De-Extinction Craze

wooly_mammoth_modelDe-extinction is thought to have first appeared – as a word – in The Source of Magic (1979) science fiction book by Piers Anthony and caught the attention of Hollywood. Using ancient cloned dinosaur DNA, popular ER television scriptwriter Michael Crichton then captivated the imagination of American film producer Steven Spielberg with the 1990 Jurassic Park novel igniting the de-extinction craze.

In 2013, de-extinction was announced to be a science, at least according to journalist Ben Macintyre writing in the Times (London, March 8). Not everyone agrees, though. “I will argue,” said Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in her new book How to Clone a Mammoth, the Science of De-Extinction, “that the present focus on bringing back particular species… is misguided” – scientifically.
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Extinction, Darwin Wrong Again

Great AukIn The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.” Extinction, however, was a relatively new concept only emerging in revolutionary France following the publication of Essay on the Theory of the Earth in 1813 by French naturalist Georges Cuvier.

“All these facts, consistent among themselves,” Cuvier argued, “seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours… And what revolution was able to wipe it out [extinction]?” Cuvier was an iconic French scientist who established extinction as a field of inquiry. When completed in time for the 1889 World’s Fair, his name was one of the only seventy-two names inscribed onto the Eiffel Tower. The discovery of extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains in the book The Sixth Extinction (2014), made evolution seem “as unlikely as levitation” – an issue Darwin conveniently overlooked.

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Darwin’s Frog Faces Extinction


 
Darwin's FrogIn December 1834, during the five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin described the colorings of an unusual frog on the temperate forest Island of Lemuy, Chiloe Archipelago, in his Beagle field notebook. Named in his honor, Rhinoderma darwinii, Darwin’s frog now faces extinction, not evolution.

The only known sister Rhinoderma species, Rhinoderma rufum, was discovered by French zoologist André Marie Constant Duméril (1774 – 1860) in Argentina. In 2004, the International Union of Conservation Nature (IUCN) listed R. rufum as “critically endangered” and R. darwinii as “vulnerable.”

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Eugenics

Sir Francis GaltonIn The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wove the eugenic philosophy of Plato into the theory of natural selection. As arguing that “extinction and natural selection go hand in hand,” perhaps unknowingly, Darwin legitimized the extinction by eugenics movements of the 20th century. Eugenics originated in ancient cultures. RomeAthens, and Sparta practiced eugenics to improve the strength and survival of their societies.

While Darwin uses “extinction” 74 times in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species, “evolution” is not mentioned once. Encouraged by his brother, Erasmus, Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, an English political economist in 1838.

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