Bringing back Dinosaurs?

[zyncod]

But as long as it was engineered to possess all the properties of dinosaurs that we can infer from what remains of them, it would be good enough, I think.

 

Well, if that's all you need, how about a robot dinosaur? It would be many orders of magnitude easier to "build" and would be just as accurate.

[BigMoosie]

But as long as it was engineered to possess all the properties of dinosaurs that we can infer from what remains of them' date=' it would be good enough, I think.[/quote'']Well, if that's all you need, how about a robot dinosaur? It would be many orders of magnitude easier to "build" and would be just as accurate.

 

I agree with Xyph, and life happens to be one of those properties.

[AzurePhoenix]

I agree with Xyph, and life happens to be one of those properties.

That's fine as an entertainment device, but it wouldn't hold any scientific value other than something along the lines of "looky what I can engineer!"

[BigMoosie]

I don't really care about the scientific value, could you imagine having a pet dinosour chained to a pole tearing up the back-yard? How awesome would that be!

[Xyph]

A robot dinosaur wouldn't be nearly as good - it wouldn't feel real. I know it's not strictly real anyway, but if it was a well engineered biological dinosaur it would be far closer to reality than a robot, and could at least be said to be, hopefully, as close to a dinosaur as we can get.

 

And although I confess to being somewhat more bothered about the entertainment value than the scientific value, surely the act of engineering a dinosaur would have some scientific merit? True, you wouldn't be able to find out anything new by studying it's genetics, but a variety of hypotheses concerning the specifics of dinosaur biology could be tested by simply implementing them and seeing how well it works in practice. I would think it'd take quite a few "prototype dinosaurs" to get to the "finished version" anyway, and there would be scientific value in that, wouldn't there?

[ElijahJones]

I think you are seriously overestimating the power of mathematics.

 

No, I am not overestimating mathematics. I do agree with your point though, but I guess what I am saying is that we are engaging in genetic research with the hopes of understanding DNA. If its just going to come out as a new way to try to cure the common cold we could skip the whole genetic thing and start testing cocktails of jungle herbs for much less money and technical strain. no the goal of DNA research has to be to gain as much understanding and ability in genetics we possibly can. Will this come ot the point of custom engineered genomes and dinosaur wanna be's living in real Jurassic Parks. I don't know but I have seen some of the things that are done in mathematics and they are much more powerful and complicated than alot of people realize. I say this with a sense of realizing the issues here, we have a scale issue. Trillions of combinations to try even if we can cleverly narrow the field. Then of course is the complexity of all those trillions of choices interacting, which as you point out Mokele is of a whole other order of magnitude. The problem itself however is probably not a shard to describe as some make it seem.

 

Basically the genes are a blueprint and a timeline. Understanding the timeline and event triggers is just as important as understanding the blueprint for individual proteins. These things are intersting to me because I am a grad student in envinromental science working on math modeling of ecosystem change. The obvious question once one starts to feel good about that is how does evolution interact with ecosystem change, is it of a completely different time scale or can evolution appear as a factor within a model? This of course leads to the issue of genetics etc. How do genes mutate, how fast, how do creatures change in response to changes in genes? Someday I hope to look at the whole issue from a mathematical perspective but the next few years are tied up.

 

Although I would not claim to be an expert in DNA by a long shot as an area of scientific inquiry it cannot be beyond a scientist to say something useful about it.

 

Have you ever taken a look at the subspecies of Cutthroat that live out west, there are like 15 different varieties and each one has a slightly different morphology. It seems like Darwin's finches live right here in the US, only they are fish. The watersheds they live in were cut off from each other after the last Ice Age, and in ten thousand years one and only one narrow band of morphological changes has taken root in each subspecies. It cannot be random can it? Perhaps it is a response to the unique chemistry of each watershed changing the original species (the common ancestor)? How does one account for the fact that fish of an identical species seperated for ten thousand years all developed into distinct subspecies, but only one per watershed? What factors preserve (or alter) morphology in the face of random genetic variation?

 

Cheers,

 

EJ

[Mokele]

These things are intersting to me because I am a grad student in envinromental science working on math modeling of ecosystem change.

 

Nifty, what sort of ecosystem are you modelling? Or are you trying for something generalizable?

 

The obvious question once one starts to feel good about that is how does evolution interact with ecosystem change, is it of a completely different time scale or can evolution appear as a factor within a model? This of course leads to the issue of genetics etc. How do genes mutate, how fast, how do creatures change in response to changes in genes?

 

It's certainly a complex problem, especially since you'd also have to deal with novel species arising in other environments and emigrating into the area, and how much they change is pretty hard to predict. I know some species have repeat "themes" in evolution, like crocodilians and terrestriality, but predicting their occurence would be a long shot.

 

Have you ever taken a look at the subspecies of Cutthroat that live out west, there are like 15 different varieties and each one has a slightly different morphology. It seems like Darwin's finches live right here in the US, only they are fish. The watersheds they live in were cut off from each other after the last Ice Age, and in ten thousand years one and only one narrow band of morphological changes has taken root in each subspecies. It cannot be random can it? Perhaps it is a response to the unique chemistry of each watershed changing the original species (the common ancestor)? How does one account for the fact that fish of an identical species seperated for ten thousand years all developed into distinct subspecies, but only one per watershed? What factors preserve (or alter) morphology in the face of random genetic variation?

 

Not those specificly, though I am familiar with groups of sticklebacks in Canadian lakes that show the same effect. And it can actually be random; genetic drift can play a significant role in isolating species, as can different selective pressures. There's also sexual selection, which is actually the context I'm familiar with the sticklebacks from. Apparently, those in clear waters have red spots that the males showcase, while those in "tea-colored" waters have black spots, and the females of those cannot distinguish between red and black (because of the optical effects of the water). Those males no longer had to chose between being unsexy and being visible to predators, so they just had black spots. Of course, this could be interpreted as supporting more than one hypothesis about the effects of speciation on sexual selection.

 

Mokele

[ElijahJones]

My thesis is on math models of ecological succession but it looks at this from a few perspectives. There is the old Markov chain models which suffer from not being very realistic in terms of the processes that cause the change. Then there are the Lotka-Volterra type competition models, which can at least contain a term for any important quantity. My real goal is to build spatial models that incorporate all of the important aspects, matter cycling, energy flux, competition, hierarchy. The models will have to include both deterministic and stochastic processes. I am learning now how to do finite element method. Its hard to find an easy to understand textbook though and I have a degree in mathematics.

 

Probably the big X-factor in the whole thing is the microbes. We just seem to know so little about where they are and what they do even how many there are, but screwing that system up can have huge impacts. Like for instance encouraging a certain type of microbe through warming climate can stimulate CO2 emission from the soil which then feeds back as more trapped sunlight into a thousand different positive and negative loops. The system is nudged into a new trajectory just by that forcing function of GHGs and it could be very sensitive to our particular way of polluting. Well so in forest succession if the temperature is rising some species are facing selective pressures and may disappear, but if they were part of an assemblage that evolved together their decline will effect perhaps every other species in the forest to some extent, changing the future population distributions thus impacting even the course of evolution(apparently).