'Fairytale science': Rather than reviving an extinct species, stop killing them off
I recently became interested in de-extinction science when I saw an article in Paste BN about a big investment in Australia to bring back the extinct thylacine, often wrongly referred to as "Tasmanian tigers." That led me to reach out to Flinders University's global ecology professor Corey Bradshaw, who has come out against de-extinction efforts.
What started out as a lighthearted chat about an extinct tiger that's not really a tiger turned pretty dark, pretty quickly, as Bradshaw began explaining to me what his extinction research shows for the future of mankind and the planet.
But before you say to yourself, "I can't hear this today," just wait. All is not (completely) lost. Bradshaw has very specific ideas for what we can do to make things less terrible. And that's definitely worth a try, if not for our generation, then for the next one.
Our conversation has been edited for length, style and clarity.
Tell me about your expertise and research.
I'm an environmental modeler. I reconstruct ecosystems to see how they change in the past and how they might change in the future.
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The spinal column of my work is dealing with biodiversity crisis and extinction dynamics. I try to predict what's going to go extinct and when, and what the extent of a mass extinction will be.
It sounds very pessimistic but it's actually very realistic, and it allows you to continue doing your work.
Let's talk about de-extinction. Can, and should, scientists bring Tasmanian tigers back?
First of all, they're not strictly Tasmanian nor are they tigers. They were on the mainland (Australia) until about 3,000 years ago. They only survived in a pocket, in Tasmania, because it was a small island. They aren't tigers – they're marsupials.
So, the idea of de-extinction has been going on for decades. Think about Jurassic Park, that brought the idea into the public sphere that you can take DNA and recreate a new species that's been long gone. Back in the 1970s, the San Diego Frozen Zoo (began) to freeze DNA, blood, tissue and sperm cells. Then we had Dolly the sheep cloned in 1996.
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The next one was 2008, a mouse that had been frozen at minus 20 (Celsius) for 16 years was reanimated. It didn't last very long. But then the first real de-extinction was with the Pyrenean ibex. It was cloned from frozen tissue taken prior to extinction, and it also didn't last long.
Then we have the development of CRISPR technology, which is gene editing, and can be applied to humans – but there are a lot of potential applications like switching off deleterious genes of invasive species. The only real advances in gene editing have occurred at the crop level, and this is what we call GMO.
So why are you against de-extinction?
There's a whole set of technical arguments, practical conservation arguments and ethical arguments when taken together make you scratch your head and ask, "Why are we doing this?"
Let's look at the technological side of things: The only way you're going to get a species back today is if we manage to find something very closely related that still exists. You'd have to do hundreds of millions, if not billions, of base-pair manipulations in gene editing, and one mistake and the whole thing is unviable.
There isn't a single geneticist on the planet that's been able to do that.
One of my geneticists calls it "fairytale science."
Say you've overcome all those technological challenges, which I say is impossible. So you've created an individual, now what do you do with it? To be able to introduce a species in a place it once was you need to introduce hundreds, if not thousands, of genetically different individuals for that species to have any chance of persistence. It's not this Noah's ark idea that you can just stick two in and they will breed up, no. They're not going to have the genetic variability to do that and maintain a viable population. We also don't know if the microbiomes persist that would allow them to feed, to digest, to have an immune response.
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People don't like to hear that because they put millions of dollars into breeding up very small populations, like the kakapo in New Zealand. They say we have 250 of them, yeah, but they spent millions and millions for decades and you still only have 250. You can't just pop them out.
The other practical aspect is why did the species go extinct in the first place?
We have also been cutting down trees. The habitat that you can put them back into doesn't exist anymore, at least to the extent you need it to. Then you have climate change. So, even if you can get over all the genetic challenges, the practical conservation challenges are even harder.
Ethically, there's the idea that we are putting a lot of resources into something that probably isn't going to work. What we could do instead is spend that money more wisely. Ethically, too, have we asked Indigenous people what they want? Have we considered what the nonscientific community requires? Have we considered that this is manipulating an ecosystem that has changed to the point where we no longer have the ethical right to do so? What about the welfare of animals?
What should people do instead? We could stop deforestation. We could put more effort into assisted migration where species are more likely to survive climate change. We could do massive reforestation. We need to restore grasslands.
These kind of things tend to be more effective in the long term for reducing the extinction rate.
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What are five things people can do to make the future less terrible?
We're killing the planet. That sounds sensational, but we're doing a bloody good job at it. We are now in a sixth mass extinction event. This is equivalent to the Cretaceous era when we saw the asteroid hit. A mass extinction is defined as a loss of 75% or more species within about 2.5 million years. We have managed to do this in a couple of hundred years. Combined with what the climate is doing, whether we survive is debatable. We probably will, but in a vastly different sense.
There are small, positive changes, but not at the scale required:
►If the world went to an average of about two kids per person we would stabilize. In high-income nations, the largest contributing factor to reducing emissions is choosing fewer children – relative to not flying overseas, plant-based diets, electric cars, etc.
►Stick, as much as possible, to a plant-based diet.
►Vote for policies restricting donations to political parties; without severe limitations on donations, government policies will always favor donors over the people.
►If you can donate money, donate to organizations able to purchase land to set aside from any exploitation.
►Vote to support nuclear power facilities as a means to reduce emissions while providing abundant energy.
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Carli Pierson, a New York licensed attorney, is an opinion writer with Paste BN, and a member of the Paste BN Editorial Board. Follow her on Twitter: @CarliPiersonEsq.