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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: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:38PM (5 children)
I don't disagree with the premise that preserving current biodiversity is more cost-effective and desirable than de-extincting species in the name of biodiversity. However, there must be other reasons for going down the de-extinction path that justifies the effort.
I cannot think of any reason to bring back Mammoths beyond being really cool. But is that not enough of a reason?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:50PM (3 children)
Polar bears gonna need something to eat in the arctic when the poles melt, so seed Siberia and North Canada with Mammoth herds.
Something often overlooked in this era of fattening up livestock on farmed corn, is back in the good old days the only productive use of some wastelands was feeding pasture livestock. Think of some Texas cattle ranch. My point is the north of Canada perhaps serves no useful economic purpose and growing some woolly mammoth could produce a heck of a lot of edible protein out of worthless wasteland. Now obviously a cattle rancher in the USA is going to do everything up to slander and libel, or beyond, to keep mammoth meat off the market. It would seem if you can engineer it to exist you can engineer it to taste good, so at least that won't be a problem.
Anyway there's a lot of land in the world that can't be industrially farmed because its bad land, but it does produce enough cellulose to grow a herd of tasty meat. And the mammoth can probably tolerate worse weather than any moo cow...
If cows moo, what sound does the mammoth make? If you thought "what does the fox say" was a catchy annoying tune, wait until my remake of "what does the mammoth say" hits the charts.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:33PM (2 children)
Caribou?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:35PM (1 child)
Santa, that magnificent bastard, has brainwashed too many kids into thinking reindeer pull his sleigh when its obviously area 51 UFO levitation technology. Anyway you can only sell "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" burger patties to some place at least somewhat outside western civ.
Maybe we could sell "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer Burger Patties" to Chinese and they could sell us ... melamine contaminated dog meat patties, naw thats not going to work. Easier to get kids to eat Rudolph than Lassie.
Caribou are interesting but its just not gonna happen culturally.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:26PM
We could call them "elk." Nobody would know the difference. It's more honest than calling Subway's meat nuggets, "chicken."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:57AM
Nothing depends on mosquitoes. They have caused billions of people to die.
We don't need a particular species of salamander or spotted owl, and losing one is no big deal. Losing all salamanders or all owls would kind of suck, so we should avoid that, but still it wouldn't be all that devastating. There are other predators that would benefit from the reduced competition and mostly make up for the loses.
Lots of animals are detrimental to humans (they need to die ASAP) or at least not beneficial (wouldn't miss them). There isn't enough room on this planet to keep everything.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:39PM (6 children)
The last link is dead I got a 404, the nature.com articles doi:10.1038 s41559-016-0053 Maybe its just part of the AWS outage today
The analysis in the link was typical "divide the pie" not "grow the pie" analysis with the sole exception that maybe Outback Steakhouse would fund a copyrighted patented mammoth in order to server MammothSteaks(tm) solely at their fine establishment. Which is a hell of a good idea, and the authors assume it'll raise no money yet you look at every sports stadium in the country and over the course of my life they've all gotten stupid corporate names. If McDonalds funds the passenger pigeon to sell passenger pigeon nuggets.... It seems inevitable?
You have to realize that the Panda came first, then Pandemonium was invented to describe the riots as suddenly the zoo became the coolest place in the city. I think it a pretty safe assumption that bringing an extinct sea cucumber back to life, or an ugly as hell microscopic nematode, no matter how scientifically interesting, will not be a financial boom, but zoos with mammoths and saber tooth tigers and dinosaurs will quite easily fund conservation projects. What they need is strong patent law to sit on the discovery and dole out like one megaspecies per decade to maximize revenue. A passenger pigeon is just a rat with wings but a mammoth? Holy crap that alone is going to fund every conservation effort on the planet for a century if played correctly.
Finally the article was all debbie downer that if people don't think an animal is worth funding, we shouldn't reward them by permitting people to fund an animal they do think is worth funding. To them, I say F you. I don't recall giving them god perms over humanity in some chmod statement gone horribly wrong. F them. If humanity isn't saving the right species the right way they can go do it the right way all by themselves with their own money instead of ours. What a bunch of scummy jerks. If someone is butt hurt about their pet nematode not being funded so they have to piss all over everyone elses desires, screw them. Adults are not supposed to act like little children and threaten to take their ball home and pout if they don't get their way. Sorry buddy say bye bye to that ugly as F nematode, dry your tears or not I don't give a F because baby I'm paying for grilled mammoth steaks tonight!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:45PM
Not part of the AWS outage. Just no early access (even to the abstract) for plebs apparently. Hence the note in the summary. Going to the the journal's website [nature.com] shows articles from 21 February 2017.
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(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:54PM
It's an extinct link species, but they are already working to bring it back into life. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:07AM
You have to realize that the Panda came first, then Pandemonium was invented to describe the riots as suddenly the zoo became the coolest place in the city.
No, I don't. The word pandemonium was "invented" (or coined, as we usually say of words) to name the capital of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost. (Perhaps you missed the obvious etymology, literally "all demons", because of the clash between Greek prefix and Latin suffix, but there's English for you.) It was then used to describe earthly places of uproar long before panda (either red or giant) were known in the West.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:41AM (2 children)
So, generally, yeah - I think there's a place for Mammophants in zoos, and meat farms, but I don't think it would be a good idea at all to introduce a species like this into the wild. Cool, sure - visit the Tundra and see the Mammophant herds, but the negative effects on the existing Tundra ecosystems would very likely outweigh any positive benefits, just as introduced species so often do around the world today.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:29PM (1 child)
just as introduced species so often do around the world today.
That brings up three interesting points
The tundra was mammoth-compatible 20K years ago but the presence of 2017-era wolves might make it incompatible
In the old days species introductions often led to permanent elimination of a species, but the whole point of this is it'll "merely" be expensive to have them pop alive again at the spawn point after a modest delay. If they're cute and furry and not ugly nematodes or giant killer centipedes. So this might lead to lax attitudes (ah, dump these chinese carp in the lake what do I care someone else will pay to resurrect the walleye fish its not like they'll be extinct)
The third point is I could totally see one of the Koreas either best Korea or the other one growing meter long killer centipedes to keep on the leash at the DMZ and that can only lead to problems. If you though Hannibal and the elephants was a hell of a story two millennia ago try some dude sending a stampede of mammoths against modern armor.... if you can sneak up on a M1A1 and put a mammoth foot thru it, its toast, but its going to be tricky to sneak up... normally combined arms infantry would smell or see the mammoths before they step on you but the one meter long killer centipedes suppressed and routed the infantry so they're in panic retreat two miles that way and you can hear the stomping feet inside your tank so they're out there but you don't know where and the opfor is scaring you by pushing cars off roofs to make mammoth like crashing sounds and they have more scrap cars than you have main gun rounds so this is going to be interesting.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:59PM
Fun... my basic rule for the smallish scale phenomenon (including Mammophant and killerpede creation) is: if it can happen, it will.
Hard to predict how widespread they will become, as you say - wolves and other established species will make random drops of crazy creatures unlikely to flourish, but every so often one will and then you've got your next Nutria rat, Kudzu, Fire Ant, Killer Bee, etc.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:40PM (9 children)
As always, civilization will be pushed forward by "private" capital: Shitloads of money can be made by creating and displaying in a zoo these resurrected mammoths, and then those resources could be directed towards not only conservation efforts, but also better techniques for storing and resurrecting those species that are now on the verge of extinction.
You want something to happen in the world?
Well, sure, you can always just tell people (at the point of a gun) to fund your ideas on conservation, but you'll get the most sustainable solutions (indeed, ones that will be the most profitable for society) if you can build an industry around your efforts, and thereby convince people to hand over their hard-won resources of their own free will.
When will you get it? Things like SpaceX are what [will] succeed in fulfilling humanity's ambitions, because they are built on working with both humanity's conscious desires and also humanity's actually practical capabilities as they exist in the here and now. YOUR MUST BE PROFITABLE.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:00PM (7 children)
if you can build an industry around your efforts, and thereby convince people to hand over their hard-won resources of their own free will.
There are in between, not just binary.
Surely corporations as currently defined F stuff up and are a net drag on society. Its not 1860 building railroads or 1910 building cars anymore, they are just obsolete and mostly exist today to F stuff up, a net drain on society.
Surely patents and copyrights mostly exist to screw up the economy.
But what if you mix them... B corps (benefit corporations) exist to serve a useful purpose while not being non-profit. What if we "fixed" copyright and patent laws such that you only get to patent/copyright cloning technology if you're a conservation B corp? All R+D in the profitable human biomedical field, for example, then has to feed back to B corps funding conservation efforts. All cutting edge medical technology involves paying dividends to conservation related companies.
There should be a way to socially engineer the laws for good. Yes for the last couple decades all social engineering has been for evil, but it doesn't have to be that way.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:29PM (1 child)
The more complex a phenomenon, the more you must accept that evolution by variation and selection is the only way to think about working with it. The problems you cite are the result of an attempt at to impose some kind of Intelligent Design on an incredibly complex phenomenon (society, or the economy, but I repeat myself).
The whole point of the market is to find solutions, often without realizing that such solutions are being found, and often without realizing that there was even a particular problem in the first place!
So, you want to "engineer" profitable relationships between people at large (and the organization with which they associate)? Well, set up a system whereby every interaction between each pair of individuals is ultimately (at least potentially) a matter of contract negotiation and enforcement between those very individuals (and establish a culture that respects this fact), and then through this process process there will emerge, evolutionarily, the kinds of complex social structures for which you pine.
That is the only way. Otherwise, you are doomed to squander gobs of resources re-constructing the world according to your poorly conceived world view, which is guaranteed to provide an transient (if not wrongheaded) solution; a robust system must respect the fundamental process of this universe: Evolution by Variation and Selection.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:40PM
The free-market also creates waste. I suspect that society is over-producing disposable crap at the moment. While short life cycles are good for innovating, it also consumes extra resources to replace something that could otherwise be repaired.
The free-market is actually biased against things that can be re-used. A good example is rechargeable batteries. At least in AA size, NiMH cells tend to have longer run-time (in high-drain devices anyway) than their disposable alkaline counterparts (which have the advantage of holding a charge for up to 5 years). Next time you are in a store: check how much shelf space is dedicated to the disposable vs rechargeable cells. Even though the rechargeable cells may cost 5x as much, they don't bring in a lot of revenue. The reason is that you buy the cells once, and don't have to come back for like 5 years (or however long 1000 charge cycles take) unless you happen to lose the things.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:36PM (4 children)
Surely corporations as currently defined F stuff up and are a net drag on society. Its not 1860 building railroads or 1910 building cars anymore, they are just obsolete and mostly exist today to F stuff up, a net drain on society.
Then you should be able to show that, right? To the contrary, I note that corporations remain one of the best ways to distribute capital from those who have it to those who need it.
There should be a way to socially engineer the laws for good. Yes for the last couple decades all social engineering has been for evil, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Vote for good laws not ideology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:38AM (1 child)
You're an idiot then, because that's not how capitalism works. 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, all the wealth goes to the lazy, greedy bastards at the top as people literally die of exposure during the heat of summer and cold of winter.
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.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:23PM (1 child)
To the contrary, I note that corporations remain one of the best ways to distribute capital from those who have it to those who need it.
So, by "those who need it" you mean Bill, Steve, Larry, Donald and the Korch brothers?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:39PM
To the contrary, I note that corporations remain one of the best ways to distribute capital from those who have it to those who need it.
So, by "those who need it" you mean Bill, Steve, Larry, Donald and the Korch brothers?
And the more than a third of a million employees that they collectively employed in the year 2011 when Steve Jobs died. Funny how you forgot about those people.
(Score: 2) by Anne Nonymous on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:43PM
A zoo? But they sound so delicious.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by physicsmajor on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:43PM (6 children)
The price of genome sequencing efforts are dropping like rocks. This analysis is at best a snapshot at the time it was done - which was months before publication, the way peer review works. It is in no way a durable truth. Frankly, I'm amazed that on the low end we're close to a 1:2 ratio of de-extinction vs conservation. To me what that really means is that by 2018 the exact same study may show no difference, and perhaps by 2020 it'll actually favor de-extinction. Crazy.
I don't oppose conservation in principle, but the theory is often taken to extremes.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:46PM (5 children)
Where's your data coming from? My data [genome.gov] shows a stall out, and I haven't heard anyone report a reliable $100 human genome sequencing.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:05PM (4 children)
Essentially its free and you're now mostly paying for HIPPA and biomedical safety of the workers and profit and paperwork costs.
You'll get bizarre quotes, because the market is bizarre, but "simple blood work" is of that order of magnitude of cost depending on insurance deals and bulk discounts and especially upon speed.
Its sorta like why does a hospital charge $60 to give a patient an aspirin tablet, well like $59.99 of the cost is the labor involved in the doc and nurse and insurance claim adjuster all screwing around, don't matter if the pill is $0.000001 or $0.01 its going to round up to $60 or so.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:17PM (3 children)
Your comment sounds good, but is bullshit. There is no genome sequencing free lunch, costs can go down, but haven't yet, and HIPPA does not apply to non-humans, like the ones these guys would be sequencing [soylentnews.org].
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:50PM (2 children)
Well the good news is "the price of human bloodwork" covers a random distribution from like $10 to $1500 depending on whats ordered and corruption related effects.
And the link you give goes to a graph that is very hard to interpret but you claim it means human genome sequencing costs more than $100.
So you can say theres not an overlap all you'd like, but it appears human genome sequencing is just another blood test of roughly typical cost, maybe on the higher and rarer scale but nothing shockingly unusual.
You may have made a mistake in your estimate and "it costs more than $100" was meant to be "it costs more than $100K" but that's hardly my fault.
Also no fair comparing to non-human which I guess would be cheaper? I guess veterinarian blood work is cheaper (liability insurance costs, I suppose) and maybe more limited such that gene sequencing your pet dog would cost a higher class of expense than generic doggie blood testing.
Somehow I don't think this necessarily matters in the big picture in that most of the cost of squirting out a herd of mammoths isn't going to be the sequencing anyway.
costs can go down, but haven't yet
I think you're linking to the wrong graph? That graph looks like its cratering like a dotcom stock in 2001.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:20PM
So... single payer healthcare? Yup, sounds good to me too!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:51AM
The graph did crater quite nicely. Except until recently, when it stalled out (end of the graph).
I meant $100, not $100k:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome [wikipedia.org]
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/09/illumina-ushering-in-the-100-genome/ [statnews.com]
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/illumina-wants-to-sequence-your-whole-genome-for-100/ [techcrunch.com]
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/jan/10/illumina-announces-arrival-100-genome-few-years-no/ [kpbs.org]
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/illumina-ilmn-launches-novaseq-series-125812778.html [yahoo.com]
The machines that are expected to make it as cheap as $100 per human genome can sequence many samples in parallel, lowering costs. They could probably be considered robotic too. $100 is not much for a test you probably only have to pay for once.
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:32PM (8 children)
It's predicted that ~35% of all species may be "committed to extinction" by 2050.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6970/abs/nature02121.html [nature.com]
Preserving living cells before a species becomes extinct, then taking them out of storage as desired ought to be cheaper than trying to re-create species that went extinct before modern preservation techniques became available.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:49PM (1 child)
> Preserving living cells before a species becomes extinct, then taking them out of storage as desired ought to be cheaper
> than trying to re-create species that went extinct before modern preservation techniques became available.
How about "not letting them go extinct", considering that humans are responsible for all but a few of the current near-extinct statuses?
Less shiny, and teh locals may not like the concept, but definitely cheaper.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:01AM
> How about "not letting them go extinct" [...]
That, I take it, would entail what the article calls "conservation."
> [...] locals may not like the concept, but definitely cheaper.
The human population is increasing, and is predicted to do so for a little longer. If it reaches 11.2 billion, and humans continue to live on land, and we continue to set Antarctica aside, there will be on average 83 people per square kilometre of land--up from 55 now. That's similar to the population density of Greece or Romania today.
http://mashable.com/2017/02/26/biological-diversity-vatican-conference/ [mashable.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_population_density [wikipedia.org]
Ecosystems take up lots of space. We're trying to make them smaller, but it doesn't always work.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:54PM (5 children)
Part of the problem is a lack of data on what fraction of the 35% are truly tragic like the disappearing Rhino or Giraffe and which are just boring bacteria that mostly cause food poisoning if something that interesting at all.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:04PM (4 children)
It doesn't really matter much. As the human population strains the carrying capacity of the (former) planet, other species get pushed out.
I don't trust our ability to geo-engineer our way out of this mess, so preserving diversity where we can is likely a good thing. It may just give us enough room to adapt when things change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:41AM (1 child)
There's also the issue about what to do about species that haven't yet been discovered. The only way to preserve them is to keep changes to the environment slow and gradual enough that they can hold on or evolve.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:43AM
A recent story was about Flabegraviera fujiae, a worm that was identified sometime since 2015 in samples that had been collected in 1981.
/article.pl?sid=17/02/09/0337250 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:38PM (1 child)
Well sure it matters, a lot of people depend on the Bos taurus species for work and milk and delicious food, its loss due to some species specific virus would be pretty tragic to humanity compared to losing the bacteria that gives people food poisoning when they eat poorly prepared taco bell or some minor bread mold.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:24PM
Well, there are always goats, I suppose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:51PM
Forget friggen logic, do what's cool!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:51AM (2 children)
How about homo erectus, or even just a neanderthal? There are lots of proto-human things that could be fun to meet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:21AM (1 child)
in practice: can't be done. DNA too degraded.
related comment: are you out of your mind? does it look like we need more reasons for societies with technology to fight each other? because yes, I am convinced racism is nothing like speciesm would be.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:34AM
> can't be done. DNA too degraded.
"The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24352235 [nih.gov]
http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reichlab/Reich_Lab/Press_files/2013_Nature_AltaiGenome.pdf [harvard.edu]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:16AM
Look at how long it takes for a species to evolve its amazing traits. When a species is lost, all that evolutionary "invention" is lost, too. We should look at each species as a treasure - a ton of stuff has been learned from living things through study and we have a lot more to learn. We as a species need to stop squandering our fellow living things. Plus for all we know, life on Earth is all the life there is.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:21AM
After all, if we don't first create mammoths, how can we then go on to create Mimmoths? [wikia.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:39PM
I would like to try woolly mammoth. Also, brontosaurus burgers. It would be hilarious to see a couple of those ribs deform the shell of a humvee at a drive-thru.
Washington DC delenda est.