- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.
Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.
Ben Lamm is a forty-three-year-old serial entrepreneur who has already had five “exits”—acquisitions of startups by other companies. He lives in Dallas; his estimated net worth is $3.7 billion. Lamm is dyslexic, and when he was younger he found reading difficult. He tended toward graphic novels and video games, but over time he taught himself, he says, to “read for concepts.” Among the interesting figures he has run across is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Church has endorsed using gene therapy to improve human resistance to radiation, thus facilitating interplanetary travel; he has also written about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals back into existence.
In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals.
Is de-extinction useful? From what I know, species will naturally deviate and diversify themselves with time, given enough distance and differences in habitat one species can become many, and exploit the homogeneity of their environment through new niches.
I’m totally for rewilding but the idea that we need X amounts of Y species seems like a fools errand. We didn’t need to manually invent species before, and any ecological system that necessitates we do so in the future is surely prone to collapse.
if you make a mess should you clean it up?
Of course, and to that extent we should do what we can to depollute environments, reverse emissions etc. to create the necessary conditions to rebalance ecology, but de-extinction is a different effort entirely.
Not only that, but I just wonder if there are more risks to such efforts which could interact in unexpected ways with the biospheres into which they’re reintroduced. These habitats, thanks to our impact on the climate and biodiversity of species over a century, are massively different. We can’t expect a successful or keystone species that has gone extinct to fulfill those same roles when reintroduced.
Of course I don’t want to suggest we take no stewardship into second nature, but rather that we recognise the role of dialectical naturalism in ecology. It would be much like trying to impose social or political systems on societies that exist at totally different stages in history and material conditions and expecting them to progress identical to eachother.