Remove ads

So much for "Going the way of the Dodo" Company trying to bring back Dodo bird

W

Wateryblue

Pronouns
He/Him
www.businessinsider.com

Scientists want to bring the dodo, woolly mammoth, back from the dead

Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene editing to recreate extinct animals, which it says is important because biodiversity is dwindling.
www.businessinsider.com

www.scientificamerican.com

A ‘De-extinction’ Company Wants to Bring Back the Dodo

A de-extinction company known for its plans to resurrect the mammoth and Tasmanian tiger has announced it will also bring back the dodo
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com


Admittedly this is less of a "Jurassic park" type deal and instead it's a symbolic victory for scientists able to preserve and build back up biodiversity on our planet,

They also have the technology to bring back the Wooly Mammoth and Tasmanian Wolf, it's just the Dodo is a lot easier since they actually have a close enough match to its genetic coding.
 
Those grifters are still on about this? I swear, bio-tech bros are the most annoying of the bunch.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
...now I'm worried. What is the strategic or tactical use of a dodo to spywork?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The CIA isn't directly funding it. A Venture Capital firm that gets some funding from the CIA is, so there's a degree of separation.

I'd also hold off on thinking that this means we're anywhere close to getting Dodos or Mammoth's back. There are a host of issues that have yet to be addressed in any real way, so this reads much more like a PR tactic to soak money than anything else.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
...now I'm worried. What is the strategic or tactical use of a dodo to spywork?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Remember that time the spent the GDP of a small city of installing listening devices in a cat? Now imagine if you can clone a bunch of bio-drone pigeons with built in pouches for listening devices. And considering it's the CIA it's entirely believable someone higher up from the MK ULTRA days took a little to much LSD and thinks it's a swell idea.
Guessmyname said:
If they can bring the Dodo back from beyond the grave, maybe it can kill Fidel Castro from beyond his.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Also complete believable and sadly probably not the weirdest CIA attempt to kill Castro.
 
I'll be honest - I dont care much directly if this works. What I care about is this as precedent for bringing back the Carolina Parakeet, the Eastern United States' own native colorful parrot.

The Passenger Pigeon should unfortunately probably stay dead; by all indicators it could only survive in huge flocks thst there likely isnt the wild food available to support anymore.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
...now I'm worried. What is the strategic or tactical use of a dodo to spywork?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Dodos can be used as distractions in the field. People would look at one and go "Hey look, a dodo!" and while they examine it they won't notice the CIA agents propping up another dictator.

Dodo meat also gives a straight +20 to your Sneak skill. It is the ultimate tactical espionage bird.
 
Wateryblue said:
The CIA Is Funding a Mission to Reincarnate the Dodo Bird

If it is a gift... It's must be pretty convincing to get the CIA involved...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's been nothing more than a money grab from the time they first announced, they would clone Mammoths. There are several issues with this whole thing:

1) You're not getting mammoths or dodos. You get new animals, that look like mammoths and may behave like them. It's similar, but not the same.

2) This "de-extincts" nothing. These animals won't survive in the wild. For mammoths, there is not enough suitable habitat for such a large animal to live off of in sustainable numbers. The dodo's habitat has been destroyed through human settlement. Even if you can convince people not to hunt it, dogs, cats and rats will have a field day with this thing. You're creating expensive zoo exhibits, at best.

3) The whole marketing is dishonest, to say the least. Investing millions or even billions in "bringing back" a few highly visible species that rely on a complex food web that no longer exists, is money burned. If you want to preserve biodiversity, invest the time and money in actually preserving what currently exists. Literally every initiative to limit the extend of climate change, deforestation or any kind of preservation attempts will allow you to spend money in a more meaningful way, if you're actually here for the "safe the planet" angle of this scam.

4) And then there are the ethical concerns of creating living beings from scratch just to salve your curiosity, embezzle money from investors or stroke your ego. Bonus points if you manage to get copyright to the genetic code of these creatures.
 
There are some positives also, and perhaps the responsive to limited perceived space for megafauna is to rethink how we build roads or presumed natural dynamics of the environs.

Edit: somthing Ive noticed is how used people are to animals, like moose, mountain lions, and wolves. Or bison. Or the bison relative in Europe. Or Tigers, or elephants.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2008.1921 here is a paper on megafauna and the affect of mosaic habitats and seed despersions.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2008.1921 a paper on how hominid migration may have - by killing off megafauna - changed the types of habitat available.
 
Last edited:
Promising to bring back iconic species is how you secure funding. Once someone actually succeeds, it opens the door to bring back species for some reason other than exotic zoo attraction.

For example what if colony collapse wipes out bee species essential for pollinating planets key to sizable proportions of world agricultural production? While it'd be preferable to avoid that, having a backup plan on hand would be nice. I'm sure that actual scientists could come up with a laundry list of species that have gone extinct recently enough that we might have workable DNA samples whose absence caused marked damage to the ecosystem.

Granted obviously you need to sift the grifters out, but that's true for any speculative field. If you want to dunk on the company in the thread OP for being a grifter, I'm fine with that. Going from that to "there is no compelling societal reason to try and reclaim an extinct species" is a bit too far though.
 
Last edited:
I mean like, if bees go from 100% of current numbers to 1% or 0%, the ecological catastrophe is about the same, right, but down at 1% there's still enough population reservoir you could do a reintroduction program. And the reintroduction program would be the hard part, right. Do you spin up a million bees in factory-farming and then, I dunno, dump them all over the country side? Who is going to pay you to do that, the Department of Agriculture?

Like that's where the USA is at with the buffalo right now, it's basically gone, its ecological niche as "Great Plains mega-ruminant" has been taken over by our cattle, so the ecological program of bringing the buffalo back is much much more about land use, getting from 1% back to 100% pop numbers, than it is about developing clonal techniques to get from 0% to 1% (which we don't need to do, to be clear, because there are still a few hundred buffalo around, or whatever). Everyone agrees it would be very neat to bring buffalo back, right up until you ask who's going to pay to make that happen.

Like this is interesting science, here, but the fundamental question "so uh how are you going to turn the 210 million USD of investment into a business that will repay all that to the investors, and more, which is the theory of how venture capital works as a kind of business activity" the answer to that question is still "???"

Like there are pathways to Business Success here, like profaning against God even harder by inventing a kind of pig that is genetically the same as a human so you can harvest them for parts (like kidneys) to implant in humans. But this specific company isn't really advertising that plan.

Instead its like, "we should revive some extinct animals," and it's like, "okay, but you are A Capitalist doing A Business, how do you plan to make money, here, exactly" and it's just very funny they don't, like, have an answer.
 
Last edited:
daniel_gudman said:
Instead its like, "we should revive some extinct animals," and it's like, "okay, but you are A Capitalist doing A Business, how do you plan to make money, here, exactly" and it's just very funny they don't, like, have an answer.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The correct answer is to let nonprofits and government do it, though they'd obviously be inclined to start with getting extinct keystone species X from 0% to 1% so that it can subsequently be gotten from 1% to 100%.

Besides reclaiming recently extinct species of known use, I also think that there could be value to trying to recreate past habitats. It would test the validity of biohistorical theories, but could more broadly be used to test to see how things respond to alternative biospheres. The Mesozoic era had higher CO2 levels and temperate than the present. Understanding how life survived and thrived then might prove helpful in order to understand how to survive in a future which might well be similar.

The for-profit path is presumably some sort of contract with zoos, or if you are feeling more skeevy, some rich billionaire who wants to brag about having a private menagerie of extinct-in-the-wild animals that they 'singlehandedly' restored for the common good and not just bragging. I mean if Elon Musk is willing to dump 44 billion into his mid-life crisis purchase of Twitter, getting some insecure billionaire willing to pay 210 million for a dodo or mammoth doesn't sound that implausible.
 
Last edited:
Pirx said:
It's been nothing more than a money grab from the time they first announced, they would clone Mammoths. There are several issues with this whole thing:

1) You're not getting mammoths or dodos. You get new animals, that look like mammoths and may behave like them. It's similar, but not the same.

2) This "de-extincts" nothing. These animals won't survive in the wild. For mammoths, there is not enough suitable habitat for such a large animal to live off of in sustainable numbers. The dodo's habitat has been destroyed through human settlement. Even if you can convince people not to hunt it, dogs, cats and rats will have a field day with this thing. You're creating expensive zoo exhibits, at best.

3) The whole marketing is dishonest, to say the least. Investing millions or even billions in "bringing back" a few highly visible species that rely on a complex food web that no longer exists, is money burned. If you want to preserve biodiversity, invest the time and money in actually preserving what currently exists. Literally every initiative to limit the extend of climate change, deforestation or any kind of preservation attempts will allow you to spend money in a more meaningful way, if you're actually here for the "safe the planet" angle of this scam.

4) And then there are the ethical concerns of creating living beings from scratch just to salve your curiosity, embezzle money from investors or stroke your ego. Bonus points if you manage to get copyright to the genetic code of these creatures.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

All of this. These people shouldn't be given money. They should've been laughed out of the building. This is another pointless greenwashing con. This is why nothing will change until the current system for motivating actual change ceases to be impelled by the principles of modern capitalism, which is to say short-term, highly visible results that occur at the whim of a tiny group of isolated and ill-advised hyper-privileged individuals. This makes as much sense as trying to colonize Mars at this juncture. Fix the biosphere we have, or pray what's left can support whatever dregs of humanity remain.
 
Last edited:
For those interested in the topic of de-extinction as a reasonable method of stabilizing / increasing biodiversity, this article covers it well:


TL;DR: Don't focus on sexy species like mammoths, instead go for keystone plants, insects, fish etc. Bring back stuff that is very recently extinct (or currently functionally extinct) and where the habitat can be restored.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top