"... within several years.... Some researchers suggest that wooly mammoths helped transformed the now-mossy tundra into a fertilized grassland; if the Frankenstein version were able to achieve this feat again, the tundra could serve as a buffer against erosion and a potential carbon-dioxide sink to combat global warming.... 'Is it humane to produce an animal whose biology we know so little about? Who gets to decide whether they can be set loose, potentially to change the ecosystems of tundras in profound ways?'... 'You don’t have a mother for a species that — if they are anything like elephants — has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time... Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that they’re being looked after?'"
It not really about introducing them into the wild though, is it? It's more of
a P.T. Barnum thing — creating something for us to gape at.
Either way, it's ethically wrong. It's easy to see.
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63 comments:
Seems like at some point I watched a movie about this...
didn't the make a movie about this? Didn't it go BADLY?
I say we let him do it provided he keeps the first couple dozen confined to the Harvard/Allston campus complex...
Mammoths were so called because of their big breasts.
Biology has no ethics beyond one goal: replication of DNA. The mammoth "mommas" will be the surrogate elephants carrying the hybrids to term.
Ethics, smethics. Humans are the ultimate predator and have never sincerely cared about ethics for other animals (and often not cared about other racial/ethnic groups) for more than moment.
Our cows, pigs, turkeys, and chickens often don't look much like the natural wild versions. We grow and slaughter them by the millions every day, month, and year.
Don't call it a mammoth, call it an "arctic-friendly, climate-change-enabled farm animal." Keep them in pens and eat them and it'll be just fine. They may prove to be quite tasty, they open the door to organic ivory production, and elephant feet make great wastebaskets too.
https://www.prices4antiques.com/Taxidermy-Elephant-Foot-Wastebasket-14-inch-D9741498.html
Mmmmmm...a double cheeseburger would hit the spot now...am I being sarcastic? I don't know!
The ability for us to resurrect a species driven to extinction largely by us could be seen as morally good. Obviously this is not the situation for the mammoth.
“Either way, it's ethically wrong. It's easy to see.”
Ethics? Scientists? Hey, if it combats “global warming” then it must be done. Crisis!
Jerry Coyne also mentioned Barnum.
"This project is fraught with so many problems that the likelihood of producing a woolly mammoth is close to zero.
In fact it IS zero, because they’re not going to resurrect that extinct creature."
Biology has no ethics beyond one goal: replication of DNA. The mammoth "mommas" will be the surrogate elephants carrying the hybrids to term.
I also just read about the famous/infamous Winklevoss twins investing in some research to bring back prehistoric megafauna to- get this- combat climate change.
Between the wooly mammoth and the prehistoric megafauna, I'll quote another favorite: "What could possibly go wrong?".
The mammoth is going to need something to eat, no? Whatever comes out of this research, I can assure you that there will be Floridians who think it's neat to own a mammoth-cloned beast for awhile. Then they'll get tired of having them around and release them all into the Everglades where, like everything else that should not be in North America, they will multiply, grow, eat the native species, and change the demographics of Florida forever.
Florida man stories will abound in the coming years.
Althouse said...
Either way, it's ethically wrong. It's easy to see.
"Ethics, schmethics -- I want my wooly mammoth man!"
Why is it readily apparent that the manipulation of elephant embryos is wrong, but not readily apparent that destroying human embryos is wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
The reference to global warming feels perfunctory (performative?). Is there any science project looking for funding that does NOT mention a global warming aspect?
What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, in a few years they'll be doing this to humans to select for intelligence (or lack thereof), height, hair color...
If we were actually in danger of having too much Carbon in the atmosphere this might be a good idea.
Or if their stupid plan to expand green space around the north pole had any chance of actually working. Macro fauna can't do this sort of thing. It would be much more likely to work with an earthworm variant.
Also ethically wrong would be taking Billions of Dollars from the Chinese regime through your son who was plied with underage Chinese sex slaves. Not trying to make mammoths.
First people whine about extinction then they whine about reversing extinction. Sheesh.
Besides Mammoth might be tasty. You never know.
Lazy Althouse. It's not easy to see how this might be immoral to make extinct species roam the earth once again.
Is Dr. Fauci involved??
Drago said...
What could possibly go wrong?
We would not have automobiles with this kind of thinking.
gilbar said...
didn't the make a movie about this? Didn't it go BADLY?
Hollywood doesn't really know what they are talking about.
The book got into it a lot better.
Even then they left out modern weapons. Dinosaurs would do very poorly against armed robots.
We have little to fear from macro fauna generated in this manner. Killer robots and virus/bacteria threats are far more dangerous.
" Some researchers suggest that wooly mammoths helped transformed the now-mossy tundra into a fertilized grassland"
And if some researchers jumped off a cliff would you follow them? (Say that in your best Mom voice)
Ethics. It’s what separates us from the animals, the beasts of burden.
The tundra is big. How many beasts for how many years to make this happen? (Or is "beasts" somehow pejorative, even for mammoths?)
Enigma said...
Ethics, smethics. Humans are the ultimate predator and have never sincerely cared about ethics for other animals
Wait a Minute! Wait just a Goshdarned MINUTE!!
Are You SAYING, that there's going to be a season? That we'll be able to get licences?
BRING IT ON!!! BRING ON THE MAMMOTH HUNTS!!
I hear there is a lab in Wuhan that can help with elephant gain of function.
But screw the mammoth. Give me a Mothman, woolly or not.
Think of it!
If they make them one at a time, EACH OF US will get the opportunity to
SHOOT THE LAST LIVING MAMMOTH!!
Asian and North American human hunters were likely responsible for their extinction. Bringing back a few herds to wander the wilderness of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia seems perfectly fine to me.
Biology has no ethics beyond one goal: replication of DNA.
True, nature will do what nature will do as part of its nature. It is not unethical for a lion to eat you. He's only doing what lions do.
But this has nothing to do with that. This is human action -- which is subject to ethics -- not biology acting on its own.
Nature chose the mammoths for extinction.
The earth these mammals inhabited has been gone for tens of thousands of years. Only one of the predator species that kept their population in check still exists. All in all, not a good idea.
Wait a minute! Maybe we could clone a few predator species from back then. How about bringing back Smilodon and the Dire Wolf, too? What could possibly go wrong???
Hey hasn't this already been done with respect to Neanderthals? Didn't I hear good old Scranton Joe referring to those who disagree with him as "Neanderthals"--or at least "Neanderthal thinkers". So been there done that--no need to recreate wooly mammoths.
"Some researchers suggest that wooly mammoths helped transformed [sic] the now-mossy tundra into a fertilized grassland; if the Frankenstein version were able to achieve this feat again, the tundra could serve as a buffer against erosion and a potential carbon-dioxide sink to combat global warming"
So many maybe's.
Unethical? Definitely. Stupid? Colossally so.
Finally, Rosie O'Donnell will be able to have a look-alike roommate.
Scientists like to do things like this just to see if they can. Rather like the nuclear bomb. They just wanted to see if their theories worked out.
Then it's ohhh nooo, what did we do.
The "lust of the eye," I believe Augustine called it.
There were American mammoths being hunted by the ancestors of the Pueblo community before the Southwest began to dry up and warm up as the glaciers retreated - say 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. We might be able to clone a mammoth as we cloned Dolly the sheep. But their habitat in the continental United States is gone. Picture yourself in a heavy woolly coat in Death Valley. Or even in North Dakota in the summer. And then too, these wooly mammoths are going to be raised by African elephant mommas and trained for the veldt or the jungle and then put in Alaska or the Mackenzie Delta. How's that going to work? But worst of all is the suggestion that they be raised in Harvard Yard and imprint on Harvard professors - entitled, arrogant and 12 feet tall at the shoulder. Yikes
Besides Mammoth might be tasty. You never know.
I remember it as being pretty gamey.
Some researchers suggest that wooly mammoths helped transform the now-mossy tundra into a fertilized grassland
Some researchers are always suggesting something or other.
That seems like a very flimsy reason -- here I channel hundreds of science fiction films -- To Play God!
Or if their stupid plan to expand green space around the north pole had any chance of actually working.
Wouldn't that cause the oceans to rise, and wasn't that a bad thing up until recently?
"Lazy Althouse. It's not easy to see how this might be immoral to make extinct species roam the earth once again."
I do not presume to speak for Althouse, however:
Lazy
I wanna be lazy
I'm longing to lay in the sun
With no work to be done
Under that awning
They call the sky
Stretching and yawning
And let the world go drifting by
I wanna peep
Through the deep
Tangled wildwood
Counting sheep
'Til I sleep
Like a child would
With a great big valise full
Of books to read where it's peaceful
While I'm killing time, being lazy.
I say it's temporal eugenics, and I say the hell with it.
The mammoth "mommas" will be the surrogate elephants carrying the hybrids to term.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the mother and child remain together for around 16 years. I don't think the tundra is elephant friendly, otherwise they could just move some of them there and wouldn't need to go through the mammoth-making. At some point, they will have to break the mother/child bond. At what age? How do you do that when the mammoth is young enough to adapt but old enough to leave its mother?
That "mother-infant" quote is really a low-key attack on the Buttigieg and husband baby photo
Althouse said...
Either way, it's ethically wrong. It's easy to see.
--------
how does Professora and others see ethics coming into issue here? does not compute for me!
It’s more “bad idea” than “bad science” in my opinion. The science is solid. Choosing to do these things is folly. If we can’t even accurately predict whether we are entering warming or cooling period geologically speaking, then taking extreme measures that might mitigate climate effects is dangerous and morally wrong. Have the courage to condemn dumb shit.
Swift's Projectors, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, the new super-virus which probably originated in a lab: don't worry, some day a lot of people will benefit from this research.
P.T. Barnum: I'll show you something weird you've never seen before, and charge you admission. Who knows what the scientific value is? Did it teach the public to care about elephants when they could see them in a circus, like the famous Jumbo who suffered many health problems from the way he lived? P.T. kept trying to keep beluga whales alive for a show, and they kept dying. To his credit, I guess, he diverted salt water, I think from the East River, to his "museum" (pseudo-scientific or cultural name). This didn't work. When the museum burned down, the beluga whale inside was boiled alive.
Are the marine shows always morally dubious? My brother and sister-in-law live in Victoria, B.C., and nearby you can go where there was a marine show in the fairly recent past ("Sealand of the Pacific"). Some extremely tame seals or sea lions were left behind, and they still beg for food. There were killer whales there, and there was a violent attack. A young woman fell into the water, and then was repeatedly dragged under water by three different killer whales until she drowned. The three killer whales were sold and moved in 1992. Where, you ask? To marine shows in the U.S.--two to Seaworld Orlando, a mother and baby to Seaworld San Antonio. One of the whales that was moved to Florida was directly responsible for the death of a trainer in 2010 ("Florida Whale responsible for Needless Death"), and was probably responsible for a death in 1999. (See "Killer Whale Attack"--lots of incidents in marine shows).
"The reference to global warming feels perfunctory (performative?)."
It's just like what was done with the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002. If you had a business proposal you wanted implemented at your company, you just added that somehow it was needed for SOX compliance. Before that it was Y2K and before that...I'd have to check.
"Lazy Althouse. It's not easy to see how this might be immoral to make extinct species roam the earth once again."
Perhaps you'd expound on that if YOU weren't so intellectually lazy.
"Of course, in a few years they'll be doing this to humans to select for intelligence (or lack thereof), height, hair color..."
We human have been doing that for millennia.
"First people whine about extinction then they whine about reversing extinction. Sheesh."
First people whine about white-flight then they whine about gentrification. Sheesh.
How can you just leave me standing
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (she's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
Achilles: "We would not have automobiles with this kind of thinking."
I'm thinking beyond automobiles and wooly mammoths.
Lloyd W. Robertson said...
P.T. Barnum: I'll show you something weird you've never seen before, and charge you admission
I Keep wanting to see this Egress i've heard so much about;
But every time i pay my money to get in; and follow the signs... I somehow end up outside
Today I am imagining Trump as a wooly mammoth, transforming the landscape. A lot of people want to make him extinct.
I suppose that while the dire wolf and saber toothed tigers are long gone, polar and brown bears would be more than willing to take up the mantle of predators on the Mammoth, and without their 'culture' they might have a difficult time surviving to the point where a culture develops. On the other hand, I don't see the harm of bringing them back in protected circumstances and seeing what develops.
Biology 201:
There's a significant part of a creature's makeup that comes from the non-nuclear-DNA part of the egg that mom donates.
Starting with the mitochondria. But it goes on from there.
The parents all do a fair amount of methylation of the nuclear DNA that gets added to the sperm / egg.
We have no clue what momma wooly mammoth had in her egg's cytoplasm.
We have no idea what the methylation patterns were for the DNA in the sperm and egg.
Given what's currently known about molecular biology, I expect any such attempt to be a total failure.
I think it will take them several rounds of utter failure until they might get to the level of epic failure. Because I expect it to take at least that long to actually get something to survive long enough to be born.
Assuming this is allowed to go though, I expect we'll learn a lot. And that most of it will start with "we had no f'ing clue that ...."
gilbar said...
Think of it!
If they make them one at a time, EACH OF US will get the opportunity to
SHOOT THE LAST LIVING MAMMOTH!!
Something like that hadn't even crossed my mind- but imagine how much each could auctioned off for. And what groups it benefit! Not to mention profits to the company that makes them.
I had read that the extinction of mammoths by humans resulted in the expansion of Northern forests in Russia and Canada, not of tundra.
This is precisely why scientists need a liberal arts education.
Didn't he ever read H.G. Wells?
Drago said...
Achilles: "We would not have automobiles with this kind of thinking."
I'm thinking beyond automobiles and wooly mammoths.
The world will be interesting when people control how tall they are and how muscular they are and the size of their reproductive organs.
It will be even more interesting when they can walk around in dinosaur bodies or dragon bodies or robots.
If we survive that long as a species.
AOC might look good wearing a wooly mammoth fur coat to the charity fundraiser for Zoo New York.
Greg the Class Traitor, you ought to have a chat with Mr Church. Sounds like you could learn 'im somethin'.
@LA_Bob I desperately hope that Church is very aware of the epigenetic issues, and has some sort of plan to work up to "correct wooly mammoth epigenetics"
If not, all they're going to make is sad failures
Mary Beth, I appreciate the difficulty of breaking an elephantine, mammoth mother/offspring bond, and doing so in such a way that the hybrid mammoth children can and will effectively utilize the tundra for which they were resurrected, but long before then I also appreciate a herd of elephants, looking at the first resurrected, newborn mammoth and all thinking, "My goodness, that is one ugly baby."
Wait - I thought that large mammals pooping and passing gas all over the place were bad for the environment!
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