I guess I didn’t see a) as seriously up for debate. And I’m hugely in support of studying genetic manipulation. My youngest is starting college next year in Mollecular and Cellular Bio and my best golfing buddy sells RNA interference agents. And I have a niece who just graduated with degrees in biomedical and chemical engineering. I know just enough about it to know how little I really know about it!
But after reading this article (which I believe was an exerpt from a general audience-directed book in a general audience-directed magazine) I didn’t really get the impression that they would actually be “re-creating an extinct animal” such that they wouldn’t really be proving b). Instead, it came across to me as tho they would have fucked with something such that it resembled something else. Yeah, a lot more sophisticated than gluing a fin and some horns on an iguana, but not exactly what they seemed to be presenting it as.
Do my distinctions make any sense - or are they yet more evidence of my ignorance in this area.
Dinochicken first appeared in the Isaac Asimov story A Statue for Father. Apparently it was delicious, and they started a restaurant business. These were a species of dinosaur, though, not an engineered species.
I know it’s spelt “dinachicken” in the link, but I remember it as “dinochicken.”
You’d be surprised just how few people actually “get” a). Just look around on these boards, for example, in any evolution-related topic. Evolution is often described as “mutations arise, natural selection picks the ones that work, discards the ones that don’t, and voila! – you have a new trait!” (that being a general paraphrase of the descriptions). However, new traits don’t usually appear out of the blue as such descriptions imply. Rather, when development is tweaked, new features can appear, or existing features can be heavily modified. It has been said that most evolution happens during development; that evo-devo is a fairly new field is testament to the fact that the relationship between development and evolution is really only just beginning to be explored, and the implications realized.
I mean, it’s certainly not “news” to folks who already get this stuff, but it is big news with respect to how the general public views evolution.
Quite right: they won’t be actually resurrecting a formerly extinct animal. But they will be re-creating the “grade”, or morphology, of an extinct form, which is pretty impressive in itself. If successful, it means that at the very least, all the macro-morphological genetic components needed to make a T. rex-like organism remain intact in extant birds. Of course, because the folks involved are selectively tweaking specific components, what they’ll get will be a very peculiar chicken, not a resurrected Velociraptor. It would be a chicken descendant, not a chicken ancestor.
At any rate, the resemblance, such as it might exist, between the presumed dinochicken and a maniraptoran dinosaur, such as Velociraptor or even Archaeopteryx, would be specifically because of the evolutionary heritage of the animals, not because we mad-scienced together a chimera from various animals. What’s even more fascinating is that the project doesn’t involve adding or subtracting any genes at all. It’s all about regulating the expression of existing genes. If we can turn birds into pre-avian dinosaurs (or even pre-avian dinosaur look-a-likes) without touching the genome, well, that’s some powerful stuff.
I guess I’ll have to take your word for it. I was surprised at how much this struck me as a sideshow stunt, right alongside the alligator man, seal boy, and the bearded lady.
Of course, the other day my kid brought home a book from the library saying she thought I might find it interesting and that it actually said some interesting stuff despite being horribly “dumbed down.” I think I made it all the way to page 18 or so before I had to stop due to a headache!
When I worked at a petting zoo some years ago, one of the chickens had thumbs, complete with little claws.
He was a Polish chicken, so he wasn’t particularly reminiscent of a dinosaur even with the clawed forearms. He was routinely beaten up by the non-thumbed chickens, which suggests that opposable digits are not an evolutionary advantage in the world of poultry. Granted, we never let him near any firearms.