this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Can I be nit-picky here for a second?
If you're genetically modifying an elephant for cold tolerance and fur growth, you're not "bring a mammoth back from extinction", you're creating a furry elephant. It may look somewhat like a mammoth, but genetically it's not a mammoth at all.
It's like saying you can genetically modify a homo-sapien to have a pronounced brow ridge and a hairier back and say that you've brought the neandertal back from extinction. No you haven't, you've just designed a human who looks different.
Well, the goal isn't to just create woolly mammoth-lile creatures by copying characteristics. The goal is to recreate the genome from what genome data we have into a living creature.
It's not like they are trying to create a sweded version, but take a creature that is already close and change the genes to match.
At least, that's how I understood it based on the article.
And next you’ll say that genetically-modified ears aren’t enough to make catgirls real either 😩
Can we let this one go? Not for science, not for accuracy, but for the prospect of having catgirls in our lifetimes, at least?
Give me the genetherapy that makes me an anthropomorphic dog.
And catboys! We can be equal opportunity here.
I already have the hairy back, can I say I am half neanderthalensis? Better than homo sapiens seeing how things are going...
That's not nit picky.
And the most annoying part is that this is incredibly fcking useless. Wooly mammoths went extinct for a reason. Large animals are become less and less evolutionary preferred. Wooly mammoths are adjusted for the cold while our globe is warming.
Can we just use our fcking resources for things that matter?????
Yeah, bring back the passenger pigeon! We need more pigeons! Do something that'll make a difference already!
Also, can we get some dodos up in here? Where all my dumb birds at?
Nobody cares about wooly mammoths. This is a test of gene editing techniques that can eradicate genetic diseases.
Then call it what it is
You're using the same logic my dad uses to rail against going to Mars. He says there is no worthwhile reason to go there when more pressing matters on earth are in abundance.
Just like you, he is missing the forest for the trees, angrily ignorant to the fact that the knowledge you gained from trying to achieve a seemingly worthless achievement is the actual value, not in the achievement itself.
The achievement is just a convenient goal to make the science more exciting to the general public so as to garner more financial support from both private and government sources. Each of the steps needed to gain that achievement may not have gained as much funding as they do now if they were presented separately from that final goal.
When your house is on fire you don't start looking for package holidays to Pompeii, no matter how much you might learn. We have all the knowledge we need to avert the climate crisis, we just need action and resources dedicated to fixing it.
What do you want the geneticists to do? They are educated in their domain, you can't just plop them into another field
The applications of their work is likely plenty in medicine and bioengineering
I want them to stop pretending that resurrecting a cold adapted species into an ecosystem that is rapidly melting will do anything productive.
If they want to be helpful they can work out how to engineer humans that can survive 40 degree heat and breathe co2.
Dang I guess me and your father would rly vibe then because I feel the same about colonizing Mars
Not really, we humans killed most big land animals that we found as we expanded our territory, back when we were hunters. This happened in big "islands" like Australia and Madagascar, as well as all the small islands. There, large animals had lived in equilibrium for centuries, and their extinction matches some short time after humans arrived. An exception are the galapago islands, as they were discovered in the 19th century.
And to recreate the species they’d need hundreds of them from different genetic material. Which means they’ll likely create a single one that will eventually die and costed billions of dollars.
Besides the fact that the hunting hypothesis is that; a hypothesis, there's a lot of other factors as to why it isn't a good idea. Mainly, ohh idk... The fact that they have had no place in nature in over tens of thousands of years? Even if we managed to create an artificial habitat and role in an ecosystem for them, they would be very vulnerable due to megafauna's increased minimum land requirements because of their size and in danger constantly due to climate change.