Can mankind "build" a animal?

[ReptilianGameplays]

Just like when you build a critter in spore, you put legs, arms, some eyes and other stuff.

Or mankind can only clone animals or/and cross breed (when possible) species?

Share your thoughts.

[Nachtwind]

Like Dogs? Or Mules? Although.. dogs are no real "species" they can interbreed with wolves still..

Given enough time, romance and bottlenecks i am sure mankind could create a new species.. but what for?

[ReptilianGameplays]

Like Dogs? Or Mules? Although.. dogs are no real "species" they can interbreed with wolves still..

Given enough time, romance and bottlenecks i am sure mankind could create a new species.. but what for?

For science... Also to make animals capable of surviving in harsh planets (if said planet has oxygen).

[Monkeh]

I saw an incredible video on the BBC's Science Club where some very clever people had stripped a pig's heart of it's 'pig' cells but left the overlying structure intact. Then they injected some human stem cells into it and not only did they start to fill in the framework of the heart, and more importantly the blood vessels, IT ALSO STARTED BEATING! IN A JAR!

Now that.

Is completely.

Insane.

Here's the video:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01dfkgd

Simply amazing and the first step towards better transplants and 'building' any animal we wanted...

Edited September 26, 2013 by Monkeh

[Ralathon]

Depends how you define "build".

We can already build new species by transplanting bits of DNA from one cell into the next. That's how insulin is made nowadays: we inject the DNA segment that creates insulin in humans into a bacteria and then let them multiply in giant vats. But that's not so much 'building' as it is 'copy pasting'. Creating entirely new DNA and injecting that into animals is also possible, but it is extremely hard to figure out what your DNA string is going to do to the animal.

We could probably figure that out in the future though as computing power increases and nanotechnology grows more mature.

You could also go on a robotic path. The main culprit here is reproduction which is pretty hard to pull off. There are several ideas floating around for simple replication, but to constitute as a living being it has to be capable of reproducing (replication with faults but still functional so evolution can occur). Then again, nature figured this out. So it is certainly possible. Given enough time we could probably build something that reproduces. Although I have to question why we would ever invest in something like that. The main value behind self replicating machines is that they allow you to make lots of useful stuff for very little investment. If your machines start to evolve the ones that use less materials to make goods for you start to overtake the helpful machines. So before long you're stuck with a bunch of self reproducing robots that don't produce anything useful.

[Vaebn]

Yes, but not yet. Unless you count single celled things as animals as well, in case it has kind of, already been done ( Mycoplasma Laboratorium )

The problem with such biology is that it deals with huge amounts of information. Not to mention that the DNA, courtesy of it's evolution, is not only fully obfuscated, but also a case of the worse spaghetti code in existence. Considering that computers have only recently become "good" (aka, think of what our fathers had) the information age had to happen first before a true age of biology can begin.

Edited September 29, 2013 by Vaebn

[DaveofDefeat]

WELL, there has been work on custom creating algae to make hydrocarbons for use in bio-fuels, And some theories of custom creating algae or bacteria to survive in mars atmosphere and create oxygen.

[NGTOne]

The problem works out to is, you'd need a far more thorough understanding of what every region of DNA in every "donor" organism codes for than we have now, and some things are next to impossible to mix together. I think it can best be summed up thusly:

Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants' talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant.

Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

[lajoswinkler]

Building from scratch is impossible, i.e. taking chemicals and making even a simple bacteria cell is impossible using current technology and might stay like that forever because of the humongous number of molecules in one cell that you need to orient, energize and place in such position at one single moment in time to expect the machinery to carry on.

Cellular mechanisms are so complex it's making you **** your pants when you read about them.

We can only take parts of living cells, replace the genetic material in the sample of a huge number of bacteria and then pick the ones that "catch up". Vaebn mentioned Mycoplasma Laboratorium. It was made by inserting mostly artificial, engineered code into a cell with its genome removed. So in a way of speaking you can make very simple new lifeforms, but you can't do create life from the scratch.

The life as a phenomenon was developed long time ago in conditions we'll never know in detail. During the next billions of years, it's the "way of matter behaving", a "spark" that has multiplied, taking over the entire surface of Earth.

As for taking various body parts and lumping them together, that could work if the source organisms are close on evolutionary scale and loaded with various chemicals so their immune system doesn't go wild. Add gene therapy and yes, you can create monsters. Not very useful monsters, though. They'd be poor, suffering lumps of tissue, certainly not anything close to the stuff from movies.

It's very expensive and difficult and mostly theoretical at the moment, but it can be done.

[bsalis]

Like others have said, this has "sort of" been done...

http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/20/venter-creates-first-synthetic-self-replicating-bacteria-from-scratch/

Very very long way away to building custom advanced life, or anything from scratch. Do we really need either of those though?

[ZedNova]

I'm sure we could, even if we can't now it's likely we'll figure it out sometime. As long as we don't start giving apes human intelligence...

[lajoswinkler]

Like others have said, this has "sort of" been done...

http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/20/venter-creates-first-synthetic-self-replicating-bacteria-from-scratch/

Very very long way away to building custom advanced life, or anything from scratch. Do we really need either of those though?

It's not about the technology. This is about pure science. We need to do such experiments in order to know more about the life as a phenomenon.

[Joshington]

Imagine if that's what the US and Soviet Union took up after the Space Race...creating new species.

[-Velocity-]

Eventually, I believe that it may be possible to "build" an animal. Basically- if you understand what all the DNA does, then you can design your own animal. However, by the time that it is possible to do this, I find it unlikely that we will be able to truly call our civilization a "human civilization" anymore.

I think that you are using an assumption that may be short-sighted. This assumption is that Earthlings will still be limited to just "mankind" in the future. I think that, eventually, Earthlings will include humans, machine intelligences, and perhaps genetically enhanced, "uplifted", non-human animals. Further into the future, I wouldn't be surprised if the line between machine and biology becomes very blurred; after all, biological creatures are just very complex chemical machines.

Consider that if we know enough about how DNA works to design an animal from scratch, it is very likely that we mastered complex genetic engineering long before that point. So it might be relatively "easy" to fiddle with the DNA of naturally-evolved animals in comparison. So I find it quite possible that we might fiddle with the DNA of promising mammals (and maybe birds) to bring them up to highly intelligent levels. The most intelligent animals non-human animals, such as dolphins, apes, elephants, and even some birds such as some corvids and parrots, are already intelligent enough to use tools and recognize themselves in the mirrors, and can outperform four-year-old humans on some tests. It might not be hard to raise them up to even higher levels of performance.

Also consider that within a decade, it is likely that the first supercomputer will exceed the power of the human brain. Up till now, the primary barrier against human-level machine intelligence has been that we simply didn't have a single computer system as powerful as the human brain. Once we have a computer system that exceeds the calculating power of a human brain, once we have computers that exceed the calculating power of 100 human brains... machine intelligence truly just becomes a software problem.

A lot of people point to the fact that we don't know how the human brain works and imply that we won't be able to build a machine intelligence until we know how the human brain works. However, that makes several flawed assumptions-

1) That the human brain uses the simplest method to build a self-aware, intelligent entity

2) That we even need to know how the human brain works to build a self-aware, intelligent entity. If it was possible to scan every neuron in a human brain down to the molecular, it seems likely you could even just upload your brain to a computer. You wouldn't even need to know how it the human brain worked.

Alternatively, there could be ways to simply evolve an intelligence using evolutionary algorithms.

I once had a professor who showed me this antenna that was designed by evolutionary algorithms. Basically, you take a certain starting configuration. The computer induces "mutations" to that starting configuration, then tests all the configurations, letting the best survive, and getting rid of the worst ones. This forms the next generation, and the process repeats.

Anyway, after several thousand generations, the antenna that was spat out didn't look like anything sensical. It didn't even look like it should work. And yet it worked far better than anything else that was tested. It took the professor MONTHS to figure out why the antenna worked so well!

So my point is, we don't need to actually UNDERSTAND something to build it.

Also, finally, another counterpoint to the argument that we must understand the human brain to build true machine intelligences is the development of heavier than air aircraft. For centuries, everyone thought that the path to creating heavier-than-air aircraft lay in studying how birds fly. But the truth was TOTALLY different. Nature takes a convoluted approach to avian flight that we still don't understand. The fundamentals of aerodynamics that you need to know to build an airplane are MUCH more simple, and our airplanes and helicopters do not resemble birds.

So anyway, so to answer the question more exactly, I do not believe it likely that "mankind" will one day be capable of building an animal from scratch. If such a capability is developed one day, then it implies the mastery of technologies that likely lead us to the creation of other intelligent races that share the solar system with us, and as such, we will no longer be just "mankind" anymore. Personally, as lonely as the universe appears to be, and considering the poor decisions we have made recently, I think that we could benefit greatly from the guidance from other forms of intelligence.

Edited September 28, 2013 by |Velocity|

[RuBisCO]

Biorobotics

[Omicron314]

Honestly, I hope we don't "uplift" other creatures from our planet. In the past we had HUGE problems getting along with people of other races; we still have some today. Imagine how interspecies relations might play out. Humanity may grow more tolerant in the future, but for now, I don't trust it.

[-Velocity-]

Honestly, I hope we don't "uplift" other creatures from our planet. In the past we had HUGE problems getting along with people of other races; we still have some today. Imagine how interspecies relations might play out. Humanity may grow more tolerant in the future, but for now, I don't trust it.

We are not ready yet. But the progression has always been towards a more inclusive granting of individual rights. There was a time when anyone who wasn't white was subhuman; we had slaves, women were property (true, some parts of the world are still backwards like this though). However, in the CIVILIZED world, we continue to move closer and closer to equality. We are even are considering granting a limited form of individual rights to the non-human great apes, and I think that that movement is getting more and more steam. We are protecting whales better and better, and most of the world views Japan's slaughter of dolphins and whales as the brutal and murderous acts that they are. The hardline religious sects that consider all animals (and any potential machine intelligences) as "soulless" continue to shrink.

Sure, the world is not ready for uplifted animals or machine intelligences that rival or exceed a human's, but we are progressively getting closer and closer to it. Comparing how women and all races are considered equal today, to the slavery and extreme racism of just a century or two ago, I feel it's naive to say we will *never* be enlightened and non-xenophobic enough to embrace a second form of intelligence in our civilization. The trend says that we WILL, and probably within a century.

Edited September 28, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Drunkrobot]

The structure of DNA, and how it does what it does, was only finally known 60 years ago. In those 60 years, we mapped the human genome, created (even patented) new lifeforms, and those who once had no chance of having a child can now have a "test tube" baby. Genetics has come a long way from "not existing" to "thousands of practical applications". Right now, forms of life as complicated as plants are being tweaked to maximize crop yield from every square metre of farmland.

We know we can create a new animal. I am of the belief that whatever nature has done, we can do better, faster. The one problem is trying to find a purpose for this animal that has already been taking by a natural animal.

[lajoswinkler]

It's a brave new world awaiting our progeny, if we don't destroy it.

It's worth noting that, even if we're literally speeding like a rocket on the path of genetics and biotechnology, we still have relatively poor knowledge about ecology i.e. the connections between living organisms. Genetics is about molecules and sets of molecules. Ecology is an n-th derivative of it and is extremely complicated.

My opinion is that artificial organisms should not be released outside labs. The same goes for species with potentially invasive behaviour. Not only that could force a new, problematic for us, equilibrium... but the genetical cross contamination with similar species might occur. Problems might multiply.

I say let's experiment a lot, but keep it in the test tube, or at least if we're releasing something like enhanced plants (something that will help end the starvation), design them to have a weak spot, so they can't spread around and fight other domestical plants. It's already done.

[Monkeh]

You've all seen Jurassic park right?

LIFE FINDS A WAY MAN, LIFE FINDS A WAY!

[lajoswinkler]

Yes, that's the cross contamination I'm talking about. For those reasons, engineered bacteria genomes in the lab experiments have artificially built in parts that require a special supplement in order to facilitate growth i.e. they can't grow outside special environments. It's a neat method to ensure they stay where they're supposed to be, in vitro.

[SmiteZero]

"Oh, who am I kidding? I can't build a cat."

[meve12]

Life support (CO2->02) in a cup.

Fast growing, hardy food crops.

Biological capacitors.

Self-repairing hulls.

Autodocs.

Etc, etc, etc.

Not NEEDED, but it'd be nice to have.

EDIT: sorry, replying to bsalis.

[3_bit]

While it would be really, really hard (It would no doubt be more economical to just modify E. Coli, essentially one of the most-used bacteria, to do what you want. People have even used them, with modifications to their DNA, to make fuel for cars.) but it could be done. Seeing as how if you look at our chemicals on their own, we're really not worth much more than $40 USD. So for $40 USD and a bunch of unrealistically-high end equipment, yes, you could make a duplicate of yourself. Now if we made a was of 3D printing by the atom, and 3D scanning to the atom, we could easily clone you, but they would think they were you. That part's expected, though. I'd personally place my money in genetic resequencing.

Verdict: Yes, but it's not going to be a business anytime soon.

[magnemoe]

"Oh, who am I kidding? I can't build a cat."

Why would you want to build an cat? Cats are very good at making more cats themselves.