Passage: "Conservation biologists debate whether a reintroduced population descended from a handful of captive founders should count as a restoration of the extinct wild population or merely a new population that happens to share the extinct one's genome to some degree. The dispute is often treated as a factual question awaiting better genetic data, as though sequencing enough founder DNA would settle whether the reintroduced animals really are 'the same' population. But no amount of genetic resolution can settle this, because the dispute is not actually about genetic content; it is about which criterion of population identity we should adopt, and genetics alone cannot adjudicate among candidate criteria. If population identity requires unbroken lineage continuity in situ, then any captive-bred reintroduction fails by definition, however close its genome; if instead population identity requires only that the reintroduced organisms occupy the historical niche and reconstitute the historical ecological function, genetic distance from the original founders may matter less than ecological role. Gathering more sequence data cannot tell us which of these criteria is the right one to apply; it can only tell us, once we have already chosen a criterion, how well the reintroduced population satisfies it."