Whoa Nellie…hold your horses there, Mr. Finch. There’s so much wrong with your last post, I don’t even know where to begin.
First of all, a friend of mine heard from a guy, who heard from a gal, who heard from another guy who just happens to be a very prominent conspiracy theorist, highly regarded by his peers, that there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that there are Tyrannosaurus Rex currently living amongst a nation of Big Feet in Saskatchewan. Furthermore…Australian researchers? Really? Those Aussie scientists can’t even handle a littlebunny rabbit problem!
Which is kinda the point…no DNA, no de-extincting anything. Sure, we might be able to cobble together a Syntho-Rex[sup]TM[/sup] someday out of a combination of assorted selective breeding, DNA from extant organisms, and synthetic genes, but the point is it won’t be a Tyrannosaurus rex. Not even a new species of Tyrannosaurus. It will be a new creature entirely; contrary to the popular maxim, there’s more to being a duck than looking, walking and quacking like one.
Read my examples. You can’t know what informations about the DNA or the living creature we’ll be able to collect with whatever technology we’ll develop or knowledge we’ll acquire during the next 100 years. We’re certainly a very long way from being able to extract all the information there is to extract from fossils, DNA of successor species, etc…
I can easily imagine a robotic T-Rex in the next 30 years, so that wouldn’t preclude a genetic facsimile in the next 100.
What clairobscur is saying is that even though the data appears to us to be gone, perhaps it left some kind of shadow and we’ll be able to figure out how to detect that in the distant future, just as we can oftentimes read data from a hard drive even after it has been deleted. A hundred years is a long time in the advancement of technology.
Huh? All RNA sequences are transcribed from genomic DNA, and there isn’t any heritable information in RNA sequences*. We could learn some useful things from the transcriptome, but it wouldn’t be necessary for reconstructing the genome. There are various sources of epigenetic information (heritable stuff that’s not DNA), but RNA sequence is not one of them.
I’m assuming the idea is to look at quantitative RNA levels to give us some idea about gene regulation, which might theoretically be handy to know. But we certainly don’t have the technology to make use of that information right now.
I don’t simply mean deleted as in the file descriptor removed but the file overwritten. If we’ve been able to do that since hard drives were invented… well you can see what I’m getting at.
Others have mentioned the difficulty in turning a chicken into a facsimile of one of its ancestors. But in reality, it’s even more complicated than that: A T. rex isn’t an ancestor of a chicken. You’d have to go back all the way to whatever the common ancestor of a T. rex and a chicken is, and then go forward from there along a different evolutionary path.
It was actually easier in the past, as older hard drives were more sloppy, to put it in layman’s terms. They left more traces behind. The higher density of data means that hard drives had to get more precise.
I do understand the point you were trying to make, though.
