Does Gone Mean Forever?

For this blog post I read National Geographic's  pros and cons on reviving extinct species. This topic has been an ongoing debate because of question that if those animals are gone, are they meant to be gone? Whether or not humans played a roll in the extinction of the species, they died off and if we did play a roll, then isn't it just part of the natural food chain? It's all just survival of the fittest. Whether it is ethically moral or not is up to you to decide but we are working on, and getting closer to  being able to actually revive extinct species. All scientists have to do is extract DNA from a body cell of, for example, a wholly mammoth and inject in into an egg cell of a female elephant. That female elephant will then, in theory, birth a wholly mammoth.

Pros: Bringing back certain species could actually really help the environment. For some species such as the Tasmanian devil, just pure bad luck drove them into  near extinction. A cancerous strain infected the gene pools and was killing them to the point of no return. Without those animals the whole food chain and ecosystem would just be thrown off. Luckily all scientists needed to do was release a few Tasmanian devils without the cancer gene into the wild and through mating the species was saved. My point is, if we did not interact and release those healthy devils then they would be extinct and the whole ecosystem would crumble. In the future when we fully develop this reviving system I hope that if such tragedies could be reversed, we would take action and do so.

Wholly mammoth found frozen in Siberia
source: http://natgeotv.com

Cons: The negative side to this is is it morally right to interfere with natures natural way of doing things. If an animal dies off, was it meant to die off? My personal opinion on this is that if humans caused the destruction of a species, then it is just to bring it back. But if that animal dies off from natural causes long before human contact, it is not just. It is not just aniamls that are able to be revived, also plants. If we bring back certain species then they might kill off the ones on our earth at this moment. They might kill off the species that are meant to be here.

In my future posts I hope to see how humans can help animals on our planet now