Not so much resurrection as carefully-crafted reinvention focused on ecosystem-scale repair.Īs a researcher who is shaping this field, Shapiro is the perfect guide to the ongoing discussion about de-extinction. This is the goal of de-extinction efforts – not to recreate extinct species down to the finest detail, but to generate organisms that rehabilitate ecosystems. But with a broader definition of de-extinction – creating organisms that can fill vacant ecological roles – an elephant with a touch of mammoth trundling around the Arctic steppe would count as what Shapiro dubs an unextinct species. It’s impossible to recreate lost species exactly as they were, down to every last gene and quirk of behavior. And this cuts to the core of what de-extinction is really all about.įrom a purist’s perspective, extinction really is forever. On the very first page, Shapiro explains that for long-extinct organisms such as “the passenger pigeon, the dodo, the mammoth – cloning is not a viable option.” If at all, these organisms are going to come back to us piecemeal as revived genetic material expressed in hybrid creatures that may, or may not, look like the lost species. The book’s title is a bit of a bait-and-switch.
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