I can just picture pacts of socially maladjusted Woolly Mammoths roaming the streets late at night, getting drunk, getting into fights, shoplifting, graffiti, vandalism, smoking…
Where are their parents! (oh right, been dead for 10000 years)
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Science can now bring a species back from extinction.
- Thread starter Photonic
- Start date
Where are their parents! (oh right, been dead for 10000 years)
InformedIgnorance
Do you 'know' or believe?
More likely what they will be doing is attempting to produce an elephant-mammoth chimera which they can claim is a mammoth (and may even heave mammoth DNA but is still not a real mammoth). Heck we still cannot produce microscopic organisms from scratch yet... a mammoth is a little *cough* well a bit too ambitious just now. If they are able to obtain good enough DNA samples... well maybe its a possibility given that the elephant and mammoth are pretty close, but what is likely is that they will obtain only partial samples... perhaps they might attempt to splice them with elephant DNA, but will what results be viable? perhaps....
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Photonic
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It has been postulated that if a woolly mammoth existed today, it would be interbreed-able with the Indian Elephant. This is what they hope to use as it is the most genetically similar family member.
They can strengthen the DNA by successive cloning and breeding.
painted wolf
Grey Muzzle
You mean like the problems we are having with modern wild elephants?fantôme profane;2718208 said:
Elephants regularly terrorize villages... some even become hunters of humans. One female who lost a calf to humans in India not only hunted and killed dozens of people over several years but ate some of them in vengeance.
Two raging elephants invade Mysore, kill security guard in 3-hour rampage | Mail Online
Young male African elephants raised outside of normal herds have been known to go on rampages killing everything they encounter from rhinos, other elephants and getting into villages to kill humans.
An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times
The Delinquents - CBS News
Elephants are well known for the fact they can be driven insane and become serial killers.
wa:do
painted wolf
Grey Muzzle
Which would ruin any reasonable effort to actually bring back the mammoth. They wouldn't be mammoths but hybrids.
Elephants are quite distantly related to mammoths. It would be like calling Ligers a valid option to save tigers.
wa:do
Photonic
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As I said, successive cloning can bring it back to very close to the original thing, it may be a hybrid but for all intents and purposes on a genetic level, it is a woolly mammoth.
painted wolf
Grey Muzzle
If cloning worked that way.
And back breeding doesn't work, it's been tried several times.
Before you bring up things like adding Western mountain lion genes to the Florida mountain lion population.... those are subspecies, one of which was so inbred that extinction was a generation or at most two generations away.
The only way to have a 100% genetic mammoth is to have a complete mammoth genome. And have a baby born to mammoth parents to avoid eppigenetic factors.
Plus, elephants and mammoths are far removed from one another... if lions and tigers can't produce fertile offspring then mammoths and elephants wont be able to. Heck, African and Indian elephants can't successfully reproduce, the only recorded hybrid that made it through gestation died 12 days after birth.
Again, Ligers are not a way to prevent tigers from going extinct.
wa:do
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
I can assure you this is absolutely nothing new. I was excited the first few times it was promised, but I've heard it so many times now that the story sounds more like a scratched up record. Actually there was another some time over this last summer about it.
But there are so many problems, as PW mentioned, that the experiment would likely fail. And as explosive as elephants can be, they would be tampering with something that could potentially make a raging elephant seems like an irritated house cat. It would be very exciting to actually see, but it would also be very painful knowing the creature was created and doomed to a life of misery.
Harassment, ridicule, threats, and the rest of the ugliest side of humanity. While some would want to befriend such an individual, many more would want to keep it caged up and poke and prod at the specimen to study it, and even more would treat and view the individual as an abomination and try to kill the individual. A Neanderthal could visually pass as a modern-day homo sapien with hardly any problems, but the science behind cloning one would be creating an individual that has nothing but suffering to look forward to.
But there are so many problems, as PW mentioned, that the experiment would likely fail. And as explosive as elephants can be, they would be tampering with something that could potentially make a raging elephant seems like an irritated house cat. It would be very exciting to actually see, but it would also be very painful knowing the creature was created and doomed to a life of misery.
Harassment, ridicule, threats, and the rest of the ugliest side of humanity. While some would want to befriend such an individual, many more would want to keep it caged up and poke and prod at the specimen to study it, and even more would treat and view the individual as an abomination and try to kill the individual. A Neanderthal could visually pass as a modern-day homo sapien with hardly any problems, but the science behind cloning one would be creating an individual that has nothing but suffering to look forward to.
painted wolf
Grey Muzzle
woops...sorry I missed this.
1) being raised in a lab
2) the fight over if you qualify as having human rights or are the property of the lab that made you.
3) knowing you are the only member of your species... because the species that made you also killed off your people.
4) the immediate prejudice that comes from the word Neanderthal and the concept of cavemen. Stupid, violent, untrustworthy.
5) Knowing everyone will stare at you... you may even trigger the "uncanny valley" instinct in humans... making them prone to hate you.
6) having a different physiology so that no one can be sure of your medical treatment. Being a clone, needing extensive medical treatment because you will be sickly.
7) Never being able to really know about your ancestors.
8) Falling in love and having the chance of reciprocation being extremely low. Assuming you'll find our species attractive at all... in which case never being able to fall in love with someone.
9) Never ever being able to have a normal healthy life.
10) Geiko commercials.
Just a few quick thoughts
wa:do
ps... I'm skeptical that a Neanderthal could pass as a member of our species. Subconsciously we highly rate features like chins and eyes... both features that would be extremely different in a Neanderthal.
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Jeremy Mason
Well-Known Member
We had him for years guys!
Breathe
Hostis humani generis
Majority of those entered my mind as well. I don't think there's a way around this, is there?
Yeah; I do think that it could probably trigger the uncanny valley, as they look close to us, but significantly different.
Father Heathen
Veteran Member
I say they should clone whatever extinct DNA they can get their hands on, if not just for the ***** and giggles.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
Science can do a lot of good things, but when will they fix the really important things like solve the problem of world hunger, disease, droughts, floods, plagues etc etc etc
Science has never promised to do this. We use the scientific method to study phenonema. That's it.
It's the religious people who have been indicating for thousands of years that by praying to some spook or spooks or a few spooks in one that all the problems you mentioned on earth would be solved. All those prayers aimed at all those different spooks have delivered sweet blow all.
"Science" has not promised anything, but has delivered a lot of good things.
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camanintx
Well-Known Member
Science has given us larger crop yields, drought resistant crops, dams, levies and medicine. What has God given us?
painted wolf
Grey Muzzle
Probably about the same time people stop using religion and politics to justify them.
Too many people use religion as a way to justify letting others suffer.
wa:do
Photonic
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CynthiaCypher
Well-Known Member
I wonder what mammoth taste like. I hope they do clone one so we can eat it