Aggregated News
I recently spoke at Revive & Restore's TEDx DeExtinction event at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington DC. Most of the speakers were brilliant geneticists working on ways to revive species that no longer live on earth by injecting DNA from extinct species into eggs of living relatives. The atmosphere was electric with the hopes and claims of top scientists bent on bringing back the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon, and other vanished species. I was the invited skeptic, and here's what I told them, more or less.
The poster child for de-extinction is the passenger pigeon. The first European visitors to North America saw flocks so huge that they darkened the skies from horizon to horizon. Even in the 19th century, when the pigeons were starting to decline, observers estimated over a billion birds in some flocks. A market hunter with a shotgun could kill 50 or 100 with a single shot. The combined weight of the pigeons could bring down giant tree limbs with a sound like cannon fire. Yet the last passenger pigeon, a...
The poster child for de-extinction is the passenger pigeon. The first European visitors to North America saw flocks so huge that they darkened the skies from horizon to horizon. Even in the 19th century, when the pigeons were starting to decline, observers estimated over a billion birds in some flocks. A market hunter with a shotgun could kill 50 or 100 with a single shot. The combined weight of the pigeons could bring down giant tree limbs with a sound like cannon fire. Yet the last passenger pigeon, a...