Maybe scientists should question what precisely their work is going to be used for? like “hey boss why are we making house-sized predators? i’m not sure i want to do that, i’d rather start with small herbivores that can’t hurt anyone”.
“i was just following orders” is famously called the nuremburg defense, and the world didn’t really like the nazi officers who pleaded that to charges of gassing people…
An engineer working on the construction of a building that’s obviously going to collapse can’t just say “oh well i’m just a worker, when the building collapses and kills 30 people that’s the owner’s fault”, they have to refuse to continue work until the designs have been fixed or they are criminally negligent
In the book Dr Wu pretty much begs Hammond to let him genetically alter the dinos to be slower and more tame. Hammond is a much better villain in the book than the kindly old attenborough who just wants the world to experience the magic of Dinosaurs in the movie. Besides having a single Newman in charge of the whole IT system for the park, his greed and cheapness wasn’t really highlighted in the movie
I want like a gritty animated version of Jurassic Park that’s more true to the novel. Like heavily stylized art direction and shit. With sick dino action scenes and more gore.
Yea that sounds sick af
It would have gone much much better if they started with like 10 small dinosaurs and just slowly scaled up after a few years.
The hubris in the capitalistic mindset was that they went as far as possible, including a full T-Rex.
Bringing that after a few years would ironically make more money in the long run cause it would give people a reason to revisit.
nah, fuck both.
I hate this meme because it absolves the scientists of their moral obligations entirely. It wasn’t good science. It was terrible science. No ethical scientist would have ever participated especially since most of it wasn’t actually science.
They put random other genes into the dinosaurs, that’s terrible science! You can’t learn anything from that data!! For fuck’s sake, it’s some of the worst science I’ve ever heard of.
You can always learn from experimentation.
in this case they learned that yes, recreating huge predators and letting people go on poorly secured safari next to them does indeed result in people being violently killed.
I somehow don’t think this experiment would pass an ethics committee in real life…
You can learn on extant animals which would give you real results, not extinct animals that you have no chance of confirming your findings.
Sure you can. They found dna sequences. If they found enough to build a complete genome, they could compare. (yes yes I know they cannonically did not have enough, but you can learn a lot from an incomplete picture)
So what science should they have done before they discovered they could use living DNA to patch gaps in the dino DNA to complete the cloning process?
I really don’t think they were just going down a random list being like “Mouse? No. House fly? No. Sparrow? No. Antelope? No. Octopus? No. Frog? Wait! Yes, thats the one!”
Can you clarify the ethics of cloning extinct species? Is it that cloning is always unethical? Is it that zoos are unethical? Is it a combination of creating living creatures wholly to be in zoos thats unethical?
What I’m trying to understand is if you have an ethical issue with the process or the goal?
So what science should they have done before they discovered they could use living DNA to patch gaps in the dino DNA to complete the cloning process?
None? What scientific purpose does cloning a dinosaur that is guaranteed to not behave, look like, or function like any actual dinosaur ever did? If the purpose was instead to fill gaps in “extinct dna” they would have instead tested on living dinosaurs like birds and removed part of their DNA and then tried to supplement it with the stuff they wanted to learn about. There was no purpose to cloning dinosaurs at all if you have no clue how they’re going to act.
Can you clarify the ethics of cloning extinct species? Is it that cloning is always unethical? Is it that zoos are unethical? Is it a combination of creating living creatures wholly to be in zoos thats unethical?
What I’m trying to understand is if you have an ethical issue with the process or the goal?
Both? For one, bringing back extinct animals that we caused the extinction of is completely different than bringing back animals we know nothing about.
An extinct bird 100 years ago that might have affected the ecology of the island it was on, and we find a missing piece of DNA and can use that to clone the animal would tell us some about the animal. But the animal’s behavior will be completely different. We might or might not know if it needs a specific familial structure, specific nutrients, specific types of dwellings.
For a dinosaur that we know nothing about besides its bodily remains, cloning it will tell us nothing. It’s not the same planet, it’s not the same environment, it’s not the same DNA. There’s literally nothing about it that cloning would tell us more of. The only purpose would be for entertainment.
This gets covered extensively in the two part episode of Behind the Bastards on Dr George Church and his claims about bringing Dire Wolves back to life. We literally already can see exactly what the ethical and scientific problems with cloning extinct animals are right now. It’s not some movie plot. It’s really happening and the scientific results are useless.
You… DO realize science has many mechanisms to deal with studies where not everything is known… right?! You DO realize many, many scientists produce great results from studying things they do not currently understand, right?
For that matter, you DO realize most scientific breakthroughs happen while studying things they don’t already know the result of, right? Your response reeks of ignorance on how knowledge is gained.
I do realize that. I also realize that many many scientists currently disapprove of exactly this kind of science occurring RIGHT NOW with Colossal Bioscience. I don’t need to know every single scientific breakthrough that “might occur” when we have thousands of scientists saying that it’s not cloning, it’s not resurrection, it’s a new animal. The scientific results can be gotten a different way and don’t lead to eugenics.
It’s abundantly clear that you were looking for me to say something specific so that you could attack just that argument. There’s a difference between learning something from performing science, and choosing to perform science that will lead to bad outcomes. There’s no reason to try to clone a dinosaur. We have plenty of other animals that will be much easier to clone, we will be able to learn more, and there won’t be a ridiculously bad eugenics (or science) outcome at the end of it.
“But even then, it’s never the original animal,” he says. “That animal is extinct, that lineage is extinct, but it’s a new entity that has some genetic legacy. It’s a hybrid.”
Nope, not waiting for anything specific. My comment was also in no way what so ever about the morals of the situation or whether it’s wise to create new animals. Just that there is plenty to learn from experiments where the outcome cannot yet be predicted. That’s uh… a very large portion of science.
