His case against reviving the mammoth depends on premises about funding and innovation that he asserts more than he proves.
When a working conservation scientist calls mammoth de-extinction “bad conservation,” the verdict carries more weight than ordinary skepticism. Nitin Sekar has spent his career on elephants and biodiversity, so when he argues that money spent reviving extinct species is money taken from living ones, the claim lands with the authority of a finding rather than an opinion.
It is worth asking whether it actually is one.
The argument has a clean structure. Conservation funding is scarce. De-extinction is expensive. Therefore, de-extinction drains resources from species that need them now. Each step sounds reasonable. The difficulty is the middle step, the one carrying the entire conclusion, which is an empirical assumption dressed as a settled fact.
That assumption is that de-extinction and conservation compete for the same money.
Often they don’t. Much of the capital behind de-extinction comes from technologists, biotech investors, and philanthropists drawn to frontier engineering, not from the donors and agencies that fund habitat protection. A venture investor weighing a genetics company is usually choosing between that company and another biotech bet, not between a mammoth and an elephant reserve. If these projects vanished tomorrow, it is far from obvious the money would reappear inside conservation. It might simply leave the room.
Sekar treats the funding pool as fixed and shared, but he never establishes that it is. The claim that one effort starves the other holds only if the dollars are genuinely fungible, and that’s the point he skips.
The second premise concerns innovation, and it is weaker still. The argument assumes the science produces nothing of value beyond the headline animal. History rarely cooperates with that assumption. Tools built for one purpose routinely migrate. Genetic techniques developed for agriculture and medicine now underpin wildlife management and environmental monitoring. The reproductive biology, genome engineering, and cryopreservation that de-extinction requires sit squarely in the lineage of methods conservation already relies on.
Whether those spillovers materialize is genuinely uncertain, and a careful critic would say so. Sekar instead resolves the uncertainty in one direction, assumes the benefits will not arrive, and builds his conclusion on that assumption. Treating an open question as though it were closed mimics rigor without delivering it.
Underneath both premises sits a single move: framing conservation and biotechnology as rivals. That framing manufactures a choice the field itself does not accept in practice. Conservation has never run on one method. Protected areas, restoration, anti-poaching work, captive breeding, legal protection, and genetic rescue already coexist. Adding new biotechnology to that list extends what the discipline has always done rather than betraying it.
There is a sharper irony here. Conservationists routinely warn against zero-sum thinking, the instinct to treat every gain in one place as a loss somewhere else. Sekar’s argument runs on exactly that instinct, assuming every dollar, every headline, and every ounce of public attention pulled toward a mammoth is subtracted from something better. It is the reasoning conservationists criticize when other people use it.
None of this means de-extinction deserves a pass. The demand for evidence is correct. Companies should be transparent, timelines should be tested, and marketing should not stand in for results. But there is a wide gap between holding a field accountable and ruling it categorically harmful before the evidence is in.
Sekar’s conclusion may even turn out to be right. De-extinction may prove a poor use of scientific energy. The problem is that his argument does not earn that conclusion. He arrives there only by treating contested assumptions about money and innovation as if they were established, which is exactly the move a scientific case is meant to rule out.
That is why “bad conservation” is a stronger slogan than it is an argument.
