Specicide
Are there species that we should deliberately drive to extinction? Before you say no, try reading Olivia Judson's controversial article in the New York Times entitled 'A bug's Death: Should we send the malaria mosquito the way of the dodo?' . In this article she advocates the extinction, or "specicide", of thirty mosquito species through the introduction of recessive knockout genes".Would this be the first step on a very slippery slope (a lot of people hate snakes, many people dislike spiders etc. etc.) or would the ends justify the means - eliminating the mosquitoes that vector malaria would save at least one million human lives every year?
Labels: Biodiversity
posted by John Latto @ 3:58 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
We have to be really careful about this because even if an organism seems like it is nothing but harmful to the world, it may actually have indirect benefits that are not easily seen. By causing its extinction, we would be eliminating its niche and potentially adversely affecting the community in which it lives...which might have even bigger effects on the global ecosystem in the long run. It would be incredibly difficult to prove that this organism is completely unnecessary and only has negative contributions.
Besides, there will always be harmful species around and there is no way we can eliminate all of them, so who's to say who gets to stay and who gets to go?
Also...this sounds awful and is terribly controversial, but maybe harmful species like these are actually helping to control the human population. Without them, the population would be sky-rocketing even more than it is already and areas that are most affected by malaria would not be able to support the added millions of people every year...
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