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RE: Bring Back Your Dead: De-Extinction
Selective breeding feels like kind of a cop out. You can't really say you've created the original species unless the genome ends up identical. I do like the idea of editing existing species to match extinct genomes though.
Great article overall.
Well, that depends on how you define a species- there are, for example, species of finches that are more closely genetically related to another, separate species than individual members of a species of monkey might be- that is, there is more genetic diversity in the monkey species than between two separate bird species. As useful as genomes are, they're only one metric by which to judge a species. You can also define a species by evolutionary chain, by who it reproduces with, by their ecological niche, etc, etc- usually a combination of several metrics.
So no, selective breeding doesn't reproduce the old species in a genomic sense, but it's perfectly reasonable to consider them a rebirth of that species in, say, an ecological niche sense.
And thanks, glad you liked it!
I was wondering the same, so I'm glad he asked it and happy you answered it. But it seems some DNA fragments would be more important/preserved than others, and it looks as though selective breeding would treat highly conserved sequences the same as any sequence, and what is conserved in the new species might leave out something that was present in the old...
Yeah, not all gene sequences are created equal. Those that control neuron growth in your brain and spine, for example, are clearly more important than those that control your eye color. In recreating these species, those genes which differ from the gene sequences shared with the related species are of the most immediate concern.