Lindsay Abrams

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We can’t really clone a mammoth (like George Church wants to) or passenger pigeon (as Stewart Brand hopes to) because we don’t have living tissue from these creatures, so we would have to employ gene editing to approximate them. The question is why, what’s the purpose? Lindsay Abrams of Salon speaks to this issue in an interview with Beth Shapiro, author of How to Clone a Mammoth. An excerpt:

Question:

So the big question that’s running through my mind — and I know there are different answers to this — is just, why? Why devote the resources to trying to bring things back from extinction? 

Beth Shapiro:

Those are two very different questions. I’ll first start with the first one. I think that it’s really important in any one of these cases to start off thinking about this process — even before we get into really trying to figure out what the technical, ethical and ecological challenges of any particular de-extinction might be — by having some compelling reason to do it. I think that is absolutely critical.

For the mammoth, if we skip over technical, ethical, ecological problems right now, the answer to the question of why we might want mammoth-like traits back I think is possibly one that’s pretty easy to answer. For example, many of us don’t really want to contemplate a world without elephants, but even elephants are endangered and their habitat is disappearing and they’re being poached and it’s very hard to protect them. The IUCN lists them as an endangered species right now. What if we could use this genome editing technology to make elephants that had a little bit of mammoth-like traits, just enough to allow them to live in colder climates like Europe and North America, maybe even Siberia and Alaska, these high Arctic climates? Could we use this technology as a way to save elephants? I think that is a potentially compelling reason to do this research.

Another reason why that’s been tossed around a bit comes from Sergey Zimov, with the Russian Academy of Sciences, who works up in Cherskii, in northeastern Siberia. He has this place called Pleistocene Park, where he has bison and horses and a bunch of different species of deer. He’s shown that just having these herbivores on the landscape, walking around and turning the soil and recycling nutrients and distributing seeds, has been enough to reestablish this rich resource for herbivores there — this dense grassland that lives there and allows these animals to flourish. He’s shown that other species like saiga antelopes, that are also endangered, have come to the park now because it’s a great place for them to come and find stuff to eat. So what if having this big herbivore back on the landscape was actually better able to do that, to recreate this rich resource for other species to use, and in a way could be used as a way to conserve biodiversity in the present day? Again, not just elephants, but these other species that lack habitat.

So compelling reasons to consider bringing extinct species or traits back to life are things like that, not to study mammoths. If we were to bring some animal back that was a hybrid between an elephant and a mammoth — and it necessarily would be — this would not be a good way to study mammoths. It wouldn’t be a mammoth, so we wouldn’t learn anything from that. But, to save elephants and reestablish these ecosystems, those are compelling reasons.•

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Michael Tennesen is a glass-half-full kind of guy. The author of the newly published The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man tells Lindsay Abrams of Salon that something may extinct humans (his guess: overpopulation), but it’s not that big a deal. Maybe something less shitty will come along and replace us. 

A tangent before the interview excerpt: I’ve heard a million times that no one reads anymore and that Amazon has destroyed publishing and that books are dead, but have you noticed how one great title after another keeps emrging, almost more than it’s possible to keep up with? Something there doesn’t compute.

The interview excerpt:

Question:

A lot of us look at these studies about pollution and climate change and extinction on a very day-by-day, headline basis. What was the value for you of stepping back and taking a more pulled-back, planetary perspective on these issues?

Michael Tennesen:

I was influenced by a paper that Anthony Barnosky from the University of California at Berkeley wrote, about his idea that we are entering a mass extinction event. People who study life on Earth think that extinction has a dual side: it could be a catastrophe or it could be an opportunity. The comet that fell out of the sky at the end of the Cretaceous period knocked out the dinosaurs, but made way for mammals and man.

So I’m trying to look at what can happen next. And to get an idea of what can happen next, I kind of had to pull back and look at the history of life on Earth with the idea: how does life recover from catastrophe? What things can you see in both events that might possibly be repeated in the future?  I wanted to look at the whole concept. There was a book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, where he talked about what it would be like tomorrow if man disappeared and how long it would take for man’s infrastructure to come down, for New York to fall.  I just wanted to look at it from more of a reality standpoint: What would the biology be like in such an event?

Question:

When you’re looking back at some of these lessons we can learn from past mass extinctions, what are some of the most important things you came across, that we should be paying attention to?

Michael Tennesen:

If you look at the past, the driver of four out of the five mass extinctions has been carbon dioxide. I went to Guadalupe National Park and took a hike with the national park biologist Jonena Hearst to Capitan Reef, which was just this explosion of life that existed back in the Permian Era, 250 million years ago, just before the Permian extinction. It showed just how susceptible life is to chemicals in the environment, and the litany of things that was going on during the Permian extinction, which was the greatest extinction we’ve ever had: 90 percent of life was knocked out of the ocean; 70 to 75 percent on land. The high CO2 content and greenhouse gases and other problems — sulfur dioxide release, major changes in the ocean currents — these are some of the things we’re dealing with now. I don’t know if we’re going to be heading into that massive of an event, but there are lessons there. A lot of people want to go, “Well, what’s CO2? What’s the big deal?” It’s 400 parts per million. That’s a lot.

Question:

As you said, there is sort of a more optimistic way of looking at mass extinction, because there are some positive potential outcomes…

Michael Tennesen:

In an extinction event, you’ve got a new playing board. I went up to Mt. St. Helens and looked at the land around that volcano. They’ve actually separated a portion of the volcanic area as a natural experiment to see how life would come back. Nature actually does a pretty fabulous job pretty quickly.•

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