how to clone a mammoth the science of de extinction

The restored version of a natural landscape will typically lack much of the aesthetic value of the original landscape because of the different historical processes that created it-processes that involved human intentions and actions, rather than natural forces acting over millennia.

I then argue that synthetically created organisms needn’t be perfectly indistinguishable from their genetic forebears in order for species de-extinction to be successful.Īre the methods of synthetic biology capable of recreating authentic living members of an extinct species? An analogy with the restoration of destroyed natural landscapes suggests not. In this article I use the example of an extinct New Zealand wattlebird, the huia, to argue that there are compelling reasons to resurrect certain species if it can be done. Shapiro’s denial that genuine species de-extinction is possible is based on her assumption that the resurrected organisms would need to be perfectly indistinguishable from the creatures that died out. The de-extinct ‘mammoths’ she speaks of are merely ecological proxies for mammoths-elephants re-engineered for cold-tolerance by the addition to their genomes of a few mammoth genes. But in fact Shapiro both denies this is possible, and denies there would be good reason to do it even if it were possible.

The title of Beth Shapiro’s ‘How to Clone a Mammoth’ contains an implicature: it suggests that it is indeed possible to clone a mammoth, to bring extinct species back from the dead.

How to clone a mammoth the science of de extinction