What to bring back

Well, first, a person is more than just genes, they are a product of their environment, education, experiences, etc. etc. etc. So if you did clone Einstein, there is no way his clone would be anything like him. Might just be an average joe who works as a greasemonkey at some garage.

Second, if a species was wiped out due to Mankind's stupidity and not because of it's own inability to adapt to changing environments, then I wonder if it wouldn't behoove us as a steward of this planet to try to clone extinct species. How about the dodo. I hear they were fun to have around.

Dododeyo dododeyo.

Cloning Einstein would only produce a sibling of Einstein. Most likely his slow brother Eduardo, who was never talked about in public.

If the planet deemed a species done (ie: T-Rex et al) then cloning would be a potentially foolish mistake. If human mistakes caused it (ie: the California Condor) then I'd say okey dokey. But IF and only IF all the bugs were worked out in the cloning process. It's very iffy science right now, and all products of cloning die very early, and suffer many afflictions.

That's not to say, naturally, that the future wouldn't change things. But again, as we talked about in the "repopulating the world"/"DNA challenges" thread, cloning too much will produce a very narrowed gene pool.


(the preceding was merely an opinion, of course)

MidnightMuse said:

If the planet deemed a species done (ie: T-Rex et al) then cloning would be a potentially foolish mistake.

Click to expand...

Whoa, whoa, whoa! By the most commonly accepted account, it was not the planet, but rather a planetoid that deemed T-rex "done."

Just sayin'

alaskamatt17 said:

Whoa, whoa, whoa! By the most commonly accepted account, it was not the planet, but rather a planetoid that deemed T-rex "done."

Just sayin'

Click to expand...

Were you there?

(just jokin') Until scientists can stop changing their minds every ten years about things like asteroids, ice-ages, cholesterol levels and Pluto, the jury's still out.

MidnightMuse said:

If human mistakes caused it (ie: the California Condor) then I'd say okey dokey.

Click to expand...

Huh? I thought there were still a few of those poking around?

Jurassic what? I say clone Teddy Roosevelt.

I feel the need to speak up for the poor, much-maligned dodo. Though it was a fairly silly looking bird, and though they were indeed particularly vulnerable to human influence, what must be remembered is that it was perfectly adapted for the situation it evolved in. In fact, similar (but less famous) animals can be found on many of the worlds islands--there's flightless cormorants, for example. One may wonder why a bird would evolve to be so 'ungainly', and why it would want to lose the obvious advantages of flight, but in reality, the dodo was well-suited to its island life. Flight requires huge energy expenditures, so in a situation where wings aren't a requirement for survival, it is to the birds advantage to ditch them. The dodo was good at surviving-- at least until people arrived, but the same can be said of a lot of animals. A lot of other flightless species today are highly threatened for similar reasons; think of the kiwi, or the kakapo. In the absence of humans, though, they're pretty successful, and the reason they are still around today and not the dodo is probably not because they were in any way 'better evolved' than the dodo (well, except for being nocturnal--that can be pretty helpful against us diurnal humans). Its probably in part because of larger starting populations, and because people began conservation efforts to save them (alas, the dodo was wiped out before conservation).

Even flighted birds can find themselves in the same situation as the dodo. Hawaiian birds evolved in a setting entirely free of snakes, and now that the snake has been introduced, it is taking a heavy toll and endangering huge numbers of species--the birds have no natural mechanisms to deal with the threat. Sure, they can fly away, but the problem is that the snakes prey on the eggs, and nesting in trees doesn't stop them. So while flighted birds may have survived the introduction of ground-based predators that knocked out the dodo (pigs, rats, etc) by eating their eggs, they are vulnerable to introduced predators in the exact same way. You can't blame a species for not being adapted to face predators that don't exist in its home environment; unfortunately, this puts island species at a high risk. My point though is that the dodo wasn't some kind of 'evolutionary fluke' that would've died off soon anyway--at least, not any more than any other island animal (where there is always the inherent risks of a small isolated population).

As for cloning an extinct species--especially a recently extinct one--I see no problem with it. In fact, it would probably be good if we could bring back very recently extinct species, as these species have left gaps in their natural ecosystems--their niches still exist, they just aren't being filled (or they're being filled by invasive species). Heck, in some cases, scientists are coming to realize that the gaps left by megafauna that went extinct a thousand years ago are still present today--like in madagascar, there are plants that seem to have no natural mechanism to distribute their seeds, but in fact had probably used the extinct giant lemurs to distrubute them.

The problem with the idea of 'reviving' a species, though, is that just because you can clone an individual or two, doesn't mean you've brought back a species. You need a lot more than that to produce a viable genetic population, and unfortunately, in most cases I don't think there's enough DNA sources left to ever make that really happen. There's only a couple of thylacine sources left that are preserved correctly, for example. Cloning extinct species may help us to understand them, and may be great for zoos, but in a lot of cases there just might not be enough we can do to bring them back. Not to mention that without a parent to rear them, release into the wild wouldn't be easy.

That said, I hope we find a way to make it work anyway--maybe private collectors who've been hoarding their illegally-gotten trophies will come out of the woodwork, if they're promised to have no penalties. It would be really great if we could try to fix some of our own mistakes. Probably the best use of cloning though is to help us bolster species that are still around, but are on the verge of extinction.

PS. This is a very cool thread. ^_^ (you can tell I'm a bio major, can't you? XD ).

MidnightMuse said:

Were you there?

(just jokin') Until scientists can stop changing their minds every ten years about things like asteroids, ice-ages, cholesterol levels and Pluto, the jury's still out.

Click to expand...

What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Give T-rex the benefit of the doubt until that jury you mentioned comes back with a verdict.

On a more serious note, the Chicxulub impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico has been dated to the K-T boundary, and it happens to be pretty large. Even though dinosaur populations were on the decline for a few million years before the center of the range scientists have dated the crater to, it still seems plausible that the impact might have been a primary factor in dinosaur extinction.

a tree of night said:

Huh? I thought there were still a few of those poking around?

Click to expand...

The California Condor was on the BRINK of extinction - the only surviving members were in human captivity. Careful breeding and study brought them back.

This was a species nature wasn't targeting for extinction, but rather had fallen victim to man's influence. Therefore it was right to bring it back from the brink. Now their numbers are holding steady in the wild.

JA Konrath has a free ebook with this theme on his website called "The List". Basically a number of historically good persons (jefferson, einstien, lincoln) and some very bad guys (attila, jack the ripper) are cloned. The babies are adopted out and don't know their "ancestry." Once grown, a couple of the clones figure things out and dig into why it was done with dramatic results. It was an amusing read. I especially loved that the Lincoln clone became a used car salesman.

I'd just written a short story - in fact, posted it in SYW - about a clone of Hitler who really didn't turn out as expected. Twins often turn out quite different (my father's identical twin acts and grooms so differently that my mother-in-law failed believed them to be fraternal twins), and I don't think a clone would even have the same fingerprints or retina pattern. The only real use I would see someone trying to have for human cloning would be trying to make a child look like a known quantity (a deceased sibbling, some celibrity, even oneself).

Some of the possibilities I've mentioned are a bit repugnant, but my main objection to human cloning is the number of cloned babies they'd inevitably make with severe defects before getting it right - if they got it right.

Gandhi, people, please. It's G-A-N-D-H-I.

You may be able to clone a replica of a famous historical figure, but what about their soul or spirit? I realize that I'm throwing metaphysics or spiritualism into the mix, but that's what I write about.