Thursday, May 13, 2010

A Mammoth Technicality


Here’s an interesting little argument for you to start with somebody.

Years ago there was concern that elephants were soon to become extinct. Hunters and poachers were shooting them, even on wildlife parks, and making off with their tusks, because some people somewhere got it into their heads that ground up ivory was a good base for organic viagra. Or they wanted to carve little figures out of tusks and sell them to tourists at vastly inflated prices.


Well, we still have elephants roaming the African wilderness because of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; CITES. And also because people started shooting poachers, who aren’t an endangered species.


It prevents elephant ivory from crossing international borders, effectively stemming whatever tide of elephant tusks was flowing. There’s still probably a black market trickle of elephant ivory, but now that people need a CITES certificate authorising the possession of their ivory, the demand is so much less.


One alternative the hunters have found is in the frozen wilderness of Siberia. For three months a year they can get out there and happily and legally dig up mammoth tusks. Because mammoths are extinct there is no problem, except that the “hunters” have to spend two days defrosting the ground around the tusk before they can get it out.


Now, according to my good friends at Wikipedia, there are an estimated 150 million mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost. So there’s no real danger that the trade in mammoth ivory is going to dry up any time soon.


Meanwhile, scientists are optimistic that one day they will be able to sort out differences in mammoth and elephant DNA and eventually a little half-tonne woolly bundle of joy will be delivered via a surrogate elephant mother.


Can you see where I’m heading with this?


At the moment of mammoth birth, technically the woolly mammoth will no longer be extinct, but will be an endangered species. Therefore CITES kicks in and the tusk hunters are out of business.


Or will they argue that the newborn mammoth is not of the same species as the 150 million others floating around the Siberian underground? Because scientists have dicked around with the DNA and used DNA from another animal to effectively build this new species of mammoth, is it still a proper mammoth?


I think there was a similar argument circulating when Jurassic Park first came out. If such a park were possible, would the animals there technically still be dinosaurs?


Well, that’s one for you to argue about with somebody. You can make a fair case for both points of view.


If some alien species found a strand of human DNA and filled in the holes with, say, chimp DNA, would the result still be considered human? Fortunately, that’s one for the aliens to debate. But I'm pretty sure you'd find the results in Temuka.

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