Uncommon Descent Contest 11: Can biotechnology bring back extinct animals?

This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it. Go here to enter.

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone? Consider this:

... researchers have now resurrected the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial, which has been extinct for more than seventy years. In 2008, scientists from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, extracted DNA from tissue that had been preserved in the Museum Victoria, in Melbourne. They took a fragment of DNA that controlled the production of a collagen gene from the tiger and inserted it into a mouse embryo. The DNA switched on just the right gene, and the embryo began to churn out collagen. That marked the first time that any material from an extinct creature other than a virus has functioned inside a living organism.

It will not be the last. A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with hair samples from two woolly mammoths—one of them sixty thousand years old and the other eighteen thousand—has tentatively figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant’s egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. “There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth—a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. Rex.,” the Times editorialized soon after the discovery was announced. “We’re just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth.”

The article discusses both the promise and the peril or reengineering nature.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical that an extinct creature can be resurrected from DNA alone, but ... wait! What I thought was passing traffic turned out to be a herd of tyrannosaurs heading off to eat the McDonalds.

So now to Uncommon Descent Contest Question 11: For a free copy of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), how likely do you think biotechnologists will be in bringing back the Tasmanian wolf or the woolly mammoth? You can try the tyrannosaur too if you are feeling ambitious.

Here are the contest rules, not an extensive read.

Biotechnology: The quest to bring back extinct animals

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone? Consider this:

... researchers have now resurrected the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial, which has been extinct for more than seventy years. In 2008, scientists from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, extracted DNA from tissue that had been preserved in the Museum Victoria, in Melbourne. They took a fragment of DNA that controlled the production of a collagen gene from the tiger and inserted it into a mouse embryo. The DNA switched on just the right gene, and the embryo began to churn out collagen. That marked the first time that any material from an extinct creature other than a virus has functioned inside a living organism.

It will not be the last. A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with hair samples from two woolly mammoths—one of them sixty thousand years old and the other eighteen thousand—has tentatively figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant’s egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. “There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth—a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. Rex.,” the Times editorialized soon after the discovery was announced. “We’re just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth.”

The article discusses both the promise and the peril or reengineering nature.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical that an extinct creature can be resurrected from DNA alone, but ... wait! What I thought was passing traffic turned out to be a herd of tyrannosaurs heading off to eat the McDonalds.

Extinction: A 62-million-year itch?

At Seed Magazine (June 29, 2009), Adrian Melott of "The Big Idea" asks, "Sometimes, something kills nearly all life on the entire planet. But is there a regular cycle to this creation and destruction of Earth’s biodiversity?", arguing,

Fortunately, all known dips in biodiversity seem to be followed by periods of rapid diversification called radiations. It was the end-Permian event that allowed the dinosaurs to develop and flourish. Of course, yet another mass extinction ended their reign. In their place, birds and then mammals ascended. And now humans have emerged. But even with all our intelligence and technology, we still don’t really understand what causes extinctions or radiations.

One of the big mysteries associated with these phenomena is also a key question for life’s future: Do they occur with any regularity? If we discovered a cycle to these events, it might suggest what’s driving the changes on Earth, and what linkage, if any, they have to events elsewhere in the universe.

He plays with the idea of a 62-million-year cycle:

Soon I was losing sleep over something I’d read in a 2005 issue of Nature. Robert Rohde and his mentor, Richard Muller of UC Berkeley, had reported a fascinating cycle in biodiversity within a major compendium of fossil data sets, a regular 62-million-year rise and fall in the count of all kinds of creatures. They had explored several mechanisms to explain it and found them lacking, but both they and their editors deemed the signal so significant that it was published.

Hmmm. Scheduled renovations?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Dinosaurs survived into the Paleocene (comparatively modern) era - about 65 million years ago and counting?

Well, EurekaAlert (28 April 2009) offers some suggestions in "Evidence of the 'Lost World' -- did dinosaurs survive the end Cretaceous extinctions?"

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago. Various Hollywood versions have tried to recreate the lost world of dinosaurs, but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality. New scientific evidence suggests that dinosaur bones from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin, USA, date from after the extinction, and that dinosaurs may have survived in a remote area of what is now New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years. This controversial new research, published today in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, is based on detailed chemical investigations of the dinosaur bones, and evidence for the age of the rocks in which they are found.

"The great difficulty with this hypothesis - that these are the remains of dinosaurs that survived - is ruling out the possibility that the bones date from before the extinction" says Jim Fassett, author of the research. "After being killed and deposited in sands and muds, it is possible for bones to be exhumed by rivers and then incorporated into younger rocks" he explains.

My caution is, we all want this. We wish the more interesting dinos were alive today. Gee, if we could show off a real T Rex at the Royal Ontario Museum, people would be lined up around the block 18 times. But, like the space aliens, ... they never write, they never phone ...

Goodbye, frog prince. It was your habit of eating flies in public that totally bugged me

No, but seriously, Robert Deyes asks at Access Research Network, "Are We Kissing The Frog Prince Goodbye?"

Review Of PBS NATURE Documentary Thin Green Line: For those who take issue with the rather blase application of evolution to every aspect of biology, Public Television's recent showing of Thin Green Line is bound to have raised hackles. Few nature documentaries that I have seen begin with quite the same density of evolutionary suppositions. We are told for example that amphibians were the first of our ancestors to venture out of the water and that they have since evolved 'into an explosion of species'. By the same token frogs are made out to be evolutionary gems that over the millennia adapted to live alongside dinosaurs, survive asteroid impacts and withstand the rigors of the ice age. Yet herein lies the irony. For despite all their supposed evolving and adapting, amphibians today have been unable to keep up with the more recent pace of environmental change.

Indeed evolutionary just-so stories aside, Thin Green Line provided important yet deeply troubling details about a tragedy that is unfolding beneath our very eyes- one that is unprecedented in its sheer scale. A third of all amphibian species across the globe are currently in decline and half of all amphibian species may eventually disappear altogether. Like many environmental tragedies, human activity is partly to blame. Spade-Foot toads in Cape Cod for example are being edged out by an increase in road construction while the Mountain Yellow-Legged frogs of America's Yosemite National Park have only recently recovered from a hard-fought battle against fish that were introduced by recreational fishers in the early 1900's (Ref 1).

As the demand for new housing continues to rise across the world, amphibians are facing survival challenges on every front.

The trouble with amphibians is that they are stupid. In response to every new challenge, they need help surviving, because they won't do it themselves. Do you doubt this? Compare them to rats, raccoons, and Canada geese.

The only solution, in my view, is to get communities to adopt species and create an interest in keeping them alive. You can be sure they won't do it themselves.

Other extinction stories.

Animal Planet: Extinction confronted

I am informed by Animal Planet that most animals that have ever lived have gone extinct. This looks like a very interesting series, and it raises an issue that I think should properly be part of any discussion of evolution: How and why do life forms go extinct?

Here is one way of looking at it: How did medicine get to be such a useful discipline?: Not by explaining how and why people stay alive, but by explaining how and why they die (and - what we are really paying for, of course - how to prevent early death).

So thanks, Animal Planet, for starting to unpack the question of how all existing members of a life form can just die out. Are they doing something wrong? More important, is it something we could actually prevent?

Let's say we learned that the "Weird Macaque" is dying out, due to a monkey version of AIDS (yes, yes, of course I made up both the species and the disease, for illustrative purposes). Should we try to prevent that? How much should we invest in the problem, as opposed to investment in human health or in the welfare of less obviously endangered species?

This just in: I am also informed by Animal Planet that every monkey knows his place until he is pushed too far. I would have said the same about anteaters and coyotes, one of whom recently killed a chihuahua in Toronto. I am happy to report that almost everyone has sided with the coyote.

Look, here in Toronto, we have standards, okay? Just because you can breed a dog that looks like a rat ... don't push your luck! In the priceless words of the Toronto Star (Web edition),

Coyotes usually feed on rabbits, squirrels and mice but have been known to go after cats.

So, while I am here anyway, keep your overfed pussy indoors. It's better for her for a number of reasons; this is just another one to pay attention to, not the only one.

This is a coyote - a canine somewhat smaller than a wolf.

How to Become Extinct: an oldie but goodie

This new evo devo spoof site might be a good time to revisit the charming Will Cuppy (1884-1949), author of How to Become Extinct, a similar send-up of the ponderous truisms uttered on the history of life:

Some fishes become extinct, but Herrings go on forever. Herrings spawn at all times and places and nothing will induce them to change their ways. They have no fish control. Herrings congregate in schools, where they learn nothing at all. They move in vast numbers in May and October. Herrings subsist upon Copepods and Copepods subsist upon Diatoms and Diatoms just float around and reproduce. Young Herrings or Sperling or Whitebait are rather cute. They have serrated abdomens. The skull of the Common or Coney Island Herring is triangular, but he would be just the same anyway. (The nervous system of the Herring is fairly simple. When the Herring runs into something the stimulus is flashed to the forebrain, with or without results.)
- Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984, p. 13. (1)

Company/government nosesdives no different from animal extinctions, author argues

A new book apparently claims that the failure of large companies, governments, et cetera, to accomplish their goals can be understood with reference to the same processes as animal extinctions.

Alasdair Palmer, Public Policy Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, reviews Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics by Paul Ormerod, noting,

Why Most Things Fail might have been just another melancholy dirge on the omnipresence of death of the “all flesh is grass” variety, but this engrossing and entertaining book is much more than a mordant moan on mortality. It is a careful, comprehensible analysis of the limits of human rationality's ability to control the world, and of the implications for public policy - and, to some extent, for personal conduct - of the failure of most rational calculation to produce its intended results.

Ormerod occasionally over-states the hopelessness of the human predicament. Impressed by the parallels between the law which relates the frequency of extinctions in the animal kingdom to their size (the larger the percentage of living creatures an extinction wipes out, the less often such an event happens) and the law which relates the frequency at which firms fail to their size (the rate at which firms fail exactly parallels the way species go extinct), he concludes that firms will fail at a predetermined rate - irrespective of the decisions of the people who run them.

The collapse of IBM, for example, wasn't really the fault of its executives. Nor was it due to Bill Gates’s planning genius at Microsoft. No one, including Mr Gates, expected Microsoft’s Windows 3 to be the huge success it became. It wasn't any better than the competing products, and in some ways it was worse. Luck, more than any rational (or irrational) choice by managers, explains why IBM shrank and Microsoft prospered.

No amount of planning or rational calculation, insists Ormerod, can escape the iron law of failure which governs human endeavour. That conclusion, however, seems to me to be too despairing. “Human reason can't be as impotent as Ormerod implies. After all, its application to the problem of how to understand the laws which govern the natural world has produced spectacular results over the past 200 years. ... Ormerod's despairing vision of the inevitable failure of practical reason seems unable to account for that fact.

What I think reviewer Palmer does not see clearly is that Ormerod probably subscribes to Darwinian naturalism. According to that view, intelligence is simply an illusory state produced in the overdeveloped human brain, rather than a regular feature of our universe that creates design, as well as law and chance. Now, if a person believes in Darwinian naturalism, he is always looking for iron laws or randomness to account for events in human life, rather than the outcomes of intelligent decision-making.

Of course, there is not, in reality, any comparison between the reasons that megatherium and brontosaurus went extinct and the reasons why Enron went under, Martha Stewart went to jail, or the Dems lost the last U.S. election. But the amazing thing is that some people actually take comfort in believing that failure is an inevitable outcome of law and chance, rather than the result of poor or limited planning or bad choices (to be fair, not necessarily one’s own, often that of others - but choices nonetheless). To find out more about my book, go to By Design or by Chance?