Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I would say no. We should still be concerned with extinction for a couple reasons. One is, absolutely this is a legitimate, serious scientific field to understand the genomics of extinct animals. There is small but serious enough science of de-extinction. It's feasible that some organisms could be targeted for serious de-extinction efforts. At the same time, a couple of thoughts. One is, I'm not that optimistic that it will work, not because I think it's necessarily impossible, although it's not yet totally feasible, particularly for animals that don't have very similar modern descendants. It's because a species isn't just a genome. A species is an organism that inhabits a food web and an ecosystem. We could bring the wooly mammoth back, but there's nowhere for them to live. The mammoth steppe that they need to thrive is not there. There's really very little point in bringing an animal back from extinction just to put it in a box at a zoo to satiate our curiosity about it. Without the ecosystem, you can't have the species. One of the themes that I try and get at in the book that I'm trying to finish is, we need to think about living systems, ecosystems, and the extinction question is very much a question of what kinds of systems will exist on the planet? Whatever happens technologically in 100 years, 1,000 years, the impacts that humans have on biodiversity is gonna be very long-lasting. We're part of a species that has been impacting biodiversity for over 10,000 years, and there are things we can't undo. There are things we can't change about the past. We're making decisions right now that will be binding on the future whether our descendants like it or not. We need to think very hard about what choices do we want to make to keep intact the kind of variety and vibrancy of living systems that in 1,000 years, 10,000 years, that will be a huge part of our legacy. The impact that we make on the stream of macroevolution will be one of the really big things that our species does. It can sometimes be very hard to recognize that in our individual lives, but collectively, it will absolutely be part of our forever legacy on Earth. We need to think very carefully about the choices that we make. I think that's an excellent note to close on. Just to plug one more time, we've been discussing Plagues Upon the Earth, which is the history of disease going back through the Neolithic to modern times, Fate of Rome which discusses the plagues and history of the Roman Empire considering climate and biology. We also discussed, what was the name of the book on slavery? Slavery in the Late Roman World? Slavery in the Late Roman World.…

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