Courtney Vlastnik
Lillig
English 1102.002-Compostion 2
March 20, 2015
Rough Draft #2 What would you say if you could see a Woolley mammoth, or a Saber-Toothed Tiger or even a dinosaur up close in person? Most people would probably be so excited and asking where do I sign up? The real question is are you prepared to defy the circle of life and kill thousands beyond thousands of living species to see those animals? Scientists have come up with a process called De-Extinction it intends to resurrect single, charismatic species, yet millions of species will be at risk of extinction. De-Extinction should not be allowed because nature had their chance, we cannot contain dangerous animals, we need to focus on living species and it is very expensive to enforce. Nature had their chance to survive but didn't make it because of natural selection and human involvement. Human involvement has been responsible for most of the deaths of our fellow animals around the world. For example," Reports released to coincide with the meeting revealed that between 2002 and 2011, the African forest elephant population declined by 62 percent from poaching; that fishing kills at least 100 million sharks a year -- many of the members of imperiled species; and that between 2000 and 2012, an average of 110 tigers a year were killed (as few as 3,200 of the cats remain in the wild)" (Brand 12-12).This shows that humans are constantly killing animals for fun, not realizing that it can affect the existence of that animal in a few years. Yes, human involment with killing animals for fun can be changed but natural selection can not and should not be changed. If nature selected some species to go then why should humans try to play God? "A major problem with playing God is that we are going against how nature inherently works. This is where things have the potential to go haywire; it’s like the science fair project that blows up in our face. According to basic Darwinian principles, animals survive due to their ability to adapt and the animals that cannot do so slowly die away"(Gewin , 38-45). Nature selects animals that either need to leave or are failing at their role in the envoirment. It is all about survival of the fittest and if you are not the fittest then nature selects you to leave. We need to have this concept in our environment because it gives the chance for new life to form and makes animals really earn their role in the wild. That would all change if we bring back animals like the dinosaur that were selected to leave. We would be changing the way the world is supposed to be, there would pretty much be no use for the circle of life anymore. The animals would truly never be the hard working, livable animal they once were. Animals would never be the same animal they once were, bringing them back would all be based on profit. De- extinct animals would have no idea how to live their new life, they would be much better off extinct. "It will have permanently lost memory of important natural behaviours, the things adult animals teach their young to help them to survive. It is certainly functionally extinct, i.e. no longer performing its role in the ecosystem" (Welz, np). Essentially, de-extinct animals would become like robots. We would be enforcing how that animal is supposed to survive because it has no memory of how it survived. We would be taking away what they were put on the earth to do and making up a new role that is not suited for them or our environment. Another example of this is about the late bird named the passenger pigeon “If we bring the passenger pigeon back, there’s no reason to believe it will act the same way as it did in 1850,” says co-author Jacob Sherkow, a fellow professor at the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences. “Many traits are culturally learned. Migration patterns change when not taught from generation to generation” (Welz, np). This shows that if this bird is brought back it will have so many lost traits because of