Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Earth Science

Should We Revive Extinct Species? (washingtonpost.com) 203

An anonymous reader writes: The last male northern white rhinoceros died just last week, and a total of just 29,000 rhinoceroses now remain on earth. But National Geographic reports that "the genetic material of several northern white rhinos has been stored away," and scientists hope to give birth to another using in vitro fertilization -- or to breed a hybrid using a genetically similar southern white rhino.
Meanwhile, a postdoctoral fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology reports that scientists are seriously considering the possibility of "de-extincting" the Carolina parakeet, America's only native parrot, which became extinct 100 years ago. Thanks to the data I compiled as well as cutting-edge machine learning approaches to analyze those data, my colleagues and I were able to reconstruct the Carolina parakeets' likely range and climate niche, [which] turned out to be much smaller than previously believed... While this may seem rather minor, some scientists consider the Carolina parakeet one of the top candidates for 'de-extinction', a process in which DNA is harvested from specimens and used to "resurrect" extinct species... If someone were to spend millions of dollars doing all of the genetic and breeding work to bring back this species, or any other, how will they figure out where to release these birds...? Whether or not de-extinction is a worthwhile use of conservation effort and money is another question, best answered by someone other than me. But this is just an example of one potential use of this type of research. "
It seems like all kinds of havoc could ensue if we released a resurrected species back into the modern ecosystem. And yet Harvard researchers are already working to breed a new creature that's half-elephant, half Wooly Mammoth.

What do Slashdot's readers think? Should we revive extinct species?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Should We Revive Extinct Species?

Comments Filter:
  • Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31, 2018 @05:38PM (#56360617)

    I want to shoot one.

  • by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @05:45PM (#56360649)
    Yes, please... Let's start with the NES Classic.
  • In a word... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @05:45PM (#56360653)

    No.

    Qualifier: maybe if they taste good, we should consider it seriously...mammoth steak, mmmmmm....

    • Qualifier: maybe if they taste good, we should consider it seriously...mammoth steak, mmmmmm....

      Agreed. By all accounts the Dodo was both delicious and stupid. I could definitely make room for that on my menu.

      • All depends on what they eat... I've got a hunch they fed on needles and bark of certain conifers (considering the likely state of things during the Ice Age), in which case their meat could taste like terpentine...
  • by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @05:47PM (#56360657)

    >> ...scientists are seriously considering the possibility of "de-extincting" the Carolina parakeet, America's only native parrot, which became extinct 100 years ago.

    No it didn't. It was simply stunned, and pining for the fjords.

  • by PeterM from Berkeley ( 15510 ) <(petermardahl) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Saturday March 31, 2018 @05:54PM (#56360691) Journal

    1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.

    2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.

    3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.

    --PeterM

    • It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding

      Well then we can rename it the West Virginia Parakeet.

      • It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding

        Well then we can rename it the West Virginia Parakeet.

        Wife:
        1. HA!!!!
        2. No, rename it the Eastern Colorado Parakeet

        Me: ?

        Wife: My father's family is from there. Do you have any idea how inbred they are? They call it "line breeding" there and say that's why their IQs are so high and they produce so many PhDs in their family.

        (Me: Yes, they really DO produce PhDs. Also: They're inbred largely because they are d

    • If we reached the point where we're easily capable of creating lifeforms from some arbitrary DNA, we probably also have enough knowledge of how to create permutations of that DNA and even if we don't, once you create a few and find the bottlenecks that arise from inbreeding, you know what to alter.

      I also suspect that we'd keep anything created this way in a lab for decades before even attempting to reintroduce it to the wild.
    • Well said. And might be worth adding that the current populations in the area of introduction may also be negatively affected, and other species caused to go extinct in turn. IMO, the more we can just leave wilderness alone, the better.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )
      4) Anyone who has seen Jurassic Park, knows where this leads.
      1. 1. Humans can engineer random mutations to create a viable population. I'd bet a lot of those variations are just going to be immune factors (we can also engineer mono-culture like bananas, apples and lab mice if needed.) The world of genetic engineering post CRISPR [broadinstitute.org] is never going to be the same again.
      2. 2. Humans, unlike every other species, has both the capacity and intention to craft a custom environment to ensure continence if not flourishing of a revived species (insert rants about the Zoo here.) Darwi
    • by careysub ( 976506 ) on Sunday April 01, 2018 @02:24PM (#56363631)

      1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.

      Odd notions about "inbreeding" abound. This remark manages to capture a number of misunderstandings about inbreeding and its significance.

      Population ecologists do value, and try to maintain, existing genetic diversity since managing populations does become more difficult with low levels of diversity. But inbreeding per se is not some sort of apocalyptic doom for a population or species.

      First note that successful wild populations with very low levels of genetic diversity are not rare.

      The cheetah for example is an extreme case of low diversity since it appears to have gone through two bottlenecks (about 100,000 years ago, and about 12,000 years ago) with only a breeding population of fewer than a dozen each time, but went on to spread quite widely and develop a large population in Africa and South Asia. Many populations of various species have been founded by a few breeding pairs, or even one pair - all New World monkeys for example seem to have descended from a very small group African monkeys (perhaps a single breeding pair) who rafted across in a rare event tens of millions of years ago and went on to diversity into all the New World monkeys. As humans spread out of Africa, through Asia, and Oceania there were many cases of very small founder populations successively founding successful communities from populations that had already gone through multiple bottlenecks.

      High levels of inbreeding do cause deleterious or lethal genes to surface with harmful effect. But over time this tends to remove them from the population. People tend to get a warped idea about the significance of this from a population perspective by the well documented existence of royal families among humans. Sure, inbreeding brings about monarchs who are idiots, infertile, or with other serious genetic problems - but in the wild this is how those genes get removed. Outside of human culture those drooling idiots would not be monarchs, they would be non-breeding dead ends, it is only human cultural tradition that insists they play the role of leader.

      Similarly it is well know that many highly inbred domesticated "show" breeds have serious genetic problems. But this is due to the malfeasance of human breeders who intensively select for arbitrary cosmetic traits and ignore serious genetic disease.

      The technology that permits the recreation of extinct species, by reconstructing a genome, is more than able to remove harmful genes with the same tools. There is no difficulty, really, in having a highly inbred population of low diversity, with no disease. This is what the standard strains of white mice and rats used in laboratories are. They are quite healthy but have zero diversity within a strain, they are literally clones of each other.

      BTW - the mainstream culture of Americans has a peculiar and distinctive horror of inbreeding to a degree that is not supported by evidence. Throughout human history humans have commonly bred in small closed groups of only dozens to hundreds of individuals with little or no outbreeding. First and second cousin marriages are common in human culture. It turns out that a certain amount of inbreeding is actually optimal for successful reproduction, surviving child fertility is highest among humans with third cousin marriages, unrelated humans have lower success rates.

      2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.

      3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.

      --PeterM

      The reasons that species went extinct do need to be addressed, to bring a species back, though it is certainly possible to maintain some species in captivity. But not rarely the factor that needs to be addressed

    • 1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.

      You know neither how much genetic variation could be uncovered from extant specimens nor how much is necessary for survival.

      Cheetahs are essentially clones and have survived extinction for 10K years since their last evolutionary bottleneck. Their genetic variation is consistent with a historical reduction in total population to a single pregnant individual.

      2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.

      They were deliberately exterminated.

      3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.

      Economics does not work that way. There is no basis for asserting that de-extinction would lessen support for prese

  • by CaptainJeff ( 731782 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @05:55PM (#56360693)
    Didn't anyone pay attention to that documentary?

    Jurassic Park?

    Really?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • What, you really think humans are not a part of nature?

      We're just another animal, really. A bit more successful than most primates, but just another animal (for which read: a part of nature like any other)....

      • > We're just another animal, really.

        Things like nuclear power plants are not a part of nature. Don't be ridiculous.

        • If we are just another critter, then there is no difference than a human making a nuke power plant and a beaver making a beaver dam. (And 'nature' made it's own nuke plant somewhere in Africa, I believe--too lazy to look up the location)
        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          As much so as a bower bird nest.

          Actually, fission piles can occur even without the intervention of biology, so they're about as natural as rocks.

      • Nothing that was created by a deliberate process of design that requires teaching can be considered 'natural' - that is what the term 'artificial' means, more or less. There are some very limited cases of non-human species showing the ability to design some things within sharp limits, but this is quite different from the demonstrated abilities of humans, transmitted through culture, and which can be extended to arbitrary, unbounded purposes and materials.

  • Might be nice if we made a decision, as a species, about whether we are a part of or separate from the earth's ecosystem.

    This half-in/half-out status dooms both organisms.

  • Deposit some sludge on Mars and/or Titan, grab some popcorn, sit back, and let the Eukaryota do their work.
  • Good choice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @06:27PM (#56360835)
    The Carolina parakeet is an excellent candidate for re-establishment -- a beautiful bird, driven to extinction by a foolish fashion that valued the tail feather.
    • The primary reason for their extinction seems to be the obliteration of canebrakes, the wetland cane stands that they used for breeding. The parakeet vanished when these were all converted into farmland through drainage. This has driven several other species to the brink of extinction also, including the Florida panther.

  • I could really use some extra crispy dodo with the Colonel’s secret recipe right now.

  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @07:33PM (#56361091)

    In Venezuela, there used to be "Gavialiloids", but they went extint (Ikanogavialis and heserogavialis, for example).

    These were relatives of the Gavialis in India and indonesia, but those are close to extintion (because of antropogenic factors in their habitats).

    There are conservation efforts in ceratin zoos (San Diego in particular is very active in this conservation effort), but nothing in the wild.

    Since the Gavialis is not a danger to humans (they mostly eat fish, their long narrow snouts are too fragile for bigger pray), it would be nice to re-introduce them in the wild in the former habitat of their cousins, specialy in areas where "bad fish" abound (think piranhas and electric eels - Electrophorus electricus)...

  • Really? Like, for example?

    As far as comparative effectiveness of funding, as a society we do all sorts of stupid misprioritization of funding all the time anyway; at least species revival can result in new scientific knowledge along the way.

  • If the species is not a threat to humans, why not?

    What practical benefit is there? It would be tremendously interesting - like seeing a coelacanth swimming around, and knowing this thing has been unchanged for 400 million years. [wikipedia.org]

    The process of reviving an extinct species could advance science as well, so bonus there.

  • As much as diversity is important in ecosystems, reviving extinct species seems like an expensive and frivolous exercise if the environment isn't also somehow changed so that the species would this time survive and reach a stable population. What are the chances of that, with the concurrent mass extinction of so many other species during the Anthropocene?
    • Folks do a lot of "expensive, frivolous exercises". Examples include the so called "star wars I-III". I'm sure you can think of more (depending on your political leanings and/or belief systems). If you do it once (and it goes extinct again), that means the process is likely repeatable...whenever you get the addressed try again. Meanwhile you know what you need to do/not do for other species that may not make it. Sorry, but unless it's something like the Rocky Mt Locust (or whatever it's called--the one we
  • by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@earthlinkLION.net minus cat> on Saturday March 31, 2018 @08:20PM (#56361241)

    You should only revive a species if you can supply it a habitat to live in.

  • by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @11:38PM (#56361709)
    Should we revive the extinct insects as well? Keep a bunch of bees DNA, we surely will need some soon.
  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Saturday March 31, 2018 @11:49PM (#56361739)

    you bred raptors

  • and restore it to its natural habitat, roaming the halls of power eating everything in a suit or golf shirt.

  • But smarter people (like the ones who may have done the research necessary to use DNA from dead extinct animals to create new viable offsprings) should make up their mind about it based on careful ethical considerations. They should, of course, ignore slashdot and the even-dumber "public opinion" when doing it.
  • A somewhat more timely issue that requires the same level of debate is

    Should we terraform Mars?

    The impacts on the rest of the solar system would be subtle yet possibly devastating. The answer to this question could have a profound effect on the stock markets and the future of video poker.

    Isn't today April Fools day?

  • why it went extinct, I think "reviving" any species is not a good idea and may have unknown consequences. And we're not likely to completely figure out the underlying reasons of an extinction. As someone said, if we don't correct the causes (and I don't know how we could do that if we don't completely know them), it will go extinct again anyway. And if we just do this out of sheer historical preservation and keep some species alive in artificial conditions, it's kind of perverse in a way. Living beings are
  • Why is this story tagged with Silent Running? That wasn't about bringing back extinct species, but saving the ones we have.

Some people claim that the UNIX learning curve is steep, but at least you only have to climb it once.

Working...