De-extinction raises a question: what kind of nature do people want to preserve, and what kind are they prepared to build?
De-extinction raises a question: what kind of nature do people want to preserve, and what kind are they prepared to build?
On 6 July, MIT Press Reader published an excerpt from political scientist Taylor Dotson's book on reviving extinct species. Dotson uses the thylacine and the mammoth to frame a choice between preserving nature's historical form and restoring its functions in a world that has already changed.
The thylacine, a Tasmanian marsupial predator, became extinct in 1936 after European settlers hunted it. One preserved museum specimen, a juvenile, has now yielded enough DNA to sequence its genome. Geneticist Andrew Pask and the company Colossal are trying to create an animal that could perform the thylacine's role in the ecosystem. Their aim is a functional analogue, not the return of the same historical species from the past.
This is where the debate gains substance. The new animal might resemble a thylacine, but it would have to live in a different Tasmania, with different diseases, climate, landscapes, and people. Even before its extinction, the thylacine had low genetic diversity. A future population would need to survive these conditions, not merely be born in a laboratory.
Nature conservation is usually associated with preserving an earlier state. That state is already disappearing, however, as warming, habitat destruction, and emerging diseases reshape ecosystems. This suggests another criterion. We can ask which species, relationships, and functions should persist in the future, even if preserving them requires relocation, managed evolution, genetic engineering, or a human-made functional analogue of an extinct animal.
Dotson does not propose leaving this choice to startups and venture capital. He proposes a public process in which scientists, local communities, governments, and conservationists set goals, limit risks, and monitor the consequences of small-scale experiments. Such a process does not guarantee a single answer. It makes the choice itself explicit: leave a dying system as it is, or try to restore its capacity to sustain life.
For immortalism, this is a familiar choice. Medicine already treats restoring lost function as a reasonable goal, whether by replacing an organ, correcting an inherited defect, or restoring a person's movement or sight. De-extinction extends the same question to species and ecosystems. The past cannot literally be restored. We can, however, decide which forms of life will be given a future.