In Cecil’s column on the color of dinosaurs he mentions that scientists aren’t likely to succeed in their attempts of making a clone out of the frozen mammoth that was found. Unfortunately he didn’t go into much detail. What’s the Straight Dope on why it’s not likely?
Well, firstly notice that that article was written in 1980. Things have progessed quite a bit since then. I’d say that cloning a mammoth isn’t out of the realm of possibility, and I believe there are efforts currently being made. But there are still significant hurdles to be overcome. For starters, I haven’t heard that anyone has yet found a frozen mammoth cell with all its DNA intact. They might have - I haven’t been paying too much attention lately.
Then there’s the fact that you’d have to use an elephant as a surrogate mother, which wouldn’t make things any easier. And keep in mind that even with animals we’re very familiar with, such as sheep, it’s taking 30-40+ attempts to get one viable clone.
Details on cloning mammoths–“not likely”.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/mammoths000313.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_481000/481571.stm
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/01/03/mammoth/index1.html
I love the Internet. 
The column can also be found on pages 10-11 of Cecil Adams’ book «The Straight Dope (1984; reissued 1986, 1998)».
Does it feel degrading being forced to cross reference each and every column reference in a transparently mercenary attempt to hawk more books upon unsuspecting and guileless truthseekers, or do you just get used to it after a while?
Scyla - mine is an honourable calling, and wearing that Straight Dope sandwich board every day is a source of pride for me.
As long as you have the legs for it.
RR
Arnold. Put down the GIF. Step slowly away… Keep your hands where we can see them Do NOT hit “submit”!
It’s possible and likely within the next 100 years, I estimate.
The people giving conservative answers are working on the assumption that technology is about at the level it is today. The professional biologists don’t stay warmly outfitted in the latest gear by claiming things are possible which they can’t deliver on. And they have a particular aversion to having week-old squid tossed at them while they speak at professional conferences.
The “proof” that a mammoth can’t be reconstructed is based on a few facile assumptions, which were stated to me years ago by a friend who planned one day to get a Nobel prize in biology.
Assumption 1. DNA breaks down rather rapidly into its component bits. A double strand quickly becomes thousands of indistinguishable A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s. Once broken apart, they all look alike.
Assumption 2. To construct a mammoth, a really clever biologist, with a huge amount of grant money, working in a comfortable lab, with a lot of zombie sub-biologists, would need to have nearly intact strands to be able to make a shrewd guess as to what the original must have looked like.
Assumption 3. Even frozen mammoth meat is far too decomposed to recreate mammoth DNA.
Assumption 4. Assumption 2 is the only way to create a mammoth.
The fallacy is 4. The same conservative approach to science which enables biologists to see about 2 months into the future, is the same blind approach that thinks it’s really keen and important to experiment with anthrax, etc. I.e., there are precious few biologists who’ve given serious thought to what their work will lead to 100 years from now.
The problem is approach. They’re thinking the only way to make a mammoth is to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But there is another way, which is to build DNA from scratch, one part at a time, that replicates what’s seen in the specimens. If it looks like a mammoth, tastes like a mammoth, behaves what we imagine mammoths behaved like, it probably is a mammoth.
This is science decades beyond the state we’re at now: pointing to a gene and saying “Ah, ha! There’s the gene that causes people to enjoy World Federation Wrestling!” This is science which understands the role of genes in all living mammals, to some degree. That’s a long way off. Further than 2 months.
The final ingredient is that people want the mammoth to come back. It would be fantastic. Of course, we might create a few deranged, homicidal, super-fast near-mammoths before we get there, but…hey!..that’s science.
Perhaps the reason precious few biologist aren’t thinking about 100 years down the road is that precious few of those even thinking about will be toes up.
Of course one might questions why there is a NEED to clone up some wooly mammoths. They came and went in the time line of evolution, so why muke it up? But then again, if they are really tasty and their hair makes for really nicely warm jackets or a nifty rug to spread before the fire place, maybe there is a need.
I hope you’re going to be polite about my answer <g> (I had a whale of a fight with a girlfriend about this some time ago).
Without getting into the much more complicated subject of whether we should bring back dinosaurs, etc., I think there’s good justification for mankind to restore any animal or plant that it was responsible for extinguishing in the first place.
The mammoth, passenger pigeon, and the moa were eliminated by man. Not even intentionally. Actually, I just went looking for some info on the net, and found an article that suggests my argument with my girlfriend is actually quite widespread.
This is about bringing back the Huia bird:http://www.cnn.com/NATURE/9907/20/cloning.enn/
Hi Guys,
Another major argument is - why bother? It will cost an awful lot of money which could be better spent from preventing presently extant animals from becoming extinct. There are plenty of desperately endangered animals that don’t see the kind of $$$ spent on them as extinct ones 
YeW
The point I was trying to make is that if you believe that basic concept behind evolution, survival of the the fittest, then you have to consider the implications of bringing back something that is now longer part of the flora and fawna.
Yeah, perhaps some of you folks feel guilty about man’s role in doing in some species. Some of which, one would be hard pressed to deliver evidence to the fact that the demise of it was totally due to the actions of man.
But, hey, man IS another animal is the scheme of things that evolved here (green planet of the clocks). Many species that have come and gone over time did so because they didn’t reporduce fast enough to replace their losses due to many different reasons. You know like they were too slow, their food source dwindled away, climate change, vulcanism, high velocity big rocks from space crashing into the planet and etc.
Trying to place responsibility for “sins” our or others ancestors, people, etc. did in the past whether it was recently or 100 years, 500 years, whatever, ago is rediculous. Its like saying if your father was a murderer, then you as his son or daughter are responsible to families of those slain. Poppycock. Your actions are your responsibility and no one else’s.
Want to help save what is still part of the flora and fawna? Get involved in conservation. In most of the states conservation is primarily or mostly paid for by the fees charged to the folks involved fishing and hunting. Other outdoor activities like rock climbing and hiking, off roading, boating and so forth contribute nothing in dollars to operation of conservation work for the most part.
Don’t fish or hunt? I’m sure your state wil accept gifts to their parks and wildlife organizations. In Texas for example you can buy special license plates for your vehicle where a portion of the fee goes directly to the parks and wildlife department.
Since it is very difficult to change the past and there are unknowns about what the outcome could be, it seems a better idea to press ahead in the flow of time and not try to reinstate the dead. We can make use of what has been learned, and through conservation and education try not to make anything else extinct without a proper weighing of the possible outcome.
Oh, crap … I got all preachy
Well, you don’t sound like my ex-girlfriend, so I guess I hazard to answer.
Evolution isn’t “the survival of the fittest.” Spencer said this, not Darwin.
The good thing about evolution is that by trial-and-error life sustains itself in changing conditions. The bad thing man’s doing is changing things so rapidly evolution by trial-and-error is now largely irrelevant. If man’s decisions are by-and-large wise (fat chance), then maybe we’ll accomplish things that took evolution much longer to do. Maybe not.
The problem with allowing species to become extinct at the incredible rate that’s current is that we have little idea what evolutionary “purpose” these animals served. They were there for good, evolutionary sound, reasons–until we came along. Now we don’t know what those reasons were, and have no way to find out. Except bringing them back.
A maniac who kills every animal on earth except his immediate friends and family is not following any trial-and-error evolutionary process. He’s a destroyer, and most of the things he destroys would have been no threat to him. Therefore he is anti-evolution. He is destroying the process, not working within it.
Exactly the point. Conservation is “wise”, where “whole sale slaughter” isn’t (well, except for maybe cockroches). Man should try to keep what he has.
If one trys bringing back something that is no longer part of the fawna, the mammoth for example, how is it going to fit into the balance? How would its population numbers be kept in check and, other than man, what predator would do it?
Since the primary four legged predator that used to work at keeping the mammoth in check is also extinct, so should that be reinstated as well? For good examples of installing fawna that doesn’t belong in a particular ecosystem time and place, take look at things that happened in “recent” history in the land of the Aussies (rabbits, frogs, etc.)
For the most part the planet is riding in greased grooves. So why risk screwing things up? When man thinks he is actually able to control or change the “course” of the natural world and “knows” what he is doing, he is showing his arrogance. And arrogance generally equals stupidity.
With regards to blaming man; When the mammoth was around, what was the population of man the areas that they lived? And by what evidence, considering that many, many thousands of years have come and gone, can one use to provide the blame of extinction of the mammoth on man? Are there any other reasons that the mammoth went extinct? How did the “ice age” (the last one) affect things? Or is the concept (man doing in the mammoth)just some popular tripe that is being spouted because of some misplaced “green” guilts?
And if one could prove that man of the time was “compleatly” responsible, perhaps one should consider the circumstances that led man to target the mammoth. You know stuff like, day to day survival, food for the family group, warm and dry shelters, clothing and etc. Not too many folks in that time lived to a ripe old age due to accidents, varmints, sickness or just not getting enough to eat.
And with the concern of just trying to stay alive being a daily quest, I’d doubt if those folks spent much time (likely none at all) worried about if there were going to be any mammoths left to kill and eat (assuming that they were really all that successful in killing mass quanities of mammoths) because they killed one.
But since mammoths were real big by comparison to the man, and man’s weapon was basically a stick with a pointy end (flint, bone, etc.), don’t you think attacking such an animal might be quite dangerous even with 10 or 20 hunters doing it?
To be able to pull off such an attack they would had to have found an isolated mammoth far enough away from a herd that they wouldn’t have to be concerned about being attacked themselves by others from that herd. Ever notice that none of the big cats in Africa bother the elephants unless they happen to “luck” onto a real young one that is far removed from the herd?
Same deal, its a form of “risk” versus the “need to eat” assessment. So those folks were probably all too aware of the fact that a pissed off healthy mammoth was bad medicine, and a pissed off herd of the same was really, really bad medicine. So to cap off, these reasons are why I doubt if man is fully, if at all responsible for mammoths being discontinued. They are history and we should leave it that way.
Actually it will be easier to clone a mamoth (which existed upto several thousand years ago?) , than to try to find viable material from a fossil (rock if you will).
I remember a short story about a scientist that corrected a cardiac leak leak in embryonic alligators’ hearts .They grew up to become dragons.
What a mammoth is going to do, say about 80 years from now, to the fauna, is another issue. Speculation on this would be welcome, but as a quick first guess I’d imagine that any direct descendant of modern animals wasn’t much of a threat, because, after all, we’re living with their more successful offshoots. (The same doesn’t hold for some bacteria and viruses, which one can assume, if reconstructed would ravage the world.)
I’m not a mammoth expert. (Maybe that came out wrongly?) What I remember reading is that there weren’t all that many mammoths, that they lived in the same areas as humans, that humans hunted them, and that there was evidence they overhunted them. To extinction.
Even without archeological evidence it seems like an animal is more endangered if:
- He’s good eating, and useful for hide.
- He’s not extremely smart or quick-moving. (As a monkey, parrot, tiger, or dolphin is.)
- He hangs out in the same climatic zones that man does.
- He’s no good at fetching newspapers.
Quoth partly_warmer:
Totally useless. If you build an animal from the “ground up”, so to speak, then it’ll only have whatever features you already knew it had. If all we knew about mammoths was that they had shaggy brown hair and long tusks, then sure, we could probably somehow breed an animal with shaggy brown hair and tusks and call it a mammoth. But that wouldn’t tell us anything about the flexible trunks sported by the original. OK, we know about the trunks, too, so we include them. What else are we missing? And what could we possibly learn from this creature we produced?
Another point is that visible form is only a fraction of the story. Look at a shark and a dolphin sometime… Ever notice how similar the shapes are? And yet, sharks and dolphins are about as far separated as you can be in the phylum Chordata. If you blindly breed a “streamlined gray two-meter animal with a dorsal fin”, is that a dolphin or a shark?
Ah!
Two factors omitted:
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Genes don’t do only one thing. The gene that makes a mammoth’s tusk curve upward may also make its teeth more pointed. The reconstructors only need to identify one of the relationships between gene and a function to identify the gene.
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The “pointy tusk” gene in conjunction with some other seemingly trivial gene (say, the gene to control bone growth) will have unpredictable results. The two together may mandate another trait, or even dozens of traits. For example…fast growing bones?..pointed teeth?..hmm…an animal that is heedless about cracking an occasional tooth on an appetizing armored mammal?
Genes are the simplest way of describing a creature. The extrapolations are innumerable. So what one does is work backward from considerable evidence we know (or could rapidly discover experimentally) about animal form and behavior backwards to the simpler basis.
Except that there are probably a slew (plus or minus a myriad) of genes which could, potentially, cause tusk curvature. Do we want the one that also causes pointy teeth? Or the one which causes thicker toenails? Or the one which causes long eyelashes? And this is even assuming, of course, that we know that that gene causes curved tusks in the first place.