, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still try to bring back others.

And yeah I do agree that we should only focus on recently extinct animals if we were to de-extinct animals

IMO, the two main reasons we shouldn’t are pretty obvious.

One, we can’t even look after what we have on the planet now.... and two, even if some ecosystems would benefit from said cloning, how many would it be detrimental to? We can’t guarantee that introducing a once extinct animal back into an ecosystem it was once native to, wouldn’t turn said ecosystem completely on its head. We just shouldn’t play god.