Reintroducing the lost mega-fauna would destroy the current environment and species. The food chain has moved on. They no longer have place in it. It would be no different than importing and releasing any other dominant non-native species, except with better photo ops.
Introducing once-extinct megafauna into North America is precisely as wise, as useful, and as likely to work as introducing megafauna from other continents.
Does it strike anyone as a good idea to introduce tigers, Cape buffalo, hippopotamuses, and zebras into the New World? Yeah, I don’t see a point to it, either.
The OP mentions the wild horses that once roamed North America. True, the mustangs living there now are feral descendants of domesticated horses, but presumably behave the same and look (much) the same. So the OP could probably go see them.
I guess it depends on how “partial” your “partial samples” are, but any time you do mixing and matching, you’re departing from the original genome sequence, resulting in something that’s a chimera - part one thing, part another.
Now, in practice, this may or may not matter. Let’s say we’re resurrecting extinct species A, which is closely related to modern species B. And let’s say that we have all of the A genome except the gene for hemoglobin. So we take the B hemoglobin gene and pop it in, and all’s well. Probably. Odds are good that it’ll be just fine, and we’ll have our A animal. But what if it turned out that there was some important mutation in the A hemoglobin gene that was vital to A’s adaptation to, say, high altitude? We’d never know this, because the A hemoglobin sequence is missing.
The other thing is what do we actually mean if we say that “this animal I created is a resurrected A”. How identical does it have to be? One approach to recreating a mammoth I’ve heard of is to start with a genome that’s half mammoth, half elephant, and use selective breeding to reduce the elephant part as much as possible. But if we have something that’s, say, 90% mammoth, is that really a mammoth? Some would say yes, some would say no. That’s more of a philosophical point rather than a scientific one.
You say we could assemble an “approximation” to the original, and I’d agree that we could do that, if we had a relatively complete genome of A. I’m just trying to point out that that approximation might be significantly different from the original.
Which fits with my statement that species are only reintroduced where they dissapeared recently (I wrote “during the last century”).
No, we do not have the technology to do so and what do you think National Parks are, if not “the wild”? Do you think a Woolly Mammoth is going to respect the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park?
We’ll let the courts have, through the process of trial, a bite at that issue.
Decades- yes, but not millenniums ago. The niche for the Grey Wolf had not yet been filed by other species.
Oddly, this idea might help one species- the California Condor, which is one of the last remnants of the Pliestocene Megafauna. One reason why this huge bird is hovering on the edge of extinction is that it’s niche (eating the corpses of REALLY big mammals) is gone, and the Condor can’t really compete in the niche of eating smaller dead mammals.
Good point, but I can imagine a lawyer making a distinction between breeding existing species, then distributing them to repopulate an area they roamed less than a century ago, and re-creating a species extinct for millions of years with highly technical genetics in the lab, then releasing them in the wild – a wild that is totally unprepared for them – to mix with species that might be decimated as a result.
I am sure they would reciprocate and would love to live among us. We’d be such great food source.
What was the primary cause of the extinctions?
Considering that the prevailing theory is that we ate them into extinction in the first place, I’m not so sure about that.
Us.
That’s what I was thinking. I don’t have a problem bringing back something humans largely are responsible for making extinct. It would have to be in an enclosed wild animal park though. We’d have a heck of a time trying to get predator prey balances working right in the wild.
But it’s just as true that the ecological equilibrium that existed when Lewis and Clark crossed North America is completely gone now, and the new ecological equilibrium such as it exists only does so with constant management by humans. Most of the big animals that are currently confined to the mountain wildernesses of the continuous US didn’t live there in prehistory-- they were plains dwellers. The wildnerness land in the continuous US isn’t a natural ecosystem in any real sense of the word, but instead a highly managed menagerie of the creatures we drove off the plains and valleys who have been crammed into new ecological niches in mountain land we weren’t using for anything else. No reason why if we told Fish and Wildlife “hey, find somewhere to stick these mammoth” they couldn’t basically create a niche somewhere. (And many of these supposedly wild forest and grassland ecosystems turned out to be dependent on human management even back in prehistory, but that’s a whole other issue).
The question in the OP is interesting, I think, not because this is anything that’s going to come to pass any time soon, but because it sort of gets to the question of what exactly our wilderness management goals are. There’s a common perception that the national parks and wilderness areas represent last little enclaves of the continent as it was before white development, but at least in terms of how the ecosystems function that’s usually not true. Rather, these places are managed to some sort of abstract ideal of “wildness” that’s developed in the last 100 years or so. IMHO, the real reason why long-extinct creatures could never be reintroduced to the wild isn’t that they’d wreak havoc with the ecosystem or anything like that, but because we can currently suspend our disbelief that we’re looking at a pristine ecosystem when we see grizzlys and bison living in the mountains, but the whole cloning business makes the hand of man impossible to ignore.
Not to start a whole other tangent, but this seems a lot less clear-cut than it once did. The prevailing theory these days is that while humans certainly helped some species along, the main cause of the extinction event was climate change. The close timing of the extinctions with the arrival of humans in the Americas might have been a bit of a red herring, because the same climate change that drove the extinction event also created the ice-free paths for people to reach the Americas.
No, that’s not the prevailing theory. In fact the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis (not theory) has been completely discredited.
wiki:
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#Human_influence_on_extinction
Extinction of animals and plants caused by human actions may go as far back as the late Pleistocene, over 12,000 years BP, but there is no direct evidence for this theory and it is more likely abrupt climate change played a much higher role in the extinction of larger mammals.[18] …
Three hypotheses have been proposed to explain the extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene. Of these, only two have much scientific credibility. Although Ross McPhee proposed that a hyper-disease may have been the cause of the extinction,[23] the study by Lyons et al., demonstrated conclusively that a hyperdisease was unlikely to have caused the extinction.[24] The two main theories to the extinction are climate change and human hunting. The climate change theory has suggested that a change in climate near the end of the late Pleistocene stressed the megafauna to the point of extinction.[25] Most scientists favor abrupt climate change as the catalyst for the extinction of the mega-fauna at the end of the Pleistocene, but there are many who believe increased hunting from early modern humans also played a part. [26][27]
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Mind you that’s not saying humans had no part in the extinctions at all. Humans likely had some part, but not nessesarily from hunting: humans also did some wide-scale habitat changes by fire, and humans also introduced pests. In other words, saying that “We ate them” is a huge oversimplification of a very complex issue, of which we have little proof or direct evidence. The best evidence that Humans did it is a interesting co-incidence where (at least in North America) it appeared that humans arrived right before the extinctions occurred. However:
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There’s a lot of data now that show humans arrived in NA quite a long time before. Thus the dates are no longer co-incidental.
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It’s hard to detect exactly when a species went extinct from fossil evidence.
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What allowed humans to arrive seems to have been the climate change.
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And of course when humans can cross, so can other species.
Here’s another wiki page which goes into great details:
Mind you, Human arrival and hunting do seem to have been responsible for some areas, such as New Zealand. But of course, flightless birds do’t do well when a new carnivore arrives- even if that carnivore are pigs or rats.
Sorry, I didn’t read your post thoroughly and was just reacting to the first sentence.
Re: the Holocene extinction. There’ve been something like 15 major glaciations over the past 2 million years, yet (as far as I know) only the last one resulted in a major extinction event when it was ending. What was different about the last one?
Absolute rot.
Colibri and I have been over this issue with you in at least 5 different threads, pointing you to the latest peer reviewed literature and patiently explaining the issue to you.
At one stage you even promised to stop posting this crap. Yet here you are again, this time scraping the bottom of the barrel by citing misleading fragments of a Wikipedia article. :rolleyes:
Umm, no. First, Colibri and I agreed that the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis (not theory) had been completely discredited. His opinion is certainly that human actions are the primary cause of the extinctions, but not only by hunting, nor are humans the sole cause. I am pretty sure agree that saying that “We ate them” is a huge oversimplification of a very complex issue, even tho we disagree (as do many scientists) on what is the primary cause. Do you agree that "“We ate them” is a huge oversimplification of a very complex issue?
However, note here that I never argued that humans are not the primary cause. Altho I don’t think they are the primary cause, what I am saying is that :
- Saying that “We ate them” is a huge oversimplification of a very complex issue, of which we have little proof or direct evidence.*
Even tho many scientists disagree on what the primary cause is (and I admit that Colibri has the weight of opinion on his side) it still remains that Pleistocene overkill is not a Theory- it is a Hypothesis, and it has been completely discredited. Not a single scientist out there, not even Martin claims that Pleistocene overkill is a proven and tested scientific theory. In fact Martin states loudly and clearly the opposite, he admits that his idea is not testable and is a Hypothesis, not a theory. And altho there are plenty of scientists that claim Humans are the primary cause, I can’t find any that state Human hunting is the sole and only cause.
Whether or not we agree on what the cause of the extinctions is, some quip like “we ate them” is unsupportable. Science is just not that simple.