Dire wolves remain very extinct
Despite what you are being fed, de-extinction is a con, full of gloss, bullshit and ghoulish greed.
I am exhausted and pissed off. I’ve got better things to do than this. So forgive my ire, on this sunny day, my normally sunny disposition is temporarily on hold.
Here’s a fact: to date, one single animal, from one species has been brought back from extinction. It was the Pyrenean Ibex, the last of which, Celia, died in 2000. Cells were taken from her before she died, and then in 2003, using the same technique by which Dolly was cloned, a baby ibex was brought to term from a surrogate goat. This meant that the genome of the kid was near identical to that of the parent, and therefore unquestionably a member of the same species. The kid died soon after birth suffocating with ill-formed lungs, but it did live for a few minutes, making it the only species in the 4 billion year history of life on Earth to have gone extinct twice.
Extinction, with that one shitty exception, is forever. I’ve talked about this incessantly, with increasing humourlessness, for a number of years, once explaining to an Irish priest on live radio about the difficulties in artificial insemination due to the right-angled bend in the vaginal tract of an African elephant. Last year I appeared on the Infinite Monkey Cage and shat on the whole idea from a great height. This was unlinked to any particular press release, just a very popular subject that is worthy of interrogation, and ripe for a few gallows humour gags. Last month, when Colossus Bioscience - the company fuelling the mammoth resurrection gargleballs - released an un-peer-reviewed paper in which they unveiled a genetically modified mouse, its genome edited to include mammoth versions of a couple of genes. The hirsute mouse came out not cold adapted as was intended, but certainly a bit hairy. My write up was in the Guardian, and there’s little more to add to it.
Today, the press is awash with fawning headlines about the successful de-extinction by Colossus Bioscience of the Dire Wolf. Three pups are now alive, and they are cute.
Let me be absolutely clear on this though: no matter how cute they are, this story is absolute bollocks. No amount of fancy pictures, cool legendary names (Romulus, Remus and one from Game of Thrones), or American-brand biotech TED-style glossy hubris can change this. I’m just going to list the ways that this vexes me, and should vex you too.
ONE: The newborn wolves are not Dire Wolves. There isn’t a definition on Earth by which they could be considered Dire Wolves. Romulus, Remus and the one from Game of Thrones are Grey Wolves, an entirely different species, whose genomes have a very small number of edits that make those genes a bit more like Dire Wolf versions of the same genes. They are, by any sensible definition, genetically engineered grey wolves.
I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you.
Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.
Dire wolves and Grey wolves had a common ancestor about 5.7 million years ago. Dire wolves evolved in the Americas, and have no real kinship with Grey Wolves. They look similar, because evolution is sometimes convergent. But sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. The new-born wolves are Grey Wolves, and Dire Wolves remain very extinct.
TWO: Wolves, as you all very well know, are highly social animals. They have complex social structures, and these behaviours are part of being a wolf. No-one has much of a clue what the social behaviour of Dire Wolves was because they’ve been extinct for more than 10,000 years, and David Attenborough was born 10 millennia too late to get a BBC crew over to California to watch one drown in the La Brea Tar Pits, where many specimens have been found.
(Side note, also in anger: Brea means tar in Spanish, so calling them ‘the La Brea Tar Pits’ is basically saying THE THE TAR TAR PITS. DO BETTER, AMERICANS).
So these three Grey Wolves have been brought into the world without their packs, without wolf parents (their surrogate mothers were dogs), as gaudy boutique animals for a greedy, morally suspect company. If conservation is their pretend goal, they are nothing but ghoulish. If they do indeed believe that they have brought back the Dire Wolf from extinction then that’s even worse, because not only are these highly social animals devoid of their family structures, the world they evolved in has not existed for 10,000 years. These are sophisticated social animals that have been experimented on for no good reason - not for medical knowledge, not for conservation reasons, just for business.
THREE: From Time’s cover story coverage:
‘Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves.’
I have no idea how. They talk of engineering elephants to be more resistant to climate change. HOW? Please suggest your answers in the comments. Cos, I’ve been studying genetics for 32 years and I haven’t got a frigging clue.
FOUR: the press have just lapped all this wolfshit up, and regurgitated it, mostly without the slightest questioning of the corporate press release. Barely ANY reports have rebutted the dubious claims by Colossus. Time magazine has it on the cover, the word ‘extinct’ crossed out. That scientifically illiterate megalomaniacal fragile lunch Elon Musk tweeted it to his 218 million twitter followers (I will not call it X), with a picture from Game of Thrones.
Even Carl Zimmer, a mensch and doyen of American science journalism couldn’t quite manage to debunk their claims in the New York Times’ fawning write up.
On de-extinction…‘Colossal Bioscience appear to have done it, or something close’, he writes. Well, they haven’t done it, and if by ‘close’ he means ‘have done minor edits on a grey wolf so that it could barely be described as a hybrid let alone a resurrected species’ then fair game. And I’m pretty sure Carl knows that.
In that New York Times write up, Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal, and someone I have broken bread with, ‘described the wolf pups as the first successful case of de-extinction. “We’re creating these functional copies of something that used to be alive.”’
Well you can use weasel words and nebulous euphemism till the investors come knocking, but it doesn’t make it true. Every writer who promoted this nonsense without debunking it is doing client journalism for a ghoulish anti-scientific project born of exploitation and greed. I hope it was worth it.
GOOD DAY, SIR. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE.
I've long thought that, even if possible, de-extinction woul be a bad idea. The environments those animals lived in don't exist any more; at best they'd be zoo specimens. And your point about social structures and nurture are spot on. It's plain cruelty.
This is nothing more than Genetic Theatre. Its the molecular version of when Ringling Bros. surgically modified goats to make "unicorns" for a circus act.