> Then we do not lose information and might as well recreate this diversity in the future.
This is an understandable position, but difficult in practice. We're losing "information" in a lot of other ways as well. Habitat destruction is probably the most obvious part of that for many species. It's not enough to have a genome without knowledge of what I'll call that genome's "context of relevance". Which amounts to a vast web of climate, local environmental history, other organisms in that context, and so on. All of that will likewise affect any given organism's epigenetic expression, something else that a naive recording of genetic data will miss.
Likewise, we're destroying what amounts to animal "culture". Go read Elizabeth Marshall's The Tribe of Tiger[1], esp. the part that describes the extremely interesting relationship between the Bushmen tribes of the Kalahari desert and the resident prides of lions.
As far as we can manage, it's still best to preserve as much as possible of our "archives of life" in living form vs. recorded on media somewhere.
This is an understandable position, but difficult in practice. We're losing "information" in a lot of other ways as well. Habitat destruction is probably the most obvious part of that for many species. It's not enough to have a genome without knowledge of what I'll call that genome's "context of relevance". Which amounts to a vast web of climate, local environmental history, other organisms in that context, and so on. All of that will likewise affect any given organism's epigenetic expression, something else that a naive recording of genetic data will miss.
Likewise, we're destroying what amounts to animal "culture". Go read Elizabeth Marshall's The Tribe of Tiger[1], esp. the part that describes the extremely interesting relationship between the Bushmen tribes of the Kalahari desert and the resident prides of lions.
As far as we can manage, it's still best to preserve as much as possible of our "archives of life" in living form vs. recorded on media somewhere.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Tiger-Elizabeth-Marshall-Thomas/...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God