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Galilean, wow, that's um, an interesting point of view. Could we get back to chimpanzee's from humans (afterall, don't we share 95% of the same genes)?
Maybe 100 years from now what you say may very well be real. We may be able to clone anything we want, and heck, all you may need is a scale or small tissue sample from a Gold Stripe Maroon to do it. We also know that the definition of a species ISN'T as valid as it was 100 years ago because of what we learned. In fact the determination of a species is somewhat arbitrary and man-made at this point. If you're not familiar with it, look up reticulate evolution. That'd be a topic right up your alley.
My point of view is I LIKE the biodiversity that nature (or if you prefer, God) provides. I don't really care how we got it, but I do value it and treasure it. As fish breeders whom are few and far between, we currently don't even have a handful, a tiny percentage of the marine fish figured out. Why waste our efforts on making "new hybrids" when we can't even rear the 20 or so most popular species.
The wild betta plays an integral role in the ecology of Thailand. What if it went extinct? What if that meant a 50-fold increase in mosquito borne disease as a result? Could we ever hope to repopulate the wild betta population from our captive stocks when we fix the problem that caused them to go extinct in the first place?
I would very much like to see this African Cichlid anecdote you cite. I've bred African Cichlids for a LONG time, I never once bred two of the same species and ended up with a mysteriously different species show up out of the progeny, ESPECIALLY of the Tanganyikans! Sounds far more likely that some fry jumped, or perhaps a female was collected and the eggs were hatched, and out came a different species than was expected (there is at least a couple known examples of brood parasitism within the Tanganyikan fish populations, most notably the Synodontis species, which find mating mouthbrooder, eat their eggs, and in their place lay their own. Imagine a Tropheus spitting out a bunch of catfish. It's not genetics)
I do not agree that the "information for a Rusty Angel is stored in a Coral Beauty". I do not agree that at our current level of knowledge and understanding, we could ever "get back to a Gold-striped Maroon Clown from some other clown".
Your concepts are more than intriguing, but they are more than currently on the level of science fiction, not science fact. And that's why preserving what we have is important.
Matt
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