The following is an excerpt.
A few weeks back I chanced across a post by Carla Sinclair at BoingBoing in which she recounted a TED talk that proposed reviving extinct species:
“Stewart Brand began his TED talk today with the statement, ‘Biotechnology is about to liberate conservation.’ Before I had a chance to process what that meant, he went on to list a number of birds and mammals that have become extinct in the last few centuries, including the passenger pigeon, which was killed off by hunters in the 1930s.
For a moment my mood plunged, as it always does with conversations of human-caused animal extinction. And then he asked the question, ‘What if DNA could be used to bring a species back?’ I felt a tsunami of awe and excitement barrel through the audience. This was as exciting as his declaration about the digital world in 1984 when he said, ‘Information wants to be free.’ “
So far, the usual dewy-eyed gravitas we’ve come to expect from TED talks. But my reaction was quite different from Carla’s. “That is, without doubt,” I muttered to myself, “the stupidest thing I’ve heard this year.”
View the original article here: Who wants to live alongside sabre-toothed tigers?
