Joe Rogan | Can You Bring Back Extinct Animals?

Now, what do you think about these guys that are talking about bringing animals back? Like, as a scientist. Sure. De-extinction is... It's a weird word. It is. It is. It's a weird word. Weird introduction? Is that a better word? No. They call it de-extinction. Is that what they call it? That's what they call it. Yeah. De-extinction is, to me, it's fascinating, especially if it's something like, say, the passenger pigeon, right? We used to have billions of them in the United States. Wiped them out. And now they're saying, you know, we can take the closest living relative, isolate some genes and make a new passenger pigeon. Is that worth it? Because it's something we wiped out in the last hundred years? Yes. I feel like that's... We should heal the ecosystem by putting that back, right? That being said, we still need to learn from our mistakes. Like we need to take into account what we did and why we did it. And like, do I think there should be a Jurassic Park and a bunch of mammoths and T-Rexes? Absolutely not. That's a waste. Whether we can or cannot do it, to me, that's a waste of scientists. That's a waste of scientific resources that could go towards conserving things that are on the brink. Now, when you say like heal or mend the environment or the ecosystem, when you would bring back something like a passenger pigeon, isn't like 90% of everything that ever existed extinct? Sure. Absolutely. So does the ecosystem adjust and evolve and would reintroducing something like a passenger pigeon, would it kind of fuck things up that exist now where new animals have taken a different position on the hierarchy? It's too short an evolutionary time. So we are in what's called the sixth mass extinction event, right? There's been five others before us. The one we're in now, it's happening at 80% greater rate than it's ever happened before. So we are wiping out things more quickly than the world can adapt. So you go into an environment and you take out all the apex predators, the prey explodes. The prey explodes, the grass gets eaten down, everything collapses. Now if you left that environment over time, over evolutionary time, it would adapt, right? Say all of the predators got a disease and they died out over 300 generations. During that time, something would evolve within the environment to adapt the prey so that it didn't wipe out the environment. That's just kind of the nature's balance. But when you go in there and do it in 10 years or five years, it throws off the equilibrium. So when you, in theory, when you reintroduce something that's been, and it's not theory, it's science. They've shown this even right here in the California Channel Islands. When you put something back that's missing from the ecosystem, it's like you're putting a piece of the puzzle back, right? And then you can allow it to do its thing over evolutionary time. What did they do in the Channel Islands? So I was actually a big part of that and I loved the project. So the California Channel Islands were settled by agriculture. There were sheep, goats, pigs, blah, blah, blah. There was everything brought over there, right? And so not Catalina, but think about the Northern Channel Islands. What happened was when all these animals were brought in, all the farmers were there, then Golden Eagles started coming over. Golden Eagles came over to eat the pigs and everything else. They flew across the ocean? Yeah, flew across the channel, started preying on pigs and everything else. There was an animal on the Channel Islands called the Channel Island fox, a very gorgeous, cute, cuddly little fox. You can see him if you go to Santa Cruz Island. There's loads of them now, thanks to the work that scientists have done. Anyway, they were like, okay, the fox is being, there it is. Isn't he gorgeous? Look at the cute face. So the fox is being wiped out through habitat destruction through all these undulates that have been brought in. So scientists got together and said- What, undulates, like cows or- Yeah, yeah, domestic animals, cows, sheep, goats, et cetera. So scientists came in and said, the habitat's getting destroyed, and that's just the keystone. There were several species that were on the decline. The livestock is wiping out the habitat, the foxes are declining. What do we do? Well, obvious answer, let's remove all the livestock. So we removed all the livestock, right? Through helicopters, there was a lot of pigs that were causing damage, all that kind of stuff. We removed it all. The eagles started preying on the foxes because their main habitat was gone. So now the foxes are under even more pressure. So then we removed the golden eagles. This is a very abridged version of what happened. But now we've got- the golden eagles also pushed out the bald eagle, which are fish eaters, which lived on the island. So now after loads of years of removing golden eagles, like relocating them, removing all of the livestock, now you have a healthy population of channel island foxes. The bald eagles are back, they're eating fish. The whole ecosystem is back in balance. Had it been left the way it was, what you would have found at the California Channel Islands over, say, 20 or 30 more years, 40 or 50 more years, no foxes, no bald eagles, a ton of golden eagles, and a ton of pigs. And likely over time, pigs would have exploded to the point that they Easter Islanded themselves, right? They ate up all the resources, destroyed all the habitat, population collapsed, golden eagles collapsed, nothing left on the island. What do you mean by Easter Island themselves? So you're familiar with Easter Island in South America? I know what those statues are and all that stuff, but I'm not familiar with what happened to the island. That island was an ancient civilization that was the mecca. It had everything. Off land, it had big trees, tons of food, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People settled there and they said, this place is incredible. It's paradisical. And then they started cutting down the trees to fish. They started eating all the mammals. And what actually happened is because they were so remote, the middle of the ocean, nowhere near South America, nowhere near anywhere else, they cut down the last tree. There were no more canoes. There was no more food on the island and the population collapsed. The island was barren. It was void of trees, void of life, void of anything. And they didn't have the canoes or anything to leave anymore because they cut down the last tree to build a boat or make firewood and everybody there died. Oh, shit. So that's what happens when you use up every last resource. God, so wow. When did this happen? I couldn't tell you. Because I thought it was like a mystery to what happened to the population of Easter Island. So they're pretty sure that's the exception. That's the scientifically accepted understanding. And did they get this from fossils? They get this from bones? So they've sort of pieced it together? Yep. They take isotope samples and measure carbon data and yada yada. I think the heads are still a pretty big mystery. Why? I think certain people believe that the heads were like calling to the gods to help save things because they were going so badly, yada yada. But I believe the heads are still a pretty big mystery. But the actual anthropology, the population, the collapse is known to be due to running out of resources. How long did it go for? Couldn't tell you. Do they have an idea of how long the population lasted? I think it's all published. Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head. But it was a thriving population that flew too close to the sun, as they say. Because of Easter Island's small size, only 63 square miles, it quickly became overpopulated and its resources were rapidly depleted when Europeans arrived on Easter Island between the late 1700s and the early 1800s. It was reported that the Moai were knocked down and the island seemed to... Did I say that right? Moai? It's me. Knocked down and the island seemed to have been a recent war site. Hmm. Lack of supplies. Yeah. See the next one there? Constant warfare between the tribes, lack of supplies and resources, disease, invasive species and the opening of the island to foreign slave trade eventually led to Easter Island's collapse by the 1860s. Wow. So, it didn't take long. 1700s to the 1860s, that was a wrap. Wow. It was annexed by Chile. And so they've never tried to repopulate the island with trees or anything else and they're just kind of leave it alone? I believe so. I know you can go there and visit it and see the heads and I think there are some things there now, but it's barren. There are no trees. There's no... you know, it's all been depleted.