Question for you.
How was 2023 for you if you were a bridled white-eye, a flat pigtoe mussel or a Java Stingaree?
The answer, for that bird, mussel and fish respectively, is ‘not great’. You went extinct. You were one of 23 species that were officially declared extinct during last year, to join the 7 in 2022, the 23 again in 2021 and the 31 in 2020. Pity the Pinango Stub-foot toad: whilst you lot were doing lock-down quiz nights, the last one of them shuffled off this mortal coil in some Central American forest.
You have to go some to be declared extinct. In the old days, not being seen for 50 years did the trick- (on which basis, England’s world cup hopes are down the pan)- but now it is a much more scientific decision. When the people in white coats decide that the last one has died out without leaving a genetic successor, that’s your lot.
My go-to extinction is the Great Auk. On July 3rd, 1844, three Icelandic fishermen killed the last known pair whilst actually knowing that they were the last pair. Some museum curator had paid them to get the birds before anyone else did and, and this could only happen to a human, the one who had second thoughts trod on the last remaining egg whilst trying to get away from the melee. End of this gentle ‘northern penguin’. There are others, but they need not detain us….
….Because all over the place, geneticists and business people, who are both cleverer and richer than you and me, are doing what are called in the trade ‘de-extinctions’, or what you might call bringing extinct species back to life.
There are basically four ways that you can do try this: cloning (think: Dolly the Sheep); genome editing; back breeding (when you try to find a few things that look like what you are after, and then keep breeding them until you have roughly what you want); and iterative evolution (when something else evolves where the extinct thing was, in exactly the same conditions, and becomes nearly identical.)
The nearest one to home involves the aurochs, the prototype cow that is the ancestor of all the cows around these parts today. There are two heavily-funded projects in Europe working to get something like the old aurochs back into the wild areas of the continent, to do roughly what any local conservation cow would do for free,if you happened to choose the right breed. Next up will be the tarpan- the forerunner of the horse- whose thundering hooves it was that coincidentally brought the first apple seeds to western Europe.
In Australia, it is the Tasmanian Thylacene (like a thin tiger, but much, much uglier); in the USA, amongst other things, it is the Passenger Pigeon, once the most numerous bird in the world, so they think, that had the gross misfortune to be knocking about the mid west when the three inventions came together simultaneously: breech loading shotguns, railroads and refrigeration encouraged every man and his wife to shoot them off the branches of trees at night once they were roosting. The last one, called Martha, died in a Cincinatti zoo around the start of World War One.
This is big business. A company in Dallas that is working on the mammoth and the dodo is currently being valued at around $1.5 billion, and employing a large number of rather brilliant scientists.
Now, with the possible exception of the mammoth (who might eat the dead grass that would allow sunlight onto newer vegetation, and crush the snow that is stopping the tundra freezing by insulating it against the cold), no one has offered me any particularly compelling reasons why we want these things back. Extinction, after all, is the norm -(we will go that way ourselves sooner or later), and survival the exception.
Which makes it all look a bit contrived to this non-scientist. I reckon that I could put up a pretty good case to get all these scientists, and all this money, to protecting and enhancing what we actually have. I know that I bang on about it a lot, but that’s because I worry about it a lot. Saving things is so much cheaper and more successful than trying to recreate them, we should try it a bit more often.
So when someone comes asking for an investment from you to get the dodo back up in your skies again, show him the door, and remind him that the dodo never flew in the first place…
…which is why it is no longer with us.
Old enough to know better 