Scientists Plan to Clone an Extinct Tiger

This is a great site for anyone interested in Tasmanian tigers: Thylacine Museum.

This is still a cryptid though. There are still reports of sightings in rare occasions. Still this is some great news for futurists.

Well, let's throw this question out there. Should we bring back animals that have gone extinct? Does it matter whether the extinction occurred naturally or through human influence? Are there ethical issues here?

As much as we go out of our way to say we are different, we are as much a part of nature as anything else. That means that anything we produce is natural, so if we bring extinct species back to life, it's nature running it's course. If the animals we bring back become super intellengent and enslave us due to some sloppy genetic work, that's natural too.

I don't agree with George Carlin on everything, but he's a pretty funny guy and always insightful. He has this one skit when he talks about plastic ruining the environment. His argument is that perhaps nature wants plastic, that maybe the answer to the age old question of "why are we here" is "plastic".

so anything the human race does is "natural"?

Of course. How could anything we do not be natural? By natural I mean "As determined by the laws of nature".

Pain and death are natural, but ethical scientists don't seek to produce misery (a byproduct of these natural events). Still, you have a point about locating man within the environment rather than apart from it.

A few months ago there was a discussion of the ethics of building an atomic bomb. I said it was an immoral act to build the bomb. Some disagreed, taking note of all the american lives it saved. I guess my point is, the phrase "ethical scientist" is hard to define with a context, let alone without one. One could make the argument that bringing back extinct species would give us insights into the intricacies of natural selection, perhaps making us better equipped to face an extinction event. I say it doesn't matter what the reason is. We will do it because it is in our nature to do it, for right or wrong.