Jurassic Park, for realsies? - Beatrice the Biologist

What if extinction wasn’t the end of a species? What if we could bring them back just like they did in Jurassic Park?

Let us review the basic premise of Jurassic Park:

Some sweaty guys dug up mosquitos that were trapped in amber after feasting on dinosaur blood, perfectly preserving it.

Then some guys in white lab coats extracted the DNA from the mosquito with a laughably simple procedure that involved nothing but a drill and a long needle. They used this DNA to clone the dinosaurs, injecting the zygote into ostrich eggs for incubation. I tried to find the video clip where “Mr. DNA” explains all of this, but it managed to elude my youtube searches, and I got bored with that real quick.

But what if we could do this same thing for reals? But instead of cloning velociraptors that have been dead for 65 million years, we cloned species that have been dead for just a few hundred, or less? What if we could bring back recently, unfairly extinct species like the dodo?

To be perfectly clear, I am not really suggesting we do this. I’m just posing the question because it raises so many other questions–some very strange ones.

To begin with, if we cloned a social species that learns behaviors from its parents, who will these new orphan clones learn from? Will it really be the same species without parents and a community to teach it the characteristic behaviors of its kind?

Imagine if an alien species took a DNA sample from you while you slept and cloned you on another planet. What would they think of humanity based on a cloned version of you? To begin with, this clone might not learn to walk or talk, unless the aliens modeled these actions. If they’re the kind of alien that communicates silently through telepathy, the cloned human will probably just improvise grunts and squeaks, and the aliens would therefore think very little of us and wonder how we achieved anything at all.

That is, unless they were smart enough to realize that their study is flawed, which they would hopefully be, since they were smart enough to invent technology capable of intergalactic space flight and earth DNA extraction. But really, you never know. Based on what I’ve learned about aliens in movies, sometimes they’re really stupid and let Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum upload a virus to their main computer.

Another issue this cloning-extinct-species raises is yet more disturbing. If cloning were easier to do, and this became routine, would humanity cease environmental efforts and wildlife conservation, knowing that they can hit a do-over button and simply clone any species we carelessly wipe out? I don’t think we’d benefit in the end from being free to call mulligan on extinction. We’re bad enough as it is when it’s final.