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OfflineBjorn_Stormcrow
The Farfarer.


Reged: 09/27/12
Posts: 2572
Loc: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
On resurrecting dinosaurs
      12/18/23 11:17 PM

so this is a continuation of a topic started on the discord. regarding the viability an ethics of resurrecting extinct species, even if we could.

so heres the problem(s) when it comes to resurrecting mammoths... we -can- do it... in fact we have enough dna and fully sequenced genomes that we could over time recreate a genetically viable population of them... thats actually not the hard part (well kinda the hard part, but not the problem.)
but we -do- have the tech, and we have enough genetic specimines that we -could- create a viable breeding population of both mammoths, and wooly rhinos if we wanted too.

part of the problem comes down to the question of nature vs nurture, how much of an animals behavior is baked into the dna, and how much is learned behavior from the environment and parents (we know at least -some- of it is dna based, but not how much, or why, or honestly basically anything beyond that it plays -some- factor.), so in order to resurrect a mammoth, we would need to take an elephant embrio implant it with reconstituted mammoth DNA (which we know is compatible and it works, we've tried it successfully, at least that far in the process. but we also don't know what sort of effect rebuilding a mammoth genome might have on 'genetic memory' cuz well... we have never done it before, and we have zero baseline for 'natural' mammoth behavior.) now we have a 1/2 mammoth 1/2 elephant... assuming its a female (we can select for that) we do it again, with a slightly different mammoth genome, now we have 3/4 mammoth, 1/4 elephant... and on and on and on, till we get, effectively, a pure mammoth... problem is, that very first mammoth was raised by an elephant, and since we don't know what a mammoth would have behaved like, we can't easily tell what is mammoth behavior through genetic memory (which we're not even certain would apply since we would be using reconstituted dna) what is elephant behavior, and what is new behaviors adapted to the environment (cuz we couldn't actually keep that mammoth population living in the same environments as elephants beyond a couple generations) so thats a WHOLE lot of time, and a WHOLE lot of money, for a whole lot of 'maybe' answers...

then there is the ethical question is it actually moral to bring a species back from extinction, just to -maybe- answer some questions about their biology? (cuz behavior analysis is basically right out the window at that point) especially when the world they evolved in no longer exists... they went extinct for a reason after all. yes humans played a part in it, and sped the process along, but newer research shows that they were headed for extinction no matter what... the climate simply changed to fast for them to adapt. and the world today simply isn't the environment that they were adapted to live in. so is it moral to resurrect a species, and force them to live in an environment that they are not adapted too? and even if we were, is there actually enough information that could be gained from doing so, that would justify it? personally, I'm leaning towards no.

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. * * Re: On resurrecting dinosaurs RareTricho   12/19/23 03:11 PM


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