why do people care so much about species going extinct? Millions of species have gone extinct before....millions of species will go extinct again. Its the cycle of life.
I mean sure its pretty horrible that a whole species goes extinct...but why does it matter if there are 300 species of goat or 299.
For every species that goes extinct, another 2 spring up to take its place. Adapt or die. Why should we coddle the inferior species? Let the nature take its course. Remember, if the dinosaurs didn't go extinct, man wouldn't have survived.
It's cool to keep a few around for novelty purposes. Also, if it seems humans are responsible, it is a source of guilt. Although, there is the trend of caring about some species over others, hence campaigns such as "sea kittens".
Biological diversity is important to the quality of human life. For example many would say that many amphibian species are endangered and nearing extinction. In many areas amphibians are extremely important predators of insects.
Species didn't used to go extinct the way they do now. Also, new ones don't spring up anymore. We've fundamentally destroyed the natural process by drastically altering every single ecosystem out there.
The reason to care is that we could, very easily, be left with nothing but rats and pigeons if we don't.
We ought also consider the species of animals whose numbers are increased when the human population increases - chickens, goats, cattle, minks, dogs, cats, laboratory white mice, and canaries.
I'm sure it would make the aurochs feel better to know that after we slaughtered it into extinction, we kept the domesticated version around to live in tiny pens and provide us milk and/or beef until we slaughter them too. And wolves will be happy to know their domesticated brethren are in humane shelters everywhere after we gun the last one down from a helicopter.
Heck cattle are considered by some the most suitable cattle breed for low intensity grazing systems in certain types of nature reserves, due to their ruggedness and lack of need for human care. Heck cattle today are propagated in some places to fulfill the role of extinct megafauna in the ecosystem.
It's a replacement from the standpoint of humans who want meat and/or labor. From an ecological standpoint, our attempts to create replacements often fail miserably.
What happens if you average over several non-intact samples and take the common denominator? Or layer the DNA over a descendant based on certain markers? Given enough damaged "files" and good diff tools, I feel like hacking together a working one would be possible. Can someone who knows more tell me what I'm missing?
DNA is more complicated than that. I don't fully understand the process, but I believe it works like this:
You can't read the atoms in DNA one after the other and make a list. You chop the DNA into pieces and pattern match sections (fragments) against markers. Then you try to put fragments together by matching overlaps.
But if you have sections that repeat, or have a lot of the same atom over and over, you can't directly read those.
Usually when they say: "we published the DNA" they mean the "coding section" - those are the sections that can make proteins. But there is a lot more to DNA, non-coding, or junk DNA that can not be easily (or at all?) read.
So for the comment above yours, I think what they have is fragments, but no overlapping sections, so that can't put it together into a whole. It's not like a file with gaps - it's random pieces of it, of random lengths, in a random order.
