Scientists Monkey With Evolution, Produce "Snouted Chicken"

[Yumore]

Just neat that is the only statement I can make in response to this discovery

 

[Sarah Frazier]

I love it how most people here are against ethical scientific practices. As a scientist myself I would love for all of you to volunteer as test subjects, as I have many experiments I would like to run that require subjects as enlightened as you that understand how useless ethical practices are. by the way have you seen the movie The Human Centipede?

What kinds of experiments?

 

[Lancer873]

Isn't their a general rule of thumb that humans shouldn't play God? Not speaking as a religious fanatic,I just kinda see this going in a bad direction.

That's how it works in the movies, but I'm pretty sure we're fairly safe here as long as the military doesn't take interest.

 

[Biodeamon]

hopefully, they don't devolve it into a velicoraptor and escapes containment and mates with another chicken.

then we'll having flying raptors.

 

[Jabberwock xeno]

Wait, why is one of the genes named sonic hedgehog?

How is killing the eggs "ethical" but letting them hatch not? And compared to what we do to chickens daily...

Why aren't there any pictures?

So many questions...

I studied biochemistry and I can tell you it is a joke name... the worst joke ever, one only a biochemist can find funny and most groan at this one. It's complicated, it has to do with how the cells of an embryo are arranged someone first noted that they looked hedgehog like. The "sonic" variant turns out to be rather important.

I will stay though that (in biochemistry at least) the discoverer can name it pretty much whatever the hell they like and no peer-review board can force him/her to use a more sensible name.

This is all well and good in the lab but it becomes a real problem when a doctor has to explain to a mother carrying child that their foetus has a deformity from a fault in their "Sonic the Hedgehog" gene...

Hit me.

I want to know.

While I could see that killing the animal would be the only thing for it, since it wouldn't have any place in the ecosystem as it is, how could scientists see what the new head structure will look like and how the snout would function without letting the thing hatch and grow a bit? There's really only so much that can be learned from a developing fetus.

Let them hatch a batch and learn about how they look and behave differently with that one change.

FOR SCIENCE!
FOR DINOSAURS!

OORAH!

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I, for one, welcome our new hoodie-wearing Argonian chav overlords.

Because we all know that that's exactly how this is going to turn out.

 

[robert022614]

I am all for making dinosaurs. Just might be a good idea to do it on a tropical island where they cant escape till they learn to fly aka. Jurassic Park

 

[escapistraptor]

Wow, this news is a little late to the party. We've been doing this thing in Evo-Devo (Evolutionary Development Biology) for about a decade now. We already got the teeth, scales, and tail thing done, good to know we have snouts now too. We estimate that we only have 50-100 years before we have enough traits mapped out, and do them all at the same time to a chicken or ostrich embryo to hatch a raptor-esque dinosaur. It won't actually be any particular species, it'll just be severely deformed chicken or ostrich, but that's of no concern to the layman.

I don't see what ethics have to do with this. Back off and let us add another nail in intelligent design's coffin/have a raptor!!! Plus: raptor troops! With rocket launchers!

I'm glad to see my B.S. in Biology lets me feel superior about SOMETHING in life, even if it's just knowing this stuff before most everyone else.

 

[punipunipyo]

so... how far are we from gene splicing? because I can't wait to "shark" my ass(teeth) and getting a brand new set of healthy teeth (like... every freaking year + ZERO cancer chance!~...

 

[bloopblerp]

Will be interesting to unravel mysteries of evolution. But I don't want this to happen at the expense of a life of an innocent laboritory manipulated animal.

Are you kidding me. i dont know if im a bad person but i would kill a thousand mutant lab chickens if it would help a big breakthrough in genetics

 

[Android2137]

...Screw the Skyrim screenshot! Give us the real picture of the dino-chicken, man! Is it out there? Until I see it for myself, I refuse to believe it!

 

[hiks89]

i would rather be part dinosaur than cut up and fed to fat people, so dont talk about ethics

 

[The Lugz]

Wait, sonic hedgehog?
They can't be talking about the blue rodent who runs a lot, so anyone know what they are talking about?

I don't see why they can't hatch them. What is ethically wrong with hatching something for science? How is it any worse than hatching something just to be killed and ate? Last time I checked, science is legal and murder is not. Then again, I don't think reptilian chicken strips will be as good as regular chicken strips.

perhaps they would be more efficient? also producing scaled leather products as well as food?

 

[Vortigar]

Why hatching the thing is unethical?
Because there's no saying whether the critter is fit for life at all. So you could very probably be sending a lifeform out into a life of sheer torment.

Then again, so called animal lovers have been breeding dogs into creatures that have no reason to exist for ages. Chihuahuas and Pitbulls and loads of other sub-species can't naturally reproduce and have ailments like an 80% heartfailure rate before reaching a mature age, etc. etc.

And just maybe it hatches into some uber-cancerous thing that grows out to cover our entire planet.

Man, evolutionary scientists get to have all the fun.

Engineers never get a chance to play God.

We programmers get to build AI's and the Singularity. Engineers get to build stuff like the Hadron Collider to generate theoretical black holes and zero mass particles. And then there's the bio-mechanical field. How much of a man can you replace with tech before he stops being a man? Don't get me started on chemistry. The first World War showed us enough of that craft.

I think we're pretty much covered.

Wait a sec.
The eggs were destroyed?
Did that process involve a frying pan?

 

[Sarah Frazier]

...Screw the Skyrim screenshot! Give us the real picture of the dino-chicken, man! Is it out there? Until I see it for myself, I refuse to believe it!

Due to the nature of the experiments, the scientists weren't allowed to actually let the chickens hatch. Maybe get close to see the development, but not actually grow to maturity... As cool as it would be.

 

[scw55]

Mmm, as excited as I am at the idea of prehistoric species coming alive, there's quite a few issues. The animals could never live in the wild as they would distrupt the 'balanced' ecosystem (as balanced as it can be with humans constantly mucking with it).

The idea of a "balanced" ecosystem is a myth.

Even discounting things like humans and the meteor that probably kileld the dinosaurs 99.9% of all the species that have ever existed are extinct.

Ecosystems are not stable, they are in a near constant state of flux. What is a rainforest on millennia could be a desert the next, then another thousands years and it is grassland then rainforests again.

The idea of eco-systems in "Balance" went out with ideas like "Spaceship earth", the idea that our planet could be managed like the life support systems of a spaceship.

[small](this has been somewhat of a problem in commerce as many economic models have been based on emulating nature and ideas such as natural selection based on the presumption of nature being essentially ordered. I think we've seen since the 2008 crash that the "self regulating" new economy is an illusion)[/small]

And now it has entered quite widespread acceptance in the scientific community that we are living in the anthropocene era and have been so for centuries. Anthropocene means "age of man", up till now we were in the "Heliocene" or "age of sun" such ages are named after the single largest force shaping the earth, it was considered to be the sun and its heating, evaporation of water for rain and all that erosion, etc. Before that it was the ice age, the effect of ice shaping things.

But now it is mankind, human's have left such an enduring mark on every part of nature it is pointless to deny it. We have moved more rock, channelled more rivers and moulded more of the planet in a shorter time than any other force on this planet since the the first cellular life started oxygenating our atmosphere.

Humans should no longer be considered something that can be cordoned off and away from a "perfect and eternal" nature. Human's aren't "mucking things up", nature doesn't have a plan.

I'm not sure what point if any you're trying to say. You make good points that humanity have left a stain on ecosystems.
It is not fair that a species is eradicated because "QQ these wolves are eating my lifestock. QQ. QQ. QQ. I will kill them because that's alot easier protecting my lifestock. I won't care about the consequences of eradicating a predator. It's not like there may be an increased population of rabbits that will then eat my crops".
Wardens of Nature Reserves around the world have the job to moniter populations of animals. If a species is unhealthily too high it's their duty to reduce the numbers. Humans do affect the ecosystem balance but there are some that try and maintain it.

Cities have greenbands for a reason.

There is nothing healthy about a T-Rex living in the trophics. Ignore the risk to human life, the T-Rex will compete against other predators for meat. Given the mass of a T-Rex, the amount of energy it would need, and how little energy is transfered into the top predator in a food chart, the T-Rex or other predators will die. The ecosystem will sort itself out eventually but there is risk of everlasting damage. Example, if a whole species of predator goes extinct, then an animal who is only hunted by that predator's population with expand unsustainabley. Ecosystems are delicate.

It is true that there will never be a balanced ecosystem. This is due to Chaos Theory and Shit Happens Theory.

Dinosaurs should never exist again. They ought to stay dead for Ecologic reason and Ethical reasons. Bringing them back alive will only prove that humans are a selfish species. The only advances gained from this research will be at the expense of innocent animals being created for the sole purpose of Science. This is not the science I want to be asociated with.

I just don't see the point of creating an animal that will have to live its entire life in captivity because some humans wanted to prove they can create a living dinosaur. Wasted life.

Just as long as you don't have the crazy idea that nature will always sort itself out towards some "ideal".

And humans ARE part of nature, we need to see how we can integrate with nature rather than somehow walling ourselves off.

That means if we can't live with the wolves then we have to do their job, we need to be the top predators and we are more than capable with rifles a minority can keep the rabbit population down with comparative ease. But the regulations on hunting "native" animals is unusually strict. I see this as a hold over of nature somehow being in balance (if humans leave it alone) and that humans interference is the antithesis of nature.

The truth is Humans have dominated almost every environment on this planet for about 10'000 years. You can't find anywhere that we haven't moulded it to our needs.

The point of this is is research. This tells them a lot about how evolution, embryo development and so on.

This is NOT creating a dinosaur, this is creating a FEATURE of a dinosaur. That is the "toothed snout". How this will be useful to know later down the road, you don't know until you need it. as all great inventions are built on the work of many other inventions and discoveries that came before it.

You can't make a dinosaur this way, only indicate that they evolved from them.

I'm sorry for trusting the article writer for being an intelligent person who doesn't have stupid wild factually inaccurate fantasies.

 

[Amaror]

This would not get us to find a missing link, because you have to know which genetical factors you have to eleminate before you can devolve them.

 

[lumenadducere]

Wait, so there's a chance that future-me can have a pet dinosaur?

SOMEBODY GIVE THIS MAN BILLIONS IN FUNDING RIGHT NOW.

 

[plugav]

"Their ethical inflexibility has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider."

[http://www.moddb.com/mods/project-hdtp/images/greasel]

"We've had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again, a new age."

We'll get together with the Japanese [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1348000/Woolly-mammoth-Japanese-scientists-resurrect-extinct-giant-fozen-DNA.html] and make dinosaur on mammoth porn.

 

[Rawne1980]

I wonder if this could be applied to humans too. Just find a way to de-evolve us back to the "missing link."

For Science!

I'd settle for being de-evolved by about 15 years.