Kyle Harper

How long has it been around?

Somebody told me about it.

Okay.

Somebody told me about it like, I think it was like less than two weeks ago.

And yeah, it's incredible.

I mean, it's really incredible.

I would say no.

We should still be concerned with extinction for a couple reasons.

One is

I mean absolutely this is a legitimate serious scientific field to like understand the genomics of extinct animals and there is like a small but serious enough science of de-extinction and it's feasible that some organisms can be targeted for serious de-extinction efforts.

At the same time, like a couple of thoughts.

One is like I'm not that optimistic that it will work, not because I think it's necessarily impossible, although it's not yet totally feasible, particularly for animals that don't have like very similar modern descendants.

But it's –

It's because a species isn't just a genome.

A species is an organism that inhabits a food web and an ecosystem.

And we could bring the woolly mammoth back, but there's nowhere for them to live.

The mammoth step that they need to thrive is not there.

And there's really very little point in bringing an animal back from extinction.

Just to put it in a box at a zoo to sort of like, you know, satiate our curiosity about it.

So without the ecosystem, you can't have the species.