One could argue that we DO need mammoths, or at least their ilk. The world we modern humans live in is one of relatively low biodiversity, even when you rewind a couple thousand years and look at our pre-agrarian world. Sure, North America had millions of bison; but that wasn’t the ‘natural’ state of things. North America, Europe, Asia – they each had dozens of species of megafauna, and their absence has changed the world.
Much of Eurasia and North America was covered in a biome that doesn’t exist anymore – the mammoth steppe. Just like the African Savanna, where elephants knock down trees to keep grasslands open, the mammoth steppe relied on the megafauna for its existence.
It’s hard to grasp just how big of a deal this biome was. Most of the northern hemisphere was covered in it, from Spain to Siberia and in North America as well. This massive area was as productive in terms of plant productivity and animal biomass as the African grasslands are now, but over a far larger landmass. It would be simply unimaginable today.
While mammoths aren’t necessarily required for this, projects to restore the megafauna to large expanses of land have been quite successful. Locally extinct animals have been reintroduced from other populations and this has improved the health of ecosystems all over the world.
But we can’t ignore the fact that even if we all pull together and restore nature and wildlife to the levels they were at before human civilization really took off 10,000 years ago, we’d still be looking at a devastated, diminished ecosystem. The mammoth steppe was the largest biome on land for over 100,000 years before it was suddenly extinguished 12,000 years ago. Was our planet “healthy” then?
With the way global warming is going ISTM we need to be planning more for camels & ostriches to be roaming the arctic. Mammoths would quickly die of heatstroke.
Or at least the above would be be true-ish by the time we’ve developed the tech to regenerate mammoths and bred enough to release into the wild.
I know that there a lot of learned behaviors in higher mammals but some of it seems instinctual.
I was watching my cat yesterday. He was a rescue. He was abandoned by his mom at 3weeks old. Yet whenever he passes our other cats food bowl he try’s to bury it. Scraping at the fridge or the vinyl floor until he’s satisfied it’s covered.
He’s very thorough at burying his poop too. Something I know wasn’t taught to him.
So if I’m understanding this thread, that burying thing came from his DNA, right?
True, but reducing it to just discrete details of behavior like this is understating the case. The fundamental structure of the brain, the way cats think has a substantial innate component. If you take a newborn kitten and raise it as a dog with a surrogate dog family and dog peers, it will certainly not behave like a typical kitten, but it will not grow up to behave quite like a dog either. It has a cat brain, not a blank slate.
And this applies to humans too. As humans living among humans, we are sensitive to the differences among us. A wide variety in the way humans think and behave is apparent to us, because there is no totally alien way of thinking of similar intelligence to compare with - there are no aliens walking among us. We tend not to notice how much humans all share in the way our brains work. We don’t know exactly how much of the way we think is innate, and of course it’s a matter of some controversy. But it’s undoubtedly true that some fairly substantial amount of the structure of our brains, just like all animals, is encoded in our DNA. Beyond just the level of intelligence, it means something important about the way we think to have a human brain encoded by human DNA, just as it means something important to have a cat brain encoded by cat DNA.
Absolutely. Also washing after meals, liking high spots, liking small spots, pushing things around, killing things, etc. There is a reason funny cats on Youtube in Mongolia act like funny cats on Youtube in Montana, and cat culture has nothing to do with it.
But we do have “aliens” that walk among us–adults who can’t recognize human faces and/or human emotions, for example–something most humans have mastered by the time they are toddlers or younger because that is part of the instinctive wiring of their brains, but for some the wiring is damaged and they have to work hard at it all of their lives, possibly never succeeding. I could make a list of behavioral traits that appear effortless and innate for the vast majority of humans but which come at great difficulty or not at all for a small subset, but any of you could make up a list of your own
This is the first time that being partly faceblind has gotten me called not human.
Sometimes I would like to disavow the species. But whether you can tell across the internet or not, I am human.
Humans vary a whole lot in the way they think. But we vary within the human range. That’s not in the least the same thing as thinking like a cat, or an elephant; let alone an extraterrestrial.
And that is a complete and utter mischaracterization of both my post and the post I was quoting. It wasn’t about “people thinking like animals” it was about people who lack inborn instinctive behaviors that the vast majority exhibit.
I will grant that you didn’t mean that like I read it. But whatever comparison Sacks made, humans are still not presenting a “totally alien way of thinking” (quote from Riemann, not from you; but it’s the one you responded to by saying “we do have “aliens” that walk among us”.)
– and I didn’t take you to be saying “people thinking like animals” in some sort of derogatory sense (we all think like animals, we are all animals); but to mean, thinking like some other species entirely. My point is that humans think overall like humans, even if not in all ways like the majority of humans; and that unusual humans can’t be taken as an example of not thinking like humans at all.
But you are attacking a point that nobody was making!
Riemann’s point: We don’t have anybody that lacks human instincts to show us what are human instincts.
My point: Yeah we do. There are a wide variety of traits that come effortlessly to most very young children some people lack even as adults. I included recognition of faces and emotions based on facial expressions. And there are many more.
It isn’t about thinking–that’s the point. I don’t have to think about recognizing faces, or work at mentally mapping out and memorizing details–it happens automatically and without effort for me and the large majority if all other people, including the extremely young. It is an instinct. That in some people is broken (possibly in the fusiform gyrus.)
As things stand now, if you really want a mammoth, it seems to me it would be easier to breed elephants selectively to look more and more like mammoths until you get something that could live in the tundra than to resurrect mammoths from old DNA. Even if each breeding cycle takes ten years. You could perhaps speed things up by additionally genetically modifying the elephant’s eggs with CRISPR/Cas9
It may be even easier to modify an extant bird into a dinosaur that to go full Jurassic Park.
If what you want is a pterosaur or a trilobite, though, and I would love to see one of those alive, I don’t know where to start. A Quetzalcoatlus would be a thing to behold!
But then you’re not getting a dinosaur, you’re getting whatever you think a dinosaur is. That may very well be the best we can do, but it would mean that we could very well be completely wrong in our interpretation of the fossil records. See All Yesterdays for some examples.
