1. Topic: The evidence on why de-extinction of the wooly mammoth is unethical.
2. Thesis: “I will build a case for why Church’s de-extinction of the woolly mammoth is unethical and shouldn’t be practiced in the future”.
3. Jacob Burgess list his arguments in a unique structure. Starting with the third paragraph entailing the philosophical evidence with two sub claims in the fourth and fifth paragraph. The sixth and seventh paragraph contain two practical arguments with evidence. The eight paragraph being the counterclaim and the ninth paragraph being the rebuttal.
4. Three pieces of evidence.
- Ben Mezrich, the author of Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic ExtinctCreatures, notes, “… I believe—and I think most conservationists agree—that bringing back an extinct species like the mammoth is less playing God than it is correcting something we did” (Worrall).
- Ronald Sandler in “The Ethics of Reviving Long Lost Species” notes that whether or not a de-extinction project might be hubris depends on its intentions. Sandler contends that a de-extinction project could be considered hubris if, “… it is pursued as a tool to help design ecological systems as we would want them to be…” or to “… assuage our guilt without adequate respect for the value of nature…” Church’s de-extinction project appears to be motivated by both of these ideas. For one, he and his team intend to design a genetically modified, Asian elephant that will be only similar to a woolly mammoth – not a genetically identical one (Chung).
- Zoology professor Matthew Cobb brings up a significant problem, “… the mammoth was not simply a set of genes, it was a social animal, as is the modern Asian elephant. What will happen when the elephant-mammoth hybrid is born? How will it be greeted by elephants?” (Devlin)
5. At first, I believed that bringing up the wooly mammoth from extinction had nothing to do with ethics and was ultimately in favor to bring them back, but when reading through the argumentative essay my opinion was immediately changed. The style was different yet flowed great and captivated my attention. The philosophical aspect engaged my attention and then what captivated my opinion was the evidence shown that proved why the de-extinction of the wooly mammoth is truly unethical.
