If only
there was some kind of easily accessible media that would explain the consequences of doing this
But that would be just crazy talk
Boffin: Will I soon be able to CLONE a WOOLLY MAMMOTH? YES. Should I? Hell NO
It will definitely be possible within the foreseeable future to bring back the long-extinct woolly mammoth, a top geneticist has said. However, in his regretful opinion such a resurrection should not be carried out. The assertion comes in the wake of a new study of mammoth genetics as compared to their cousins the Asian and …
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 09:59 GMT Vinyl-Junkie
Ian Malcom: But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Michael Chrichton - Jurassic Park
At least someone got the memo...
Whilst I think (re)creating a mammoth sounds fabulous; you only have to look at the havoc wrought by existing non-native species to wonder if it would really be a good idea. You could probably control the mammoths, but what about parasite and disease mutations? Mammoth 'flu, anyone?
-
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 16:02 GMT John Brown (no body)
"Ian Malcom: But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Michael Chrichton - Jurassic Park
At least someone got the memo..."
...and he was far from being the first. Authors have always postulated situations and then gone on to discuss the morals and philosophy behind the alternative answers going back to at least the ancient Greeks. "modern" SF is probably the most obvious current outlet for this type of speculative philosophy dating back at least to Jules Verne or Mary Shelly.
-
-
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 17:42 GMT Antonymous Coward
Re: Hell Yes!
Of course!
To me this announcement smells like a ploy to undermine his rivals.
Huge PR splaff: "I could do it any time I wanted. I just don't wanna. Honest"
What are the odds that a Russian team is much closer and in the midst of a final round of fundraising?
( Definitely red for Mammoth. I'll have mine served blue, with fava beans and a nice chianti, please. )
-
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 11:44 GMT Richard Wharram
Re: Wrangel Island
The Old Kingdom Pyramids in Giza at least were built about 2500 BC so 4500 years ago, not 5000.
The Middle Kingdom Pyramids were about 4000 years ago.
They didn't bother with Pyramids in the New Kingdom.
The oldest Egyptian Pyramid was Djoser's at Saqqara and that's still only about 2650 BC and that wasn't really a true pyramid. Really you'd be looking at the Red Pyramid as the first true pyramid.
Anyone for Serious Sam?
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 12:07 GMT Grikath
Re: Wrangel Island
Point in question is still the same..
The beasties were still around when "Mankind" had already progressed into "civilisation" ( and then some). Of course.. all the stone age megalithic sites in europe/north asia, many predating the pyramids, do, of course, not count as "civilisation". The buggers didn't write anything down after all, and being practically nextdoor they are less interesting.
Whether or not we should re-introduce an elephant species in its more-or-less original environment? Well, we're talking about the siberian tundra and taiga. The local insects wouldn't mind, they won't disturb the birds much, and the bears and wolves would love the extra protein. It may even give the tigers left there there a chance on a decent lunch. And it's not as if the area there is prime real estate for its biggest potential enemy: humans.
I'd say it's worth a shot.
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 16:09 GMT PleebSmash
Re: Wrangel Island
"Whether or not we should re-introduce an elephant species in its more-or-less original environment? Well, we're talking about the siberian tundra and taiga."
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 18:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wrangel Island
"The buggers didn't write anything down after all, and being practically nextdoor they are less interesting"
They didn't write down anything that we have identified as writing. That doesn't mean that they did not have some wort of written language. The Beaker People and their Bronze Age successors had a culture that spread across Europe. It might have depended on oral tradition; or it might be that they used something which wasn't that durable.
In any case, just because the last mammoth remains discovered were ca. 5000 years old doesn't mean that is when they went extinct. Scientists are usually much more cautious; it's journalists who announce that some part of a skeleton is from one of our ancestors, just based on the statement that it fits somewhere in with species X or race Y.
-
Tuesday 7th July 2015 17:28 GMT nagyeger
Re: Wrangel Island
> or it might be that they used something which wasn't that durable.
Ugg told them and told them, if you want durable storage you can't trust it to spinning rust.
And as for those faddish crystal ball user-interfaces the girls loved, well, the batteries in them just don't last and then what have you got? Just a fancy paperweight.
-
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 03:01 GMT Mark 85
Re: Wrangel Island
Whether or not we should re-introduce an elephant species in its more-or-less original environment? Well, we're talking about the siberian tundra and taiga
I won't work as they will die off from heat stroke, etc. Haven't you heard? We're in the middle of a Global Climate Warming Crisis (or whatever it's being called this week)!!!! And millions of school children collecting pennies for food drops and air conditioning their habitat and the Greenpeacers waving signs saying "Save the Wooly Mammoth" will be for naught.
Icon for global warming ---------------------------->
-
-
-
-
-
Friday 10th July 2015 00:52 GMT veti
Re: It's not a "should" question.
"Should" is still a valid question, and it's independent of "will".
Personally, I'd vote no. In my lifetime, we've gone from holding intelligent animals in zoos in too-small cages, whales and dolphins in captivity, to allowing them greater freedom and an environment closer to their natural one. If the mammoth is approximately as intelligent as the elephant - which seems fairly likely - then what sort of conditions would you keep them in?
What would it be like, being the only one of your species? Mary Shelley didn't think it'd be much fun.
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 12:06 GMT choleric
I hear your point, but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective. If the mammoths have died out then it's because they are no longer best suited to their environment. Other species have taken their place and it would be a retrograde step to bring them back. I think a creationist would argue for bringing them back on the basis that it's restoring the original masterpiece work!
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 14:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
"but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective"
Evolution has no ethics, a fact recognised by Tennyson even before Darwin published his book.
He has Nature saying(In Memoriam):
"So careful of the type?" but no./From scarped cliff and quarried stone/She cries, "A thousand types are gone:/I care for nothing, all shall go.
"Thou makest thine appeal to me:/I bring to life, I bring to death:/The spirit does but mean the breath:/I know no more."
If we were to bring extinct mammals back with bio-engineering we would be doing no more than the tobacco plant, which produces a substance that modifies our synapses to create a dependence that causes us to grow more tobacco plants. Everything that can messes with other creatures' biology in its own interests; the only difference is we know we're doing it.
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 18:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective"
"AFAIK the tobacco plant evolved to produce nicotine as a form natural pesticide. "
If you read what I wrote more carefully you will note that I didn't suggest that evolution was responsible for the tobacco plant evolving a substance addictive to us. It makes no difference if it was a side effect of the evolution of an effective pesticide, the point is that it was an unintended messing with our biochemistry.
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 02:22 GMT Allan George Dyer
Re: "but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective"
@Fibbles - true, nicotine production originally evolved as protection against insects, but this doesn't invalidate Arnaut's point, "the only difference is we know we're doing it".
Should we do it? Depends on the risk analysis, but it is probably easy to wipe out a large, slow-breeding species like mammoths than something that works on humans like myxomatosis works on rabbits if things go pear-shaped. (icon - "Take off and nuke it from orbit...")
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 18:22 GMT choleric
Re: "but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective"
@Arnaut the less
I appreciate your point about evolution having no ethics. It's intriguing though to think that if evolution is what got us here then presumably that's something we think is positive. So why would we bring back something like the wooly mammoth? Or is that the evolutionary dead end of analytical thought?
Your point comparing the roles of tobacco, humans and wooly mammoths was good too. I think though that the tobacco and the wooly mammoths are equivalent. The wooly mammoths don't have nicotine, but they look impressive/cute so maybe that's their evolutionary advantage. Looks like they had a good cryogenic strategy before we ever did.
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 18:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective"
"I appreciate your point about evolution having no ethics. It's intriguing though to think that if evolution is what got us here then presumably that's something we think is positive."
I recommend the popular articles on evolution by Stephen J Gould. He carefully dismantles our idea that evolution is somehow directed or positive with a series of examples (possibly not for the sensitive of stomach.) I can't link to them because I only have the dead tree versions.
The idea that evolution is directed derives from the persistence of religious ideas, and our own belief that we are in some way the pinnacle of the natural order (that whole phrase is very suspect). It interests me that the brighter Victorian thinkers in England were already past this stage by the time Evolution of Species etc. was published, and so were ready for it, whereas human exceptionalism is still the order of the day in the US (except among scientists...)
If the extinction event of 65Mya hadn't happened, would we be here?
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 06:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "but it's ethically wrong to do this from an evolutionary perspective"
"So why would we bring back something like the woolly mammoth?"
Same reason we'd bring back the dodo, moa, great auk, aurochs, elephant bird, western black rhinoceros, quagga, cheetah, kakapo, pangolin, orangutan, tiger and any number of the innumerable other species which our wretched little infestation has/will eradicate(d)?
Although, "cos they're funky looking" and "in case they taste nice" and "to see if we can" also all strike me as perfectly reasonable motivations.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 12:57 GMT 45RPM
Anyone for lunch?
Look at the evidence. Take a trip into the country. Cows are everywhere. Sheep are everywhere. Pigs are everywhere and horses are everywhere. No-one has ever said ‘as rare as rabbit’ or ‘as scarce as salmon’. And why not? The reason is clear - it’s because we farm, and eat all of these animals. On the other hand, Pandas aren’t exactly common, we’re running short of elephant and rhinos are thin on the ground.
The solution is obvious. Let’s farm pandas. Let’s farm endangered animals - and, to make it sustainable, lets eat them too - and turn their hide into coats and shoes. Hey presto! No more endangered species. Imagine it - a night out on the sauce and you need a really big breakfast? Hippo bacon, with ostrich eggs and side of giraffe sausages. No more hangover.
Of course, the other option is to become vegan - and watch all the cows, sheep, horses, pigs chicken and so forth join their megafauna brethren on the critically endangered list. I realise that the burgeoning population of the world means that there might not be enough space for my excellent, and environmentally friendly plan - perhaps someone else could solve this problem though. I’ve had enough of thinking for one day.
And yes, Mammoth Steak does sound like an excellent idea too.
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 15:24 GMT bjr
Re: Anyone for lunch?
They must have been delicious, that's why mammoths went extinct, they were hunted into extinction by pre-farming people. If they had managed to hang on for another 3000 years they might have been OK. The Asian elephant is a domestic animal and they are doing just fine.
Getting eaten by people is by far the best evolutionary strategy for a species even if it sucks for the individual members of that species. There are probably 51billion lbs of chickens produced in the US alone each year (i.e about 10 billion birds), I'm sure that no wild species is anywhere close. The best strategy for individuals is to become pets. By far the best deal was made by cats, they must have had a really good lawyer. They agreed to sit on our laps occasionally at a time and place of their choosing, we get no say in the matter. In return we agreed to give them a house, as much as they want to eat, and a comprehensive health plan.
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 20:19 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Getting eaten by people is by far the best evolutionary strategy for a species
"bjr, it didn’t work so well for the passenger pigeon."
Yes, it seems the animal must also be easily domesticated, or at least have young cute enough to make humans want to domesticate it.
Look at all the livestock species: Cows, ducks, chickens, pigs, rabbits, etc.
All tasty, all have young that humans go, "Dawww!"
-
-
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 06:22 GMT Dodgy Geezer
Re: Anyone for lunch?
...The solution is obvious. Let’s farm pandas. Let’s farm endangered animals - and, to make it sustainable, lets eat them too ....
That's already been proposed, for rhinos. There are some very successful rhino farms.
These are hated by the environmentalists, who are trying to get them closed down. Because every environmentalist knows that the important thing is not the survival of the species, it's the survival of the environmentalists. And environmentalists WANT to have a load of cuddly animals on the verge of extinction - they get lots of grants that way....
-
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 14:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I want to say no...but
Isn't this a Pratchettism? "We're wizards, meddling with the fabric of space and time is what we do."
Now I'm over 60, and given the likely timescales, I'm beginning to have a touch of apres moi le déluge". Come on human race, you've more or less fscked yourself with carbon emissions, let's see what you can do in a bit of the small time you have left. It's too late to de-consume your way out of it, if there is a solution it's going to need science. You're going to need to genetically engineer just about all staples - if possible. Sideline the conservatives and go for it, because there isn't going to be a Rapture or a Deus ex machina.
-
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 14:35 GMT SDSmith
It's not about "what could go wrong"
We constantly advance science and do so at terrible risk in the areas of drugs, food science, physics and space but little is noticed. We get to genetics and that risk is somehow less tolerable because a few inventive authors have written trendy books that spawned a few movies.
ALL technical advances are a double edged sword and can be abused if not researched and handled correctly. We can look at our past and see how we had women painting radioactive chemicals onto watches....they died of cancer. Soldiers standing out and watching nuclear tests....not a good idea. Creating heroin and thinking that it would be a cure for morphine addiction. Testing LSD out on people just for grins and Cold War offensive potential. Bad things happen but, on balance, staying ignorant is FAR WORSE.
Creating a wooly mammoth could be just the right thing to do if it leads to a better understanding of the genome and how to control it. That research and the processes we discover could be similar to the discoveries associated with space travel.
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 15:24 GMT JimC
But *can* we create a wooly mammoth?
I strongly suspect that you cannot create a proper wooly mammoth without a female mammoth to grow it in, or without the gut flora it gets from its peers and all th rest of it. Then there's learned behaviour from the herd and you can carry on. I suspect all you'd have would be an artificial organism that had a vague resemblance to a mammoth. No matter what the children's pictures of Dawkinsianity might present, there seems to be an awful lot more to inheritance than just the DNA.
-
Friday 3rd July 2015 18:08 GMT Chris G
Re: But *can* we create a wooly mammoth?
Using Mammoth DNA with an Elephant surrogate might be an interesting test of whether or not there may be any inheritied behaviour from a long dead species, otherwise being a Mammoth teacher could make an interesting job for someone;
'Right! This is how not to run off a cliff when a bloke with a stick and a fur coat and a bunch of his mates are chasing you......
Also a useful way of turning Tundra into protein.
-
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 14:53 GMT PassingStrange
Re: A little-known fact
Stonehenge was built as a playpen for mammoths.
Quite the opposite. Fortunately, we have an interview from the time to tell us otherwise.
"Well, what is it anyway? A henge? Well, what's a henge? You may call it megalithic culture, I call it vandalism! I suppose you realise this is about the last nesting place for mammoths in the whole of Wessex?"
- Michael Flanders, "Built Up Area"
-
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 06:17 GMT Dodgy Geezer
What a load of Dodos' eggs...
...There are many animals on the edge of extinction that we should be helping instead.”...
What's so special about animals that are going extinct? In case the scientist in question hasn't read Darwin, let us point out that this is how evolution WORKS. Species develop to fit an niche, then die away as that niche dies. Trying to stop extinction is trying to stop evolution.
Humans change niches. We are already responsible for several species going extinct, but also many new species developing, as we make new environments in which they can live, or breed them for a specific purpose. So questions about mammoths are moot - we have already done everything which has been proposed. Just not with animals that size... yet...
-
Monday 6th July 2015 19:45 GMT JimC
Re: What a load of Dodos' eggs...
> What's so special about animals that are going extinct?
Well, normally one would hope that new species would be appearing at roughly the same rate as old ones are going extinct. If Smith's yellow beaked gull goes extinct and its ecological niche is picked up by Jones' orange beaked gull that's a wonder of nature. But if all the gulls go extinct and are replaced by life free polluted wastelands the world has become a more boring place.
-
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 11:57 GMT swampdog
In the spirit of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/03/lemur_impressive_plums/
I volunteer Pc ??? and PC !!! decades ago for knocking on my door 30 minutes after the road tax on a car I'd sold earlier that evening, ran out.
I could have done with that mammoth/lemur visualisation back then.
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 14:40 GMT PassingStrange
First rule of Mammoth club...
...If it can be done, someone, somewhere will do it. And not tell anyone until it's a done deal. And try to make a shed-load of money out of it, probably by trying to patent something key.
If we can at least keep the more reputable academics in the loop by doing it ourselves, we ought to.
-
Saturday 4th July 2015 18:14 GMT x 7
They could be the key ingredient in a "Live like a Neanderthal" theme park. Hunt them with spears, kill them and eat them just like the Neanderthals did. Hopefully we could clone cave bears and sabretooth cats as well to make the event more interesting.
I don't think they're a good long time food resource - after the real Neanderthals ate them, and they all died out (or got subsumed into modern man....who ate grains and veggies)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
