genetic engineering

Shall we bring back the passenger pigeon? …Sure: I hear that they’re tasty.

Via AosHQ, meet a controversy you may not be aware of: the politics of using genetic engineering to recreate extinct species. Although admittedly the NYT thought that it was just writing about passenger pigeons.

More pressing to conservationists is a practical anxiety: Money. De-extinction is a flashy new competitor for patronage. As the conservationist David Ehrenfeld said at a Revive & Restore conference: “If it works, de-extinction will only target a very few species and is extremely expensive. Will it divert conservation dollars from tried-and-true conservation measures that already work, which are already short of funds?”

[snip] Continue reading Shall we bring back the passenger pigeon? …Sure: I hear that they’re tasty.

Why we might bring back extinct animals.

To answer Jazz Shaw’s question of what reason there might be to resurrect some of these species: I assume that mammoth meat is tasty. Certainly our ancestors thought so, given that they hunted the species to extinction. Mammoth, moa, dodo, passenger pigeon… the list, as they say, goes on. As for the Tasmanian tiger… well, fur rugs are nice.

Oh, stop wincing. If minks didn’t produce such nice fur we’d have destroyed that vicious little species centuries ago. Besides, I don’t apologize that my species is the apex predator of the planetary food chain; humanity went to considerable trouble to get to this point, and – speaking as a human – that’s just fine by me. If other species want to make an issue of it, they’re welcome to demonstrate an ability to do calculus any time that they like.

Our Neural Chernobyl, Revisited.

I was reminded of this story (found in Bruce Sterling’s short story collection Globalhead) while reading this article (via Glenn Reynolds) on DIY genengineering. The author assumes increased ease of home genetics lab work, considers malicious intent, and concludes:

Big species are not the problem. Sure, in popular science fiction movies T.Rex or a Raptor rips apart a bunch of people. But big species make big targets for rifles and fishing harpoons. Plus, lots of guys would love to hunt down the genetically engineered dino that is terrorizing suburbs. It is the littler ones that are too numerous to easily control that pose the bigger threat. Genetically engineered species could really upend whole ecosystems by being very effective at outcompeting other species.

Scientists have discovered some of the genetic variations that make influenza strains more lethal and will in time identify genetic variations that make other pathogens more or less dangerous. Therefore another future threat comes in the form of a genetically engineered massive killer pandemic for humans. The same sort of threat exists for other species. Imagine a flu that would kill most sheep or cows or pigs. Or imagine some genetically engineered pathogen that would wipe out assorted wild species. This will probably become technically doable.

Probably, but it’s not what I worry about. Continue reading Our Neural Chernobyl, Revisited.