Say humans went extinct and some alien species revived us from collected germ cells. Even if they could work out all the genetic quirks to make new population sustainable, 40000 years of social progress would be lost. Resurrected population wouldn't have benefit of any scientific advances, nor would they have any sense of rational thinking, philosophy, religion, social structures, not even language and writing.
Humanity wiped out multiple species' social history and that change is irrevocable.
Animal culture, aka knowledge and behaviors passed from generation to generation, exists but is way simpler than human culture and societal progress. It feels to me it can be recreated much more easily.
Way simpler from our perspective. I bet there are many intricacies that we haven't identified / cannot be identified through the human experience. Or maybe I am wrong, but I remain skeptical because we often don't give enough credit to other species.
In that hypothetical scenario, would you prefer humanity was left extinct? Culture can be recreated, or at least something new can be created in its place. If you're dead, that's it, you're gone
I'm not religious myself (agnostic comes close-ish), but I would think, based on the evidence I'm aware of, that there must be an important function that spirituality and religion fulfill, especially to people not living in a 21st century first world society. After all, up until very, very, very recently, every group, society, people we today have any knowledge of, in every remote corner of the planet, had some sort of spiritual or religious framework. Atheism and a-spiritualism as a mass phenomenon is (to the best of my knowledge) a very recent phenomenon, and even most of the atheists I know have something that feels to me personally like a bit of a "replacement spirituality". If everyone's doing it, shouldn't there be a good reason for that?
Traces of such activity go back a long way in time, too. Use of ochre goes back almost 300 000 years, and while we don't know what they used it for then, later finds make a pretty solid case for it to be used in some spiritual context [1]. Neanderthals built structures that may very well have been connected to spirituality 176 000 years ago [2]. We have lots and lots of Venus figurines from the ice age Homo sapiens [3], we have lots of amazing cave paintings that may have been just naturalistic studies, but really don't look like it (like this 13 000 years-old chimeric guy: [4]). And then there are statuettes of lion-headed humans and lots of other art that doesn't appear to be naturalistic at all [5], probably right up to today, unless the very few uncontacted tribes are areligious exceptions or don't create spiritual art.
That sort of thing is costly. Effigies are costly, art is costly, rituals are costly, all the more so if you're living in an ice age environment that makes today's northern Siberia look kinda decent, or on a resource-starved island. Sacrifices are very costly, and they have been a part of lots and lots of cults and religions since time immemorial. There must be a reason why we kept doing this, and why people seem have such an enormous innate need for such things that they pick up such practices on their own again and again.
Actually, I'd say there must be some pretty huge upside to this, given that cataclysmic events and very hard times invariably deepen people's religiosity, despite all the selection pressure acting under a volcanic plume or in an icy summer or during devastating epidemics. They may shatter organized religions, but there are no atheists on a foundering ship in a storm, and all that.
That's not to say that our huge organized religions are a great thing, and should be kept as-is forever. Religiosity certainly has been and is being used as a means to deplorable ends. But there is, and probably always has been, another arguably much larger dimension to this, and people without churches probably wouldn't be steadfast atheists who never believe anything they haven't seen a peer-reviewed double-blind study on.
I'd speculate that if someone actually did that experiment and set some machine-reared Homo sapiens children loose on a pristine second Earth, and if by chance they'd actually make it through the first couple of generations, a complete lack of spirituality would probably be a disadvantage to them, and they'd probably fill that void before long. They'd have to hit the big existential questions at some point, after all, and if there is another way to answer them, I don't know it.
Lets say a species is extinct. By trying to bring the species back, are we doing them any favor? Somehow sounds more like something that humans would do out of vanity than to serve any real purpose.
On the other hand trying to save species that haven't gone extinct makes sense as you are trying to protect their way of life.
We are doing favour to us and to other living species.
E.g. restoring mammoths would add a bulldozer that would trample trees in the north and bring the place back to its natural state of grasslands, that protects permafrost and CO2 stored in it
The reason species are going extinct is (generally) because their natural habitat/climate/food source are being destroyed - I'm not sure that preserving species so they can survive in some artificial zoo like ecosystem for our amusement achieves much - as you say the effort would be much better spent preserving the living species.
>It’s been hit twice on the flank with tranquiliser darts
>He kneels next to the elephant and hooks its penis into a device that looks like a huge condom. A conservationist inserts a probe that emits small electrical shocks to stimulate the elephant’s prostate in a process known as electroejaculation.
If a human standard was applied it could be described as drugging and sexually assaulting an elephant!
A noble goal however, the planets biodiversity is in a death spiral.
With regards to Murkas Gem, the cloned horse, I'm kind of surprised that anyone is surprised that he's shorter than the original horse. When you geld a horse at the correct time, they often end up bigger than they would have if left a stallion.
I think it happens in quite a few species as the growth plates stay open longer. I’ve seen some Castrated male cows get very tall. I’m not sure the author knew much about horses as they kept referring to them as race horses. Gem Twist was a Show jumper. Cloned horses are banned from racing and race horses from using AI for that matter.
I guess that's the weirdest part. The guy that referred to Gem Twist as a racehorse does artificial insemination for horses as a profession. So the basis of his career is horse breeding. He conflates racing and show jumping and either doesn't happen to mention the most obvious explanation for the size difference or is not familiar enough with horses to be aware of it. I believe I was 12 when I learned that a gelded horse tends to grow bigger than they would if they were left a stud. I honestly googled it to make sure it's not just one of those things that everyone "knows" that has no basis in fact. Difference in feed is another likely explanation that wasn't even mentioned. Why would you go to the size of the dam and the length of gestation when there's two obvious possibilities that are common knowledge to anyone who has horse experience? The quote makes it seem like it's some kind of surprise that genetics isn't the only contributor to size, but anyone who has any horse experience can tell you there's a number of other factors that determine adult size.
Almost certainly not. The genome is not the only information you need. You also need the gestation environment. It’s kind of like trying to compile gcc from source without a working gcc.
The Bootstrappable Builds folks are working on building an entire Linux distro, including GCC, starting at around 512 bytes of machine code, plus all the source code. I think they have had some success already:
While I appreciate the analogy, like others have pointed out, it's kind of broken as gcc is designed to be buildable by other C compilers, or at least, it's not impossible to bootstrap from a simpler C compiler.
A closer analogy would be like trying to build Apple's Darwin distribution tarball into an OS image without XBuild or a MacOS install, or any of Apple's other custom/proprietary tools.
Readit News
Humanity wiped out multiple species' social history and that change is irrevocable.
Dead Comment
I'm not religious myself (agnostic comes close-ish), but I would think, based on the evidence I'm aware of, that there must be an important function that spirituality and religion fulfill, especially to people not living in a 21st century first world society. After all, up until very, very, very recently, every group, society, people we today have any knowledge of, in every remote corner of the planet, had some sort of spiritual or religious framework. Atheism and a-spiritualism as a mass phenomenon is (to the best of my knowledge) a very recent phenomenon, and even most of the atheists I know have something that feels to me personally like a bit of a "replacement spirituality". If everyone's doing it, shouldn't there be a good reason for that?
Traces of such activity go back a long way in time, too. Use of ochre goes back almost 300 000 years, and while we don't know what they used it for then, later finds make a pretty solid case for it to be used in some spiritual context [1]. Neanderthals built structures that may very well have been connected to spirituality 176 000 years ago [2]. We have lots and lots of Venus figurines from the ice age Homo sapiens [3], we have lots of amazing cave paintings that may have been just naturalistic studies, but really don't look like it (like this 13 000 years-old chimeric guy: [4]). And then there are statuettes of lion-headed humans and lots of other art that doesn't appear to be naturalistic at all [5], probably right up to today, unless the very few uncontacted tribes are areligious exceptions or don't create spiritual art.
That sort of thing is costly. Effigies are costly, art is costly, rituals are costly, all the more so if you're living in an ice age environment that makes today's northern Siberia look kinda decent, or on a resource-starved island. Sacrifices are very costly, and they have been a part of lots and lots of cults and religions since time immemorial. There must be a reason why we kept doing this, and why people seem have such an enormous innate need for such things that they pick up such practices on their own again and again.
Actually, I'd say there must be some pretty huge upside to this, given that cataclysmic events and very hard times invariably deepen people's religiosity, despite all the selection pressure acting under a volcanic plume or in an icy summer or during devastating epidemics. They may shatter organized religions, but there are no atheists on a foundering ship in a storm, and all that.
That's not to say that our huge organized religions are a great thing, and should be kept as-is forever. Religiosity certainly has been and is being used as a means to deplorable ends. But there is, and probably always has been, another arguably much larger dimension to this, and people without churches probably wouldn't be steadfast atheists who never believe anything they haven't seen a peer-reviewed double-blind study on.
I'd speculate that if someone actually did that experiment and set some machine-reared Homo sapiens children loose on a pristine second Earth, and if by chance they'd actually make it through the first couple of generations, a complete lack of spirituality would probably be a disadvantage to them, and they'd probably fill that void before long. They'd have to hit the big existential questions at some point, after all, and if there is another way to answer them, I don't know it.
1: https://www.livescience.com/64138-ochre.html
2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/neanderth...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer_(cave_art)
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art
Dead Comment
On the other hand trying to save species that haven't gone extinct makes sense as you are trying to protect their way of life.
E.g. restoring mammoths would add a bulldozer that would trample trees in the north and bring the place back to its natural state of grasslands, that protects permafrost and CO2 stored in it
see https://pleistocenepark.ru
Instead of trying to save this planet, we fetishise escaping towards a dead, uninhabitable rock.
If a human standard was applied it could be described as drugging and sexually assaulting an elephant!
A noble goal however, the planets biodiversity is in a death spiral.
Except man.
And it's sacreligious, especially here, to even talk about people having less kids.
"The economic system counts on babies, and we need more!" which I have heard here so many times.
I don't want to debate. I'm a nobody. I just think there are too many people on this planet, and we are ruining it for the rest of the animals.
Population growth is declining in rich countries already, and in many middle-income ones.
We don't have to convince people to have less kids as they already do if they're wealthy, educated and their kids don't die.
https://bootstrappable.org/https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-boots...
A closer analogy would be like trying to build Apple's Darwin distribution tarball into an OS image without XBuild or a MacOS install, or any of Apple's other custom/proprietary tools.
Non-metaphorically, I vaguely remember something about using elephants to gestate cloned mammoths.