Is Extinction the End?

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin E.

And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now, look out of your window if you're sat at home listening to this, and you know, what can you see?

Perhaps a song thrush, maybe you can see an urban fox near your bins, a magpie, or if you're lucky, too.

But imagine instead you saw a roaming Tyrannosaurus rex that was eating your cats.

Well, that's the kind of world that the Boffins are trying to create.

Why are you adopting that tone?

Well, I was told to adopt that tone because apparently we're not getting enough of the Jeremy Vine phone-in audience.

And

this was the kind of thing that would draw them in, boffins.

So

you might wonder what Robin is on about.

But today, we're looking at the subject of de-extinction, bringing extinct creatures back into the biosphere.

Basically, Jurassic Park.

We know how that ended with a sequel, another sequel.

Now, is it possible to bring species like the woolly mammoth or the dodo back from the dead?

If so, how would we do it?

And even if we have the technology, should we do it?

So, today we're joined by a paleontologist, a biologist, and a comedian who has degrees in pathology, virology, and forensic forensic science, which is the best kind of episode of Colombo because you would definitely get away with it.

And they are.

Hi, I'm Susie Maidman.

I'm a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum.

And the animal I would not bring back is the giant Carboniferous arthropod, Arthropleura.

There will be further questions shortly.

I'm Adam Rutherford, and I'm a geneticist and broadcaster.

You may be aware of my work on Radio 4 from programmes like Start of the Week.

Nope.

Bit early for me.

Yeah.

The organism I would not like to see back.

The first choice, I was going to say the mammoth, and we'll probably talk about that, so I'm not going to say that.

I'm going to say Hitler.

I mean, he is extinct.

Is he technically a species?

Because I'm beginning to think that might be why one of your books didn't have the sales you were expecting.

Hi, I'm Rielina.

I'm a comedian and exfiologist, and I would not bring back the concept of women as property.

Oh, and this is our panel.

Susie, we have to ask you just for: can you tell us the name of that beast again?

Yeah, it's Arthropleura, and it was a two-metre-long, 50-centimetre-wide millipede.

Now, I don't really like things with more than four legs, so a giant two-metre-long millipede.

I don't, no, no.

Well, Well, that is beautiful, though, isn't it?

So, what size millipede do you prefer?

I prefer no millipedes.

Really?

You're anti-milliped?

I'm anti-millipede, yeah, yeah, altogether.

Well, I know, I'm fine with snakes.

Don't mind snakes, it's the legs.

Yeah, I don't mind the legs.

That's a thing, isn't it?

A fear of legs, is it?

Is it actually?

Like, evolutionally, we're designed to not like spiders and things that can move like that.

It's also, I know we're not meant to be doing a monk cage on legs, but do you think it's also the spindliness of legs?

Because we did do a show all about spiders, and Brian got all scared because there were some live spiders and it was brilliant.

It's the smallness of the leg.

If a spider had fleshier legs and knees and little shoes, it might be better.

That's an interesting idea.

I'm just trying to think, would I be more scared of an elephant if it had six legs?

Because what you're saying is, is that if they're sturdy legs, that they're not as scary.

Yeah.

But it would probably kill me faster than a spider with shoes on.

Yeah.

Have I turned up to the wrong recorder?

I do agree with that, though.

You're right, is it?

Because now, Nelly's.

How many legs does this huge milliped thing have?

Loads.

Loads of them.

So many.

A thousand-legged elephant.

I wouldn't be scared of that particularly.

Would you?

What, do they have elephant legs or do they have millipedes legs?

Oh, no, elephant legs.

Obviously.

How are you paying attention, Adam?

You have turned up to the wrong show if you're not going to listen to some of these very important philosophical points.

And torso if the elephant would be like a kilometre long to have that many legs.

Yeah.

Well, that's a good idea.

You'd sound terrified of that.

That's a terrible animal.

But I think part of the thing that makes spiders scary is because of their leg formation, they can move in all directions.

Elephants pretty much can be a different form.

They can form all directions.

You can't.

You nearly fell over when you hit your head.

Well, it could be a spherical elephant.

A spherical elephant?

With legs all around.

But where's its trunk?

Spherically sitting there.

You haven't thought this through at all.

Now, as you know, to a theoretical physicist, all cows are spherical.

Yeah, and all people are spherical as well.

And that's why physicists should be kept well away from real science like biology.

I have come to the wrong recording.

Why don't I ask a question that's related to the subject of penis.

It is hard though, isn't it?

Because I think people listening at home will be going, I would like to know more about this, the girth of a leg, the fear of a leg, the number.

What's the perfect number of legs for an elephant?

Four.

Four.

Is that perfect?

Well, actually, to be perfectly honest, male elephants also use their penis as a leg in certain situations so they can prop themselves up.

So maybe the perfect number of elephant legs is actually five.

Can I ask a question?

And this actually is going to be relevant for later in the discussion about mammoth in IVF.

I guarantee this.

I can't wait for the mammoth-penis conversation, I'll be honest.

I'm excited.

Weirdly, I had this conversation on live radio in Ireland one time, and the person arguing against me was a priest.

What conversation?

About the

why the elephant penis is prehensile.

There's a a specific reason for it, which is relevant to the topic for this.

That's creepy.

Can I just say that is creepy, a prehensile penis?

Like, don't come near.

If your penis is prehensile, do not come near me.

I mean, I didn't choose the seating plans.

Before we get to the extinction, talk about extinction.

So, what role has extinction played in the evolution of life on Earth?

It is the defining feature of evolution of life on Earth.

We estimate that something like 95 to 97% of all species that have ever existed are already extinct.

There have been five major extinction events in the history of life on Earth.

We're probably in the sixth, and this is the one that's happening at the greatest speed.

So that's the one that you should be most concerned with.

Susie's a better person to talk about the individual extinctions.

But the one that, you know, the one that killed all the dinosaurs, the giant asteroid that landed just off the coast of what is now Mexico and wiped out the dinosaur 66 million years ago, that was the third biggest.

And the two that came before it, Susie, were much worse.

The N-Permian and the N-Triassic.

In the N-Permian, probably 95% of life on Earth went extinct.

And actually, those extinctions are very useful and very informative because we can look back at them and look back at what happened and the effects and how quickly ecosystems recovered to try to understand a little bit more about what's going on today.

So I think that's why paleontology has never been more important than it is today, folks.

So, when it was at its peak before the end Permian, what would the world have looked like?

And then, when it was at its lowest, when you're talking about just five percent left, then what are we seeing?

What is what's the kind of image?

Yeah, so this was a time before the dinosaurs evolved.

So, there was lots of things like mammal-like reptiles.

So, mammals hadn't quite evolved yet, but there were lots of kind of things that, if you looked at, you'd probably think were dinosaurs, but were actually more closely related to us than they were to the dinosaurs.

So, big, big reptiles and very diverse.

After the mass extinction,

as I said, about 95% of life went extinct, potentially up to 95% of life.

And what we see then is things called disaster faunas.

And these are very, very widespread animals, but very, very low biodiversity.

So, we don't have loads of animals, but the ones that we do have seem to have been incredibly successful.

So, they seem to have been able to thrive in this kind of post-apocalyptic sort of world.

So, I guess they're the kind of things that, you know, people always say, oh, the beetles will still be there after the nuclear war.

I just pictured this sort of nuclear wasteland with just a couple of men in the forest.

So, Adam, I just want in terms of the final bit of extinction, basically, without extinction,

how much progress is it possible for that, you know, for a living planet like ours, and you've said what 95 to 97 percent of all living things have

gone extinct.

That that is that a requirement to get to the stage, you know, of the multi-legged elephants and ourselves?

The pattern of life on Earth requires extinction to have happened in order for the next thing to have happened as it already played out.

So

it's a funny sort of question.

Yes, things are the way they are because extinction has happened, but there's no sense of direction within that.

The mammals wouldn't have evolved in the same way that they have done and ended up with us and monkeys and rats and other mammals that I can't think of right now.

Yeah.

Should we just name them?

It's about 5,000.

Yeah.

A thousand bats.

What was it talking about?

I don't know.

Susie.

It's a good idea to move to Susie now.

So in terms of the subjects of this programme is de-extinction.

So in terms it sounds like science fiction, I suppose everybody thinks of Jurassic Park.

Scientifically speaking, as we are now,

is it a possibility that we can bring species back that were extinct?

Well, there's different ways that people have tried to do it, and some of those results, or the ones that are sort of successful, don't really bring back an an extinct thing.

They bring back something similar to the thing that was extinct, but it's not genetically the same.

So, there's sort of three different ways that people have thought about this.

The first one is back breeding, and people have been doing this, you know, selectively breeding traits for millennia, right?

You know, it's how we domesticated everything.

And so, you can back breed.

The idea is that you take something that's quite similar to the animal that you're interested in, and you kind of back breed to try to produce something that is basically the same.

So, an example of this is the aurochs, which was

the thing that cattle were domesticated from and is now extinct.

It was part of the Pleistocene megafauna, so in the ice age, it was one of the big animals.

And they aren't, they're no longer in the wild, they're extinct in the wild.

So, people took cows, their genetic lineage continues in living cows.

So, they took cows and tried to selectively breed the features that auroyx had.

So, big curly horns and I don't know shaggy coats.

So, you're actually breeding out the things that we breed into them.

It wasn't just people who did that, though, it was the Nazis.

Oh, really?

Yeah, the Nazi

had an aurochs breeding program to bring back.

Why did they have that?

They did all sorts of weird shit.

You seem to be obsessed, Adam.

So, in terms of that back breeding, would it be possible if you had two people who seemed to have, in terms of, say, Europeans who had a reasonably high percentage of Neanderthal gene, for instance, could we start working towards creating Neanderthal human beings?

How long would it take, and should we?

Robin, I'm afraid I've dated a few.

We're already.

They were amongst us all the time.

They've never left.

There's a nugget of a reasonable question in there somewhere, I think, from Robin.

Because I suppose the question would be, you could phrase it, so is there still, in all these bits of the Neanderthal genome that are around today, in principle, is there enough?

Is there a way of going back?

Not really, is the simple answer.

So there's about 50% of Neanderthal, of a total Neanderthal genome, is present in mostly European people today in total.

So on average, most white European people have around about between 1 and 2% Neanderthal-descended DNA.

And if you total all that up, you get to about half a genome of a Neanderthal.

We've also got, from ancient samples, we've got a full Neanderthal genome.

So we actually know the Neanderthal genome.

Now, there's a big language issue here, which is that when we talk about this kind of stuff in the you know popular science, we're not really telling the full truth about what it means to have a full genome sequence.

There is a lot of genome, in fact, the vast majority of the human genome is not genes.

So it's less than 3% of the total amount of genetic code

is genes itself.

And those are the bits that we focus on when we are looking at DNA that has been in species that have been dead for tens of thousands of years, such as the Neanderthals.

So, yeah, we do have most of the genome sequence for genes and Neanderthals, but almost none of the rest of it.

Some of that stuff is not that important, probably.

But we don't really know what that stuff does in Homo sapiens.

We don't have it for Neanderthals.

So

in principle, it is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but in practice,

it's, yeah, I mean, it's just reasonably, it's reasonable to say that it's no, it's not.

It's not a reasonable prospect.

We have picked the wrong subject for this show, haven't we?

It seems to be a very negative one.

And

they also probably had a larger Y chromosome because we've learned that the Y chromosome has been shrinking over time.

Sorry, guys.

But

it's been shrinking over time.

So there's probably actually genetic material that's been lost that we can't recover.

And it is interesting because it's not long ago.

So when did the Neanderthals become extinct as a species?

40,000 years ago.

Yes, it's not a great stretch of time to lose track, essentially, to lose that information completely.

Yeah, Adam, what were you doing to lose track?

I was thinking about elephants with too many legs.

So, one method, as you said, of essentially bringing certain traits back or accentuating them is through breeding.

But then, I suppose the other technology that people most think of is genetic engineering, so CRISPR technology and so on.

So, this idea that we now have the technology to select particular gene sequences and then insert them into the DNA of living organisms.

So, is that in any sense a route or a more efficient route or a possible route to bringing traits back?

So, we've accepted we're not going to bring the whole species back, but certain traits.

Robin's giving me a really serious stare.

He's giving me his best Darwin stare there.

Look at that.

That's why I grew this beard, my friends.

Because I'm going to give the same answer.

In principle, doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Yeah, but actually, really, no.

Now, in the future, quite possibly, but the fact of the matter is that we don't really understand how the human genome works.

But we don't understand how the simplest traits and diseases really work at a genetic level.

So when we start talking about engineering them and tweaking them in order to reintroduce, I don't know, characteristics from dead animals or extinct animals or from other species, it's just fantasy.

We talked about this, I was going to say we talked about this technology, CRISPR.

It's easy to say, isn't it, as you said, and I've said in principle many times, but this is in practice, that we can take a sequence of genes and we can insert them into a living organism's DNA.

How do we do that?

Do you want me to do it on you now?

Is that

him into one of those goat spiders we were talking about before?

Brian had not heard about these goats that now you can milk them for basically spiders websites.

Oh, I know.

I thought you did a horizon on one as far as I remember.

I've actually milked a goat and taken the spider silk out of it a few years ago.

Well, it's basically what led you to biology because you were always high on a hill with a lonely goat, and people used to watch you there milking that goat, and they said, That guy's got a future.

I mean, that's not how I remember the story, however.

Oh, it's definitely in the pop-up book of your life I've just made.

I've got a lot of crew there in my memory.

I remember a big sort of theatre in a living room, and you were singing and dancing with seven shorts.

Have I come to the wrong recording?

No, no, no, no.

You've come to the end of your nightmare, my friend, with your weedy Y chromosome.

I'm going to use that the next time on a deeper than you ever thought.

What if they make the Y chromosome?

What if it is possible to make it stronger again, or whatever we wish to define it?

How will that affect the male population?

Less boldness.

De-extinction.

De-extinction.

The subject of the

Ryan.

Said about 15 minutes ago, it's impossible.

What is the point?

He also said, oh, biology.

That was rubbish.

It's not impossible.

And Susie was going to get to the third way we do this, which is via cloning, right?

Yes.

And the reason this is important is because one species, the Pyrenaean ibex,

has successfully been resurrected.

But the tragedy of this story is it also means it's the only species that has ever existed that went extinct twice.

So, Susie, this cloning, right?

So, how is that working in terms of us creating this de-extinction scenario?

Okay, so at the beginning of the show, you asked the geneticist about extinctions in the past, and now you're asking the paleontologist about

cloning.

What we find is it leads to far more inventive answers.

Okay.

In that specific instance.

Okay, so the way that cloning works, I think, is that basically you take a somatic cell and you put it in an egg cell from a surrogate animal.

So you can take genetic material from one animal and you basically put the nucleus in the egg cell of a surrogate animal.

But again, you still don't get the exact genetic replica because they're still the organelles of the surrogate animals, DNA, mitochondria, and things like that that are there.

So I think you still get a kind of mixture.

Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much as close as you can get to an actual clone

as possible.

And you know, of course, everyone knows about Dolly the sheep, the first, it wasn't actually the first cloned, it wasn't in fact the first cloned sheep.

There was an unnamed cloned sheep from about 15 years earlier, but Dolly was the most famous one for this particular technique.

And this is the same technique used for the Pyrenean ibex.

The animal that we hear most about probably bringing back

to life the species we're bringing back is the woolly mammoth.

The woolly mammoth is

kind of iconic in a way, isn't it?

So why would people see that that was an interesting thing to do?

And do you envisage that it will be done?

Well, I think why is a really, really good question here.

I mean,

so it has been argued, I believe, that if you brought back the mammoth, the mammoths actually were ecosystem engineers.

So, they made what is today kind of tundra and taega forest, open grasslands.

And so, this

increases biodiversity or at least changes biodiversity, allows you know, different sorts of plant life and other animals to live in those sorts of environments.

But the last population of mammoths was about 4,000 years ago, but most of them were about 10,000 years not long ago.

Yeah, but you know,

the climate was fundamentally different then.

So these are animals that were living in the Pleistocene in the ice age, the last ice age, and they went extinct because of climate change.

So why

I think I don't really understand is why you would want to bring back something that lived in a fundamentally different environment and stick it in an environment today and then try to produce an environment from

a time when climate was fundamentally different.

How would that work?

The argument is, I think, isn't it, that you would be able to, I suppose, engineer

the tundra, as you say, these regions, these vast regions of the Arctic.

You'd be able to re-engineer them back to something that's more productive, I think, is the argument.

I think, and also a good carbon sink.

I think it's been argued that these actually are these grasslands are very good carbon sinks.

Plants draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then store it, lock it away.

And apparently, the idea is that these grasslands, these huge areas of steppe, would actually kind of draw down more carbon dioxide than other, the equivalent environments that are there today, the tundra, to turn it on.

So the mammoth would be, if you could reintroduce that species,

the guess, and I think Adam is looking sceptical here, but the idea is that you could re-engineer that whole environment into something that was more

useful.

Because we've seen it before, haven't we?

We've seen, the reintroduction of beavers has been able to change the paths of rivers in order to redistribute water.

And we've seen reintroduction of species in various places quite successfully, but it feels far-fetched to go, okay, what can we do with this land?

Well, first, we're going to bring back something that hasn't been around for four to ten thousand years.

I mean, it doesn't seem budgetable.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, as a project manager, I'd go,

maybe we try something.

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Something different?

See, I've already got, right, the elephant thing, let's not bother so much with the number of legs, right?

We were talking about that.

But one that's got a really, really big trunk and can just suck in all the carbon and use that as a kind of carbon capture.

Except for the fact that elephants are animals and it's the plants that are doing the carbon sucking.

Two different things.

No, but I'm thinking that if you could do something like in that movie The Mutations, where Donald Pleasance is an evil scientist and splices circus performers with plants, then we're beginning to get somewhere.

Which is about as plausible as the real supposedly scientific project.

So you're saying I should go ahead with this.

You're saying

it's good science.

I I will explain that.

What is the process by which it is proposed that we could reintroduce the woolly mammoth?

Okay, so

one of the reasons the mammoth is this iconic species for being a resurrection target is that it's, well, apart from it being a very charismatic megafauna, so big, attractive animal, the thing that Susie was saying is that the last ones weren't extinct in the last 10,000 years.

And quite often we dig out mammoth carcasses from the tundra that have been frozen for that time, which means that they still have soft tissue.

And because they have soft tissue, there's a greater likelihood that there is going to be well-preserved DNA in there.

So, the first mammoth genome was cloned in about, I think it was 2010, which means that you can sequence the mammoth genome, which means that we've got a good genetic readout of this organism that's been extinct for the last 5,000 years or 10,000 years or so.

So, there are various methods methods that you could propose at this point, but one of which is you synthesize the entire genome and then insert it into a surrogate cell

and implant that cell, that fertilized egg that is from probably an African elephant, which is probably the nearest relative to the

living relative to the extinct mammoth, and you implant that into a surrogate mother

and grow that to term, and an African elephant gives birth to a mammoth.

Now, this is where the prehensile penis bit is relevant.

Because IVF in elephants is a particularly difficult thing to do.

And the reason for this is because

the African elephant vaginal tract is about seven feet long and has a two-foot right-angled bend in it.

Which means that if you can angle your penis so it goes round this corner, then you've got a better chance of impregnating that elephant.

Elephants are really good at balancing balls and stuff, you know what I mean?

So you could just put the mammoth embryo on the end of the male penis, and I'm sure he could balance it all the way in and through.

You know what I mean?

Well, again, that's about as plausible as the real scientific techniques being proposed.

I think we've come up with a good schema here.

So

you've got many, many sort of scientific barriers to this actually being a reality.

And then the next stage is: well, we don't actually know how many chromosomes a mammoth has, because that's not not preserved

when creatures die.

You can only establish the number of chromosomes an organism has when they are alive.

So we don't know that, and that's essential for reproduction.

Second thing is, when we sequence the thing I mentioned earlier, when we sequence genomes from creatures that have been dead for a long time, you're not actually getting the whole genome at all.

You're getting tiny, tiny fragments of it, less than 5% of the total amount of genetic information.

Don't know what the rest of it's doing, can't get hold of it.

That's problem two.

Problem three is we don't know term for a mammoth.

We've got no idea how long mammoth pregnancies lasted.

We do know how long African elephant pregnancies lasted.

But we seriously are proposing that we impregnate a social intelligent animal, such as an African elephant, with a different species that we don't know whether it's going to survive.

We don't know how many genes it's got.

We don't know whether it's compatible at all.

We don't know how long pregnancy is going to get.

And if it survives that process, this African elephant mum is going to give birth to an entirely different species, which is going to be, at best, best confusing

for all parties concerned.

And then you've got to remember that both mammoths and elephants are highly intelligent social beings.

They do not exist in isolation.

And you'll bring back one baby into a social strata

that it doesn't belong to, a social organization that it has no connection with, in an evolutionary time frame that it has not evolved to survive in.

This baby, baby,

whatever it is,

hybrids

de-extinctified mammoth, is going to be both confused and very dead very quickly.

So, the question of why that Susie raised a minute ago, to my mind, is the only question worth asking.

Because if you can give me an answer to the question of why we bring back mammoths, and all that stuff about tundra is absolute nonsense.

Can I ask a question?

Because one thing that confuses me about this, right, is that, so as you alluded to, there's one baby mammoth.

So you've got to do this lots and lots and lots of times to make a viable population, right?

But

surely they're all going to be genetically identical to each other because they're clones.

Even if we were able to bring back all these little baby mammoths and they actually got on quite well with their elephant mummies and everything was fine

and they bred with each other, they're just going to be we're just going to have a very, very, very small genetic gene pool and they're just going to go extinct again, aren't they?

Do you know what the word we use to describe what you've just described as?

Functionally extinct.

It's just folly.

And isn't it also the case?

If they're cloned, then won't they all be the same sex?

And so we would have a problem in creating a breeding population.

It's so interesting that when you begin to pick apart this story, which seems to never happen in the popular press,

journalists or whoever's talking about this, sure, you can print your copy.

But the fact of the matter is, this is a house of cards built on scientific illiteracy and actual lies.

I feel quite strongly about it.

It turns out.

But is there any change?

Can you make a despite Adam's negativity?

That

in terms of trying, like, for instance, going to dinosaurs, thinking of dinosaurs, that

certain traits you could, you know, de-extinct them.

Is there that possibility?

So I find a Trinosaurus rex in some amber or something.

Did you see the films?

No, not really.

Well, I mean, again,

it's just why.

I just don't know why we would want to do that.

So, I mean, yeah, sure.

There's

a team led by a paleontologist who apparently is trying to do things like

genetically engineer, like switch genes on in birds to make them express teeth and claws and things.

No, exactly.

Why?

Like, why?

What's the point?

I mean,

could you make an argument?

I mean, just for the sake of argument, for example, a dodo.

So

perhaps something that we made extra pressure is a piece of pressure.

But what about the pastor pigeon?

There may be a moral case.

If we caused the extinction of a species, would there not be a moral case for trying to reintroduce it?

Or should we just spend more time trying to keep the things that are alive alive as opposed to destroying them?

I mean, that's another crazy angle.

I'm trying to do that.

Broaden is my position.

But people have also suggested that actually, you know, that we can do both of those things.

Like, it's not,

they're not mutually exclusive.

The funding that goes into conservation isn't the same funding that is currently being used in these de-extinction efforts as various companies and various groups.

And at the moment, all of those groups are funded apparently by sort of private money that wouldn't be

going into conservation.

But couldn't we persuade that?

Isn't that the thing we need to do then?

Persuade people.

It's to me, it feels a little bit like, you know, when we have these fantasies about going to live on Mars, why try and terraform somewhere else where we've got a place called terror, which we just need to try and keep the form of?

Yes.

You know, you look at what is out there: the giraffe, the rhinoceros, the shrew, whatever it might be, the pygmy shrew, one of my favorite shrews.

I might go through the whole list.

But, you know, that seems to me to be...

Is that really what we're talking about with de-extinction?

Can I make a case for de-extinction of one thing?

We've been focusing on fauna the entire time, but I think there's a flora that we need to focus on bringing back, and that is, so I'm a massive fan of anything banana-flavored.

But anything that's banana-flavored, like your banana milkshake from fast food places or banana sweets, is actually designed off the original banana, which now no longer exists.

The banana that we know and love, which is all one species, is a different banana to the one we used to have, and then that one got killed off.

I want that one back.

I want to taste the original banana the banana sweets are based on, because it's not banana.

I'm not actually, I'm not fussed.

If we lost the current banana, I'm like, meh, but I want to taste the original banana.

And I feel like that's what we should be focusing on.

Please, I don't know if you've yet used it as your regular catchphrase on a tour, but if you can end every routine with, you see, what I'm saying is, I want to taste the original banana.

That would be, that is a great catchphrase.

I think it's a really good point, actually, because what I think that the de-extinction projects, the high-profile ones, are doing is really sort of a bit what Susie was saying, but they're really massive distractions from the ecological crises that could, we should be spending money on.

And we do, in all conservation projects, we tend to focus on what we refer to as charismatic megafauna, i.e., you know, all the animals that Robin just listed, the nice ones, the pretty ones, and the shrews.

Hey, sorry, sorry, I'm sorry.

I'm just not that fussed about shrews.

Have you ever seen a pygmy shrew?

Yeah.

But the point, the serious point is that when other species that are less charismatic,

you know, like the one I always use as an example is like Indonesian seagrass, which is going to go extinct in 30 years' time as a result of climate change.

When that happens, entire ecosystems will collapse.

But where is the project to save insects or seagrasses?

And

that's where we should be focusing because nothing will change if mammoths come back.

Nothing will change if we resurrect the Tasmanian tiger.

Maybe the American passenger pigeon might do something, but everything is going to change when seagrass goes.

But on the flip side of that, just saying, you know, we're obviously heading massively, because we're in the fastest extinction event that we've known.

But don't we all agree?

Because we think of it so human-centrically.

We're always just like, oh, my, you know, we think of it in terms of our survival and our effect on the planet.

But once we go, something will, life will survive us.

Susie?

Did we say that it was bad when things went extinct I think so we've haven't we've been arguing that it's not it's not a good thing

I mean I think I think that it should be considered a black mark on our in our ledger if creatures go extinct as a direct result of our actions and that is the extinction event that we are going through right now I disagree with your premise that we should be devoting massive resources to bring back organisms that have gone extinct as a result of our actions

because it costs a lot and it's a lot of effort.

I think that we should register that we screwed up and did bad things and correct our behavior in the future.

I don't think we should dedicate massive resources to pursuing scientific follies in order to forgive ourselves for being terrible.

God, I sound really misanthropic.

I'm the president of Humanists UK.

So, another devil's advocate point of view for you then.

You talking about seagraphs earlier and the potential that it could go extinct or that it will even go extinct based on current trends.

If we develop this technology now, if this money has gone into developing this technology, can we then apply it to stop things

going extinct in the future?

And then to reintroduce them.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to say one thing to counter all of the negativity I've brought to this discussion today,

which is this.

Science sometimes needs big boosts from from public support in order to generate interest, excitement, and money.

And the real

story is that these are technologies that are being used to develop new techniques and new understanding of genetics and cloning and all of these things in general.

And actually,

the hubristic we're going to bring back the mammoth is just a sideshow to get people interested.

And I do accept that as a bit of an argument: that actually we need to get the public involved, we need to excite people with science fiction Jurassic Park type stories, and actually, what the scientists are doing at these places is just doing basic research.

And they, I'm pretty sure, I know some of them, pretty sure they also know that we're never, ever going to see mammoths, we're never, ever going to see cold adapted elephants.

These are things that are never going to exist at all.

I think they know this, but I think this is actually a way of generating funds so they can actually do some interesting research in related areas.

And that's the only defensive line I will concede.

Well, we're going to cut out the rest of the things you said.

Susie, as a paleontologist, and I know

you've been in Mongolia and Utah, you know, just a few weeks ago.

When you are looking at the kind of, you know, when you strike on something and you're seeing a little bit of the history of life, how does that change your framing of kind of the understanding of what went before the extinction?

All of that extinction.

When you hit upon something, you think, oh my goodness, here was something that might have dominated the planet and it is gone.

How does that change?

Does that change you philosophically?

Well, I think

the point that Rhea made earlier about after our extinction, there will be something else and the planet will go on.

I think when you have the perspective of kind of time, deep time, you see how the climate has changed through time, the environment has changed, how animals have changed and plants, of course, in response to to that, and how humans have just been here for a fraction of a second in the context of geologic time.

And that probably, you know, exactly what you said, that

we will go extinct, but there will be life, there will be something, the planet will carry on with or without us.

And I think, you know, when you go and you're looking at something that's 135 million years old or whatever, you get that sense and that perspective of time.

Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat seeing a future earth where a sentient giant millipede has just found the fossil of you?

And then, and then.

Well, I hadn't yet, but now it goes.

Imagine having so few legs.

No, and then it'd de-extinct you, and then you wouldn't be whinging.

Imagine how quickly it would dig you up as well.

Okay.

Now,

we asked the audience a question.

The extinct creature I would most like to see roaming the world again is.

What have you got, Brian?

Anne Whiddicum.

I'm not going to tell you the story again.

You do know about the time that she cured my diarrhea, but I'll tell you another time about that.

I've got someone who wants to either bring back the Loch Ness monster, I'm not sure they're gone, or David Bowie.

Oh, if we could combine both.

What a beautiful thing to every now and again just see a ladder insane bobbing in the water and then disappear in the game.

But a labyrinth.

Schrödinger's cat, so I would know for sure if it was dead or alive.

The Insisaurus made extinct by the predatory coxysaur.

It says, yeah, there we are.

Freudian.

The predatory coxysaur?

Was it a prehensile coxysaur?

The prehensile coxysaur.

I've got the pterodactyl because wings can only get better.

That was so worrying because last night we had nine different puns based around Brian's big pop hit.

And I thought it wasn't going to happen today.

So well done, whoever that was.

And they wonder what it would taste like.

That's a good reason for bringing back dinosaurs so you can eat them.

Pterodactyl sandwiches.

That's a big bit of bread.

Yeah, Brilliant.

You don't have to eat the whole thing.

Just a bit of the fillet.

Actually, I would probably do the wing and the wrap.

How big are we?

When you have a chicken sandwich, you don't put a chicken in between two pieces of bread, do you?

Someone doesn't know how to protein load.

I like this one from Sophie, Mitochondrial Eve, so we can meet humanity's mum.

I think that's really

nice.

That is nice, except that mitochondrial Eve never existed.

I am not a bad man.

You are not coming on this show again today.

You are the most miserable biologist I've met.

And I have met some miserable biologists.

I'm so sorry.

This is my 10th time, and I think my final time in this programme.

I remember the first time you came on, you'd just done that TV documentary, Will There Be Snow This Winter?

Do you remember?

And you were all happy, you had your little red hat on with all the bell ringing, and now you're just dressed in black, going, There's not really any point, we're all gonna die, and

nobody's bringing anything back either.

I'm going through my.

The universe is a point this place, so I'm not bringing any more.

I'm going through my emo science communicator phase, right?

Leave me alone, you're not my real dad.

And apparently, you don't have a real mum.

Can you explain yourself?

Explain why there's no mitochondrial leave.

Oh, it's a concept that was made popular in the 90s, and it doesn't really work in any significant way.

It's a bit like DeReem's album.

I know it's better than that.

Thank you so much to our guests who are being Susie Maiden, Anna Rutherford, and Rielina.

Next week is the final episode of this series.

So, because it's the end of term, we are allowed to have toys.

And for some reason, that means it's going to be toys, a tobacco enema, a fork that's stuck in a bottom, and an x-ray machine that has been taking photographs of a professor's poo.

So,

well, basically, we're going to be rummaging through.

Rummaging through what?

The archives of the Royal Society because we're going to be exploring the unexpected history of the human body.

There is a 16th-century Lift the Flat book which involves Satan.

Anyway, they've got some good stuff there, haven't they?

So, look forward to that, everybody.

Goodbye.

Bye.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history.

Be proud of it.

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