Assuming We Develop The Capability, Should We Bring Back Extinct Species?
Passenger pigeons (Wikimedia Commons)
Over the last 3+ billion years, billions and billions of different species have come into existence on Earth, perhaps as many as 50 billion. Some scientists estimate that around 90 percent of the species that have ever existed are extinct. Life — and biodiversity — as we know them are flashes in Earth’s pan.
But even though extinction has always been part of the natural evolution of things on Earth, as climate’s have changed, new species have arisen, and meteors have struck, in more recent centuries extinctions have come at human hands, as we’ve moved into habitats and hunted in the extreme. Over the next century, with climate change becoming more severe, some scientists estimate that as many as half of the species on Earth may go the way of the dodo.
For the time being, once a species is gone, that’s it. Extinction is forever.
But what if, suddenly (or not so suddenly, as the case may be), it weren’t? What if, through the power of modern genetics, we could re-engineer extinct species and, as is the term of art, de-extinct them? Should we do that?
According to an interview with Ryan Phelan, executive director of a project called Revive and Restore, at the Science Foo conference at the Googleplex earlier this month, there are now three techniques that may someday give scientists that ability: backbreeding (trying to work evolution backward, basically, to select for the traits of a related species), cloning (if enough genetic material exists), and genome editing (selectively manipulating the genome of a related species). None of these can bring back an extinct species yet, but it’s certainly possible that in the forseeable future, we’ll have to confront the question: should we do it?
There are obviously practical hurdles. Even if we could bring back, for example, the passenger pigeon, we may not be able to get it to flourish in the wild, not least of all because the environmental factors that led, in part, to its extinction have not exactly diminished in the century since.
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