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Following recent talk of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a new analysis has poured cold water on the idea of de-extinction efforts, recommending that funding go to conservation efforts instead:
Ten days ago, science news media outlets around the world reported that a Harvard University–led team was on the verge of resurrecting the wooly mammoth. Although many articles oversold the findings, the concept of de-extinction—bringing extinct animals back to life through genetic engineering—is beginning to move from the realm of science fiction to reality. Now, a new analysis of the economics suggests that our limited conservation funding would be better spent elsewhere.
"The conversation thus far has been focused on whether or not we can do this. Now, we are progressing toward the: 'Holy crap, we can—so should we?' phase," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. "It is like we've just about put the last stiches in [Frankenstein's monster], and there is this moment of pause as we consider whether it is actually a good idea to flip the switch and electrify the thing to life."
[...] the results also show that if instead of focusing the money on de-extinction, one allocated it into existing conservation programs for living species, we would see a much bigger increase in biodiversity—roughly two to eight times more species saved. In other words, the money would be better spent elsewhere to prevent existing species from going extinct in the first place [DOI: 10.1038/s41559-016-0053] [DX], the team reports today in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
[article abstract not yet available]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01 2017, @08:44AM
Capitalism is the best system ever for redistributing wealth from people that barely have any to those that already have more than they need. Just look at the US
Two obvious rebuttals. The US is not the only country on the planet using capitalism. For example, China has been very successful at raising the well being of its citizens via capitalism. One can see this elsewhere with Europe and South America.
Second, you're conflating the temporary effects of global labor competition with the effects of capitalism. When US labor has to compete with a vast sea of developing world labor, it's going to be under stress, no matter the economic system. Capital has no similar competition. Thus, those whose wealth depends on their labor will fare worse than those whose wealth depends on capital. But even then, it's not really a transfer. My view is that government mechanisms for attempting to fix this situation are more likely to transfer wealth from poor to rich than the underlying cause is. That gives a wealth transfer mechanism that can be targeted by the politically connected. It also gives a means by which politicians can bribe voters to go with transfers of public funding to the wealthy. The US has, for example, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid which has turned out to be a great way to discourage would-be reformers from touching most of the US budget (because ~40% of the budget is effectively untouchable directly, and politically, low information voters are very easy to rile up by intimations that their handouts are threatened by these would-be reformers).
Capitalism just ensures that those with the means wind up with everything in the absence of an outside power preventing it. Even Adam Smith the patron state of capitalism warned that any capitalist region will inevitably head towards a single source monopoly over everything if not stopped by regulation.
Economics and the world has evolved beyond Adam Smith. For example, the US has demonstrated both that capitalism doesn't concentrate wealth as claimed and that there are natural forces against "single source monopolies" which weren't understood in Smith's time.