from Hacker News

De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

by 2mol on 2/22/23, 2:25 PM with 89 comments

• by leidenfrost on 2/22/23, 3:22 PM

  I don't see the point of de-extinction other than naturist nostalgia.

  The problem around de-extinction is that you can't just shoehorn a new species into a habitat that already filled the void left by a past extinction.

  If some marsupial in Australia got extinct because it was replaced by feral cats, then that habitat won't welcome that marsupial anymore. And there's nothing we can do about it. Even if we somehow people organize themselves to hunt all the feral cats to extinction, it will either be replaced by new post-domestic cats or either some other, equally capable and already existing predator.

  The habitat wasn't destroyed nor hurt in anyway. It just changed. It changed the same way it changed when all non-avian dinosaurs got extinct and then replaced with mammals and birds that filled the void left by them.

• by rcMgD2BwE72F on 2/22/23, 3:05 PM

  >Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species, rather than de-extinct animals that have been dead for thousands of years. Maybe that’s true, but it’s extremely unlikely that this $150M would have gone to conservation otherwise! If rich people want to spend their money on de-extinction, and bolster reproductive technologies in the meantime, then we say “let ‘em.”

  There's a French idiom for that, "pompiers pyromanes", which means arsonist firemen. Seems appropriate.

• by vinaypai on 2/22/23, 3:17 PM

  This reads like a typical hatchet job with the usual fallacy of extrapolating from "didn't immediately succeed" to "is impossible".

• by remote_phone on 2/22/23, 3:49 PM

  This author spends a lot of time pooh poohing the idea without considering the fact that research could result in techniques that don’t exist right now. That’s the whole point in science and investing in research!

  How about instead of bemoaning how “money could be better spent on conservation”, the author could pursue that route (they won’t) and let people who are interested in research do what they want to do?

• by ramraj07 on 2/22/23, 3:11 PM

  I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil - it’s as evil as the concept of death itself; killing something is evil (or is it not? Outside humans even this isn’t considered unnatural), but something dying naturally is not.

  Clearly many animals have gone extinct because of humans (many memorable ones before humanity developed a sufficiently profound collective consciousness that could ponder about this), but I don’t see how there’s any moral, ethical or natural urge to repent and offer reparations for this. Species die, that’s the natural order of things for species in general and if this round of mass extinction is humanity induced then we should focus on reducing its scale instead of trying to go undo it as if that absolves us of anything.

  This says nothing about the scientific ability to do this, anyway, which as this article points is mostly BS. My general experience is if you try to do something that doesn’t make full logical economical and moral sense, you end up with this charlatan group. Crypto is another example of the same.

• by mkoubaa on 2/22/23, 3:14 PM

  It isn't what the author intended but I come away from reading this more confident that mammoth de-extinction will happen.

• by DarkContinent on 2/22/23, 3:36 PM

  Is there someone on HN who can speak to how fast gene editing technology is improving? I was a bit skeptical of the author's claim that construction of a mammoth genome would require 5000 years, but I couldn't find any information in a cursory search on what the technology improvement speed is.

• by denton-scratch on 2/22/23, 4:34 PM

  > after scientists cloned an animal and watched it die, moments later, from a lung defect

  Moments after they cloned it? The immediate result of cloning is a single cell, not something with a lung. So that single cell grew into an organism with lungs, in moments?

  I stopped reading a few paragraphs after that.

• by M95D on 2/22/23, 4:04 PM

  I think the author missed one of the most important points: genetic variability to obtain the minimum viable population.[1]

  Let's say they make a perfect clone of an extinct animal. It can't reproduce by itself. It needs a mate. Let's say they clone a second animal of the other gender. Let's say they reproduce (low chance of that, but let's say they do). All their descendants need mates too, other than their siblings, otherwise it leeds to inbreeding.[2]

  They need dozens if not hundreds of different individuals to make a viable population that doesn't go extinct again.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression

• by xeeeeeeeeeeenu on 2/22/23, 3:59 PM

  >Captain Cook’s Bean Snail [...] Today, they live only in zoos.

  Sadly, the last member of that particular species died in 2016, in Edinburgh Zoo[1]. However, they had some success with other Partula snails[2].

  [1] - https://islandbiodiversity.com/faba.htm

  [2] - https://www.rzss.org.uk/conservation/our-projects/project-se...

• by TheCaptain4815 on 2/22/23, 3:54 PM

  I've always wondered what the end goal was for animal preservation. Halting evolution and keeping the same ecosystem around forever?

• by sklivvz1971 on 2/22/23, 3:15 PM

  > Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species

  Ah, ye old whataboutism canard... it seems to be forgetting that this technology would have an immense value by itself!

  > True de-extinction is nowhere near possible.

  I'm not sure I can parse the convoluted English here. Are we saying it's impossible? I see no evidence in the article that it is correct. Are we saying it's really hard? Sure, but no one claimed otherwise.

  I am not the kind of person that tends to have starry-eyed faith into any appealing idea, and perhaps it is truly hard to "resurrect" a dead species. However it seems to me that it's obviously doable at some level: Craig Venter has created a synthetic bacterium so I don't see why a particularly simple life form can't be "de-extincted".

  I realize though that multicellular organism are much harder and quite far away from our current capabilities, but impossible? I don't see why.

• by danrocks on 2/22/23, 2:58 PM

  I’m not, and don’t call me Shirley.

• by Ruq on 2/22/23, 3:42 PM

  Jurassic Park anyone?

• by v3ss0n on 2/23/23, 3:51 AM

  Therenos 2.0?

• by jonnylynchy on 2/22/23, 2:58 PM

  I AM serious. And don't call me Shirley.

• by sebastianconcpt on 2/22/23, 3:09 PM

  Don't we had a lot of movies explaining how bad this could go? Don't we had enough self inflicted catastrophes to keep us entertained that we need another disruptive one?

• by mrozbarry on 2/22/23, 4:15 PM

  I think any attempt at "de-extinction" is quite literally a statement of disbelief of evolution. A core tenant (at least from my perspective) of evolution is survival of the fittest. I agree with all the other comments mentioning that the voids that extinct animals left have been filled and their ecosystems have changed, but that is different from their ecosystems being destroyed. Accept change, and move on. Also, humanity has a track record of trying to play god and that not going too well.