{"id":55921,"date":"2025-07-11T04:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T04:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/55921\/"},"modified":"2025-07-11T04:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T04:31:09","slug":"from-obliteration-to-resurrection-vanished-by-sadiah-qureshi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/55921\/","title":{"rendered":"From obliteration to resurrection \u2014 Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You would have to be as dead as a dodo not to notice the growing sense of excitement around \u201cde-extinction\u201d. Scientists and private companies nurture dreams of using cutting-edge science, including genetic editing, to bring famously defunct species, or closely related hybrids, back to life.<\/p>\n

Colossal Biosciences, a US-based genetics start-up that already has controversial projects<\/a> aimed at resurrecting the dodo and Tasmanian tiger, recently announced that it was teaming up with film director Sir Peter Jackson and Indigenous communities in New Zealand to bring back the South Island giant moa, a giant flightless bird that was overhunted to extinction around 600 years ago.<\/p>\n

These efforts \u2014 whether in pursuit of Jurassic Park-style entertainment or as penance for human-induced extermination \u2014 raise hackles for a host of reasons: they subtract money and eyeballs from attempts to conserve the nearly 10,000 species that still exist but are currently critically endangered, which include species of leopard, rhino, gorilla and orangutan; the lab-made creatures would be dropped into habitats to which they might no longer be suited; these living creations are likely to be lookalikes rather than exact genetic clones, raising questions of authenticity; these animals could be classed intellectual property, becoming lifeforms that are \u201cowned\u201d by the companies who made them.<\/p>\n

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The history of extinction is bound up with race, empire and colonisation, and the Darwinian concept that some species are fated to outcompete others<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the road to re-creation must also be walked with care given the link between extinction and past injustices, argues the historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished. The history of extinction, she points out in her dark and persuasive narrative, is bound up with concepts of race, empire and colonisation, and the Darwinian concept that some species are fated to outcompete others.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce naturalists acknowledged that mastodons, moas and dinosaurs all belonged to an ancient lost world,\u201d she writes, \u201c[they] quickly interpreted human encounters, particularly within the context of European colonial expansion and the subsequent persecution of many native peoples, as a form of extinction.\u201d This is where the intellectual meat of this complex book lies: it shows how the emerging 19th-century scientific philosophy of extinction as a natural or preordained process was used almost to justify the extermination of peoples who were routinely described as \u201csavages\u201d or \u201cprimitives\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"AThe \u2018Colossal Woolly Mouse\u2019, a rodent genetically modified by Colossal Biosciences to contain woolly mammoth-like traits \u00a9 Colossal Biosciences\/Cover Image via Reuters Connect<\/p>\n

Among those on the receiving end of this brutal philosophy were the Beothuk in Newfoundland, persecuted from the 1500s onwards by European settlers. The death in 1829 of the supposed last survivor, a woman called Shanawdithit who sketched pictures of Beothuk life (including the kidnapping of relatives), was memorialised by one explorer as \u201ca primitive nation\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.[becoming] extinct in their own orbit\u201d, as if this tragic event had happened out of the blue.<\/p>\n

A similar fate befell the original inhabitants of other lands favoured by settlers and colonisers, including in Australia and Tasmania. Among the many startling stories in the book is the tale of Daisy Bates, born in 1850s Ireland. The thrice-married, bigamous, long-skirted ex-governess, estranged from her own son, spent 40 years travelling across Australia and living with Indigenous peoples as the colonisers moved in.<\/p>\n

But Bates was no white saviour. Part journalist, part amateur ethnographer and wholly committed self-publicist, Bates lamented that these peoples were \u201cwithering from contact with the white man\u2019s civilisation, which can find no place for the primitive\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009I must make their passing easier\u201d. Insistent that their complete disappearance was inevitable, she even lashed out at activists who argued for protecting Aboriginal ways of life.<\/p>\n

Vanished can be dense and detailed at times, but also surprisingly poetic: a display of extinct species in Paris\u2019s National Museum of Natural History is described as a \u201cmenagerie of lost ways of being\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009held captive behind glass under the glare of false suns\u201d. Qureshi, professor of modern British history at the University of Manchester, is exquisitely attuned to the (often overlooked) historical and political contexts in which scientific ideas thrive. The assertion that genetic testing can determine whether individuals might have some Beothuk ancestry is a form of \u201cbiological essentialism\u201d that reduces kinship to molecules and ignores each nation\u2019s own criteria for deciding who belongs.<\/p>\n

\"Book<\/p>\n

At the book\u2019s end, like a passenger pigeon returning home, we circle back to the modern but fuzzy concept of de-extinction. This process \u201ccannot be a singular act of bringing a species back into existence\u201d because the notion of extinction itself is so variable. Species can be locally extinct or extinct in the wild but survive in captivity. They can be functionally extinct: still surviving but unable to play an ecological role. Does creating a close relative of an extinct species really count as true revival? <\/p>\n

But de-extinction also raises important questions of justice. Not all peoples are equally guilty for killing off species that scientists want to bring back. So, for example, who should make sacrifices to fulfil the scientific fantasy of \u201cPleistocene rewilding\u201d, in which large tracts of land are turned over to long-gone beasts like mammoths, Siberian tigers and Canadian bison? \u201cBy advocating a return to prehuman time,\u201d she observes, \u201cthe rights of extinct megafauna are effectively given priority over both surviving flora and fauna and the rights of dispossessed peoples.\u201d <\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

All the while, other species are disappearing: she mourns the Yangtze dolphin, the West African black rhino and the golden toad of Costa Rica, all declared extinct while she wrote the book. \u201cExtinction is a political choice,\u201d concludes Qureshi.<\/p>\n

De-extinction looks like a hard-nosed commercial choice. Colossal Biosciences is now a \u201cdecacorn\u201d, a start-up valued at more than $10bn \u2014 but the public conversation, about who wins and who loses, is yet to come alive.<\/p>\n

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction<\/strong> by Sadiah Qureshi Allen Lane \u00a330, 496 pages <\/p>\n

Anjana Ahuja is a science commentator<\/p>\n

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