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COUNTER TO CRITICS. "There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats ... Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way." http://lnkd.in/bTtn5st View in LinkedIn

PASSENGER PIGEON HUNTED TO EXTINCTION. "In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock—if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at sixty miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun—that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass." Old journals are full of these accounts. http://lnkd.in/bKqgWbk View in LinkedIn

CRITICS OF REVIVAL BIOLOGY "they have articulated their litany of criticisms at an increasingly high pitch. In response, particularly in recent months, supporters of de-extinction have more aggressively begun to advance their counterarguments." http://lnkd.in/bTtn5st View in LinkedIn

THE PASSENGER PIGEON'S DECLINE "was impossible to ignore, because as recently as the 1880s, it was the most populous vertebrate in North America. It made up as much as 40 percent of the continent’s bird population. On Sept. 1, 1914, Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo." http://lnkd.in/bTtn5st View in LinkedIn

ALL LIVING THINGS ARE MOSAICS OF DNA from bacteria and viruses, with the famous transposons or jumping genes, quite apart from mixing gene pools by breeding. It is archaic to be purist about the genetic purity of any creature on this planet, synthetic or natural. View in LinkedIn

CHURCH BRAND REVIVALISTS. "Writer and environmentalist Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and his wife Ryan Phelan, founder of the genetics company DNA Direct ... Working with Harvard biologist George Church, they figured out a possible way to revive passenger pigeons." These birds once were bountiful in the US." http://lnkd.in/bfZ5a84 View in LinkedIn

HYBRIDS ARE THE FUTURE. "Idealizing genetic purity of species is a purely human construction, ignoring the fact that even we are not pure, bearing evidence in our DNA of breeding with Neanderthals, Denisovans ... Is a bison that bears cattle DNA in the American West any less of a bison? The future belongs to such hybrids." http://lnkd.in/dYTym8q View in LinkedIn

"DE-EXTINCTION is not just about reversing extinction ... but about helping to prevent extinction. It “could help revolutionize conservation,” ...'That’s because de-extinction can be used to combat what’s called the “extinction vortex” ... animal populations fall, inbreeding ... and species go extinct by loss of genetic variation." http://lnkd.in/b_VedHC View in LinkedIn

NATURE VS NURTURE. "Baby birds learn a lot from older birds, and the band-tailed pigeon ... is very different from the passenger pigeon ... even if a genetic replica of a passenger pigeon could be created (a very big if), the best ... is a bird that’s something like a passenger pigeon and something like a band-tailed pigeon—a Band-Aid pigeon." http://lnkd.in/dAi8nHt View in LinkedIn

ALTERNATIVE: OLD MCDONALD'S FARM. "We don’t have the technology to bring extinct birds back to life" ... A mammal’s egg is accessible to be adjusted when it is still a single cell, but you can’t do that with a bird egg ... found a way to adjust whole gonads ... put chicken cells into a duck that then mated with a hen and produced viable chicks." http://lnkd.in/dYTym8q View in LinkedIn