Should We Clone Woolly Mammoths?

Photo by Tristan Colangelo on Unsplash

It comes up every so often; the idea of cloning woolly mammoths (why it’s always mammoths I’m not sure, the size maybe) to find out more about them.

Or just to, ya know, have mammoths.

We’re getting some pretty good DNA sequencing done, so at some point it’s going to likely be possible to clone a woolly mammoth (there are other mammoth species, but we have the most good DNA of the woollies).

So, should we?

Honestly, I go back and forth on it. So let’s talk about why we should…and why we should not…

We Might Learn Something

We might learn something about woolly mammoths and how they lived and died. This could in turn teach us something about their surviving tropical cousins.

Learning something is the reason we do most of our science, knowledge for the sake of it. So it’s a potential good reason.

Photo by Christopher Alvarenga on Unsplash

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