We'll Bring Them Back from the Dead. What Could Go Wrong?
Okay, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the geeky child in me would love to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth recreated from long frozen DNA. And not just because it would be so kewl (so I often tell myself), we were probably the ones who wiped them out. In terms of environmental crimes, it's really no different than what humans did to the thylacine, the dodo bird, the carrier pigeon, and many others, right? I mean, their extinctions were only separated by several thousand years. Right?
No. First, is anyone under the illusion that we have enough genetic diversity to repopulate a whole species? The recreated animal would be a curiousity at best. Second, most animals - mammals especially - depend on parental emulation and learning as well as inherited instinctual traits. How exactly do you teach a mammoth what it needs to know, when you have never seen a live one? The result, as magnificent as it might be, would not be a mammoth, it would be our best impression of a mammoth. Good attraction for a zoo, but that's about it.
And now comes that other case of human extinction guilt that should give just about anyone pause: it turns out, we might have enough DNA to bring back the Neanderthals. Hmmm. Well, maybe we wiped them out, too. Maybe not, but given the track record of homo sapiens sapiens, I tend to be cynical and think we did. Of course this is different. This is a human species (setting aside the opinion of the Catholic church and other denominations here.) So in one sense, it was all the greater tragedy, and - maybe - an atrocity of our own prehistory. But of course, bringing one of them to life, just to poke and prod and observe, would simply be a new atrocity.
Also, what I said above about learned behavior must go quarduple for Neanderthals. "We want to learn if they could talk!" Yeah, guess what? You can raise a parrot among humans and teach it to "talk", that doesn't mean parrots in the wild are chatting about the weather. (This is not meant in any way to compare the intelligence of Neanderthals to that of parrots.)
I'm not one to reflexively oppose sicentific investigation. But just as dreams of technological utopias threaten disastrous consequences, so these attempts to undo what we have done threaten to create only more tragedy. It's something we don't want to admit, in our information driven world of backspace and backups and restoration of the last good configuration. In the real world, there are no do-overs.
Maybe that's the line the church should be preaching.
No. First, is anyone under the illusion that we have enough genetic diversity to repopulate a whole species? The recreated animal would be a curiousity at best. Second, most animals - mammals especially - depend on parental emulation and learning as well as inherited instinctual traits. How exactly do you teach a mammoth what it needs to know, when you have never seen a live one? The result, as magnificent as it might be, would not be a mammoth, it would be our best impression of a mammoth. Good attraction for a zoo, but that's about it.
And now comes that other case of human extinction guilt that should give just about anyone pause: it turns out, we might have enough DNA to bring back the Neanderthals. Hmmm. Well, maybe we wiped them out, too. Maybe not, but given the track record of homo sapiens sapiens, I tend to be cynical and think we did. Of course this is different. This is a human species (setting aside the opinion of the Catholic church and other denominations here.) So in one sense, it was all the greater tragedy, and - maybe - an atrocity of our own prehistory. But of course, bringing one of them to life, just to poke and prod and observe, would simply be a new atrocity.
Also, what I said above about learned behavior must go quarduple for Neanderthals. "We want to learn if they could talk!" Yeah, guess what? You can raise a parrot among humans and teach it to "talk", that doesn't mean parrots in the wild are chatting about the weather. (This is not meant in any way to compare the intelligence of Neanderthals to that of parrots.)
I'm not one to reflexively oppose sicentific investigation. But just as dreams of technological utopias threaten disastrous consequences, so these attempts to undo what we have done threaten to create only more tragedy. It's something we don't want to admit, in our information driven world of backspace and backups and restoration of the last good configuration. In the real world, there are no do-overs.
Maybe that's the line the church should be preaching.