(Prehistoric) Life Imitates Art
Remember the movie Jurassic Park, where scientists take dinosaur DNA preserved in amber and splice it with other animal DNA to re-introduce dinosaurs to Earth? Some scientists are now working on doing just that, not with dinosaurs but with wooly mammoths, with a plan to use CRISPR technology and an artificial uterus.
The first question one might have upon hearing this, which is the first question I had, is why? Well, the answer these scientists give is that re-introducing wooly mammoths to arctic and subarctic ecosystems will help reverse the trends of climate change. The argument is that wooly mammoths scrape away layers of snow to forage for food, and this exposes the ground to the cold arctic air. Without mammoths, the snow has been left intact to insulate the ground, warming it and causing the release of greenhouse gases.
As true as this may be, it seems like a pretty roundabout and feeble way to fight climate change. Even during the prime of their existence on Earth, it is doubtful at best that wooly mammoths scraped away more than 1% of the entire arctic ground snow layer. So using wooly mammoths as a weapon against climate change seems a lot like bringing a rock to a gunfight.
After reading articles I gathered during some light Googling, I’m convinced the real answer is twofold. First, there’s the guilt humans feel over driving untold thousands of species to extinction, a fact that is real and unforgiving. These species include the wooly mammoth at the hunting hands of our distant ancestors, based on mounting evidence in the fossil record. Second, and probably the more direct answer, we’re doing it because we can.
Which begs the question, what is “it” that we’re doing exactly? Producing a living wooly mammoth individual is one thing, but re-establishing the species as a dynamic part of a functioning ecosystem is quite another. The earth is not nearly the same as it was during the prime of the wooly mammoth, and this is especially true of arctic and subarctic regions. Also, based on what I know of elephants and other large mammals, the vast majority of their behavior is not instinctual but learned, from parents and other adults in the social cohort. Without a herd of wooly mammoths to learn from, it seems like the first “new” wooly mammoth is going to be pretty clueless, and at best unlikely to survive in the wild. The animal could be potentially released into a modern elephant herd, true, but even assuming that the herd would adopt it, aren’t we then just producing a modern elephant that happens to be bigger and hairier than its adopted cousins? As one scientist put it, if that’s what we are doing then we should just put our energy into saving the modern elephant…that seems much more direct and likely of success.
Here endeth the lesson on life imitating art.
Bike Newbie 