[HN Gopher] The Dire Wolf Is Back
___________________________________________________________________
The Dire Wolf Is Back
Author : adrianhon
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-04-07 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| tonijn wrote:
| Very cool, but is it ethical?
| api wrote:
| We cause lots of things to go extinct. Doesn't seem any worse.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Mad Science means never having to ask "What's the worst that
| can happen?"
| krxci wrote:
| This is a deeply philosophical question. But it's highly
| dependent on the circumstances of a particular animal's
| extinction. Is it ethical to resurrect the Wolly Mammoth into
| our current climate when it's significantly warmer than the
| climate of the Ice Age? Likely not.
|
| Was a species hunted to extinction? Maybe restoring that
| population would ease our collective conscience to some minuet
| degree.
|
| So maybe bringing back some of these species is being done so
| as an apologetic gesture? Perhaps out of hubris?
|
| To be fair, we're notoriously cruel to the animals that we farm
| for mass food production and less directly to wild animals
| (when human activity destroys their habitat). Images of such
| farm operations might remind you of conditions imposed on
| alleged dissedents by dictatorial regimes. You know, those same
| conditions that are condemned as atrocious when imposed on
| humans by humans. And this kind of treatment is still
| absolutely prevalent today on humans and other animals.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ethically, how is it different from (say) Kentucky Kennels LLC
| trying to breed some Great Danes which drool less?
| evanb wrote:
| Hmmm, are you suggesting that the scientists were so
| preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to
| think whether or not they should?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0
| burnished wrote:
| Would it be ethical to let all this lightning striking the
| castle's copper spire go to waste?
| leesec wrote:
| Please provide the unethical case
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Is it ethical to make exaggerated claims in order to raise
| money? No.
|
| The article is one red flag after another.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Paywalled so I have to ask, why the dire wolf? Why not an animal
| that humans drove to extinction like the dodo bird? Is it because
| dire wolves sound cool and were in video games?
| donalbrecht wrote:
| Haven't read full article either. But dogs have an incredibly
| well studied genome and are generally incredibly well
| understood. And due to cloning efforts, performing implantation
| of lab grown embryos is established protocol. Wolves are also
| well studied and understood, so even tho dire wolves aren't
| super closely related, the dog baseline is a great control.
|
| This would be a lot harder to do with an extinct species we
| don't know well.
| projektfu wrote:
| I would guess that it has to do with much more available
| genetic information on dogs and more existing CRISPR work with
| them. However, I do not know if these wolves will give us a lot
| of information.
|
| That said, the dodo is on Colossal's list of projects, along
| with the wooly mammoth and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I'm guessing it's a mixture of practical concerns and something
| that captures the imagination of investors.
| globnomulous wrote:
| My guess is that it is indeed because they're charismatic
| megafauna.
| shakna wrote:
| > Colossal's dire wolf work took a less invasive approach,
| isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf,
| but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as
| endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of
| blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in
| the cell's nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient
| dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf's genome.
| The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated
| ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were
| allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were
| inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen
| mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their
| size, since they'd be giving birth to large pups. In each
| mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term
| pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.)
| On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A
| few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another
| clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30,
| 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi.
|
| The process seems to have dictated this. They needed an easy
| surrogate, a dog, and wolves required no need of introducing
| anything new into the genome, it's "just" reactivating what is
| already there.
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| Birds are more difficult to clone than mammals. I don't think
| we've been able to clone one yet.
|
| I hope to see a passenger pigeon one day though.
| mcdonje wrote:
| Searched for this. Passenger Pigeons are the #1 species I
| want resurrected.
| cactusfrog wrote:
| We have robust cloning protocols for dogs. For some reason dogs
| are really amenable to cloning.
| ashenke wrote:
| From the article, it looks like they have multiple teams
| working on multipe animals at the same time. But the dodo team
| is going slower than the mammoth and the wolf :
|
| > Keyte added that her team was still a long way from bringing
| back the dodo. For one thing, the methods for growing and
| manipulating the embryonic precursors of avian sperm and eggs
| in a lab setting have been developed for only two birds: the
| chicken and, recently, the goose. Keyte said, "It's been almost
| twenty years since culture conditions for the chicken were
| established, and those culture conditions have not worked for
| other bird species, even ones that are really closely related,
| like quail." She added that, despite the dearth of related
| research, her team was getting better at growing the sperm-and-
| egg precursors in birds: "We've gotten to the point where we
| feel like we can start doing some migration assays"--a
| technique for studying how the cells in an early embryo begin
| to differentiate. Once the researchers got the basic method for
| growing bird cells down, they could use the technology not just
| to develop a dodo but also to help replenish populations of
| endangered birds. The team had already identified some species
| that could use the help.
| altairprime wrote:
| Because Game of Thrones popularized the idea of a dire wolf as
| an exceedingly rare protector of children, which helps them
| persuade investors that there is a viable luxury market for
| this product. They named one "Khaleesi", so it's not a
| coincidental reference.
| iSnow wrote:
| House of Stark will still be happy to hear their heraldic
| animal is back.
|
| But yeah, clever marketing by this company.
| api wrote:
| Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or does
| it? Biological categories like species are fuzzy anyway. There is
| tremendous variation within each species. But where do you draw a
| line?
|
| It's something that perhaps has more in common with a dire wolf
| than extant wolves. Maybe it looks like one. Does it act like
| one? Do we have any way of knowing?
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Containing fragments doesn't mean this is a dire wolf, or
| does it?
|
| Only the Marketing Dept. (and some gullible-when-it-pays-to-be
| reporters) think they are Dire Wolves.
| pmags wrote:
| Yes, species/lineage/population distinctions are quite fuzzy at
| the level of divergence under consideration here (dire wolves
| vs gray wolves).
|
| Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker
| article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline:
|
| _After almost a year of computational genetic analysis,
| Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on
| fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived from Colossal's
| study of the dire-wolf genome and five tweaks were derived from
| scrutiny of the gray-wolf genome._
|
| 20 edits and 14 genes -- clearly some related to coat color,
| however:
|
| _But the genes that guided coat color presented a problem:
| they carried with them a risk of blindness and deafness. (In
| humans, variations of these genes can lead to Waardenburg
| syndrome, which causes pigmentation deficiencies, among other
| problems.) So the group decided to edit a different gene that,
| when expressed in dogs, also codes for a lighter coat._
|
| So the coat color alleles are _NOT_ the dire wolf alleles.
| calf wrote:
| I don't get it, so dire wolves were only 20 gene changes from
| gray wolves? Not thousands of tiny,crucial changes all over
| their respective genetic codes?
| pmags wrote:
| Above I'm just reporting what the New Yorker reports that
| Colossus has accomplished.
|
| Reading between the lines, I take the reporting to imply
| that these 20 edits are what Colossus thinks is sufficient
| (at least for marketing purposes ;-) to recapitulate some
| of the key phenotypic traits of dire wolves.
|
| Does that make them actually dire wolves? Not in my
| opinion.
|
| I'd probably describe the genetically engineered pups as
| "isogenic with parental gray wolf genomes with the addition
| of 20 allelic edits that recapitulate key aspects of the
| dire-wolf phenotype" (or something to the effect; Colossus
| hasn't published anything by which to evaluate their
| claims).
|
| I don't work on canids, but a quick PubMed search turns up
| this paper:
|
| Perri AR, Mitchell KJ, et al. Dire wolves were the last of
| an ancient New World canid lineage. Nature. 2021
| Mar;591(7848):87-91. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03082-x. Epub
| 2021 Jan 13. PMID: 33442059.
|
| The analyses in that paper suggests quite a bit deeper
| divergence between dire wolves and gray wolves than the New
| Yorker articles implies.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I have to agree. While this is a very cool achievement and I'm
| excited to see what this company does next, it seems
| disingenuous to claim they brought a species back from
| extinction. The pups are still genetically much more like
| modern wolves than they are dire wolves.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| These aren't even concerns limited to genetic engineering.
| There was a good (if memory serves) _Radiolab_ story ages ago
| about the conservation efforts on the Galapagos islands. The
| relevant part is that Lonesome George 's genome died out with
| him, and as a result there aren't any tortoises left that can
| fill the fauna niche on his island of origin. But since the
| tortoises on other islands are closely genetically related
| (even given the separation between them), ecologists started a
| multi-generational breeding program to attempt to select the
| key traits of Lonesome George's strain so they can introduce a
| new population to the island that will do the same job his
| lineage did in the food web.
|
| ... which begs the question: when you're doing Bene-Gesserit-
| style eugenics on tortoises to get the perfect specimens,
| what's the nature of the nature you're trying to preserve?
|
| Humans _cannot_ interact with the natural world without
| changing it, because it is the nature of life (and human life
| in particular) to change things. The question isn 't how we
| don't make an impact; it's how do we manage that impact
| responsibly?
|
| (I have no idea if breeding dire-wolf-alikes with genetic
| modification is responsible or not. Let me know if they get out
| of the lab and become an invasive species, I think).
| toolslive wrote:
| Unrelated. The article uses the word "decimated". It seems to me
| a lot of people misinterpret the meaning of this word. It does
| not mean "kill 90%", but "kill on in every 10" aka 10%.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Meanings shift with time. The original meant that (doled out as
| a very harsh collective punishment by the Romans: groups of 10
| would draw straws and be forced to kill the one who draw the
| short straw). Now it's meanining is more along the lines of
| 'severely reduced', where how much is 'severely' depends on the
| context.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| indeed, this particular one though has the added complication
| of having part of it's meaning contained in the composition
| of the word.
|
| It's usage is still changing, obviously , but for me it's a
| more difficult transition because of the 'deci'
| saghm wrote:
| I think this one is already past the past the inflection
| point, to be honest. I see people using the word with the
| new meaning far more than the old one; hell, I see people
| complaining about how the word is used more than I see it
| used for the original meaning. My take is that the original
| meaning is so narrow that it's almost inevitable that any
| more broad usage that appeared would overtake it to the
| point of drowning out the original.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Meanings shift quickly. Decimate was first introduced circa
| 1600 from Latin to mean "destroy every tenth". By 1660, it
| started to mean "destroy large number".
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| The word is from 'decimatio' which appears in original
| Roman histories written well before 1600.
| andrewl wrote:
| I would say it's more that they don't _know_ the meaning of
| decimated. Or they don 't know the _original_ meaning of the
| word. Now when someone writes that a population was decimated
| they probably just mean it was massively reduced. I have also
| seen articles saying a sports team decimated their opponent,
| which in that context means the winning team won by a large
| margin.
| globnomulous wrote:
| Semi-related: very few people, even capable professional
| writers, use "disinterested" correctly.
| argiopetech wrote:
| Can you provide an example? I'm not sure how one would use it
| improperly...
| andrewl wrote:
| The short answer is that disinterested means unbiased,
| having no conflicts of interest, impartial. So a judge in a
| court should be disinterested, but not _uninterested_.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| It is often erroneously used when the writer means
| uninterested.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" has become
| more common over the past few decades, rather than using it
| in the older sense of "having no stake in the outcome,
| having no bias or partiality with respect to a conflict."
|
| An example would be saying that someone was "disinterested"
| in what was happening on TV, or in music that was playing.
| saghm wrote:
| Using a word "correctly" isn't actually something everyone
| agrees on, though. As much as certain usages rub me the wrong
| way, it's hard for me not to fall on the side of
| descriptivism and that the issue is with my reaction rather
| than other people; words are all just made up sounds (and
| written symbols, of course) that we use to communicate, after
| all, and if enough people use them in a certain way, it
| doesn't really make sense to me that there would be some
| inherent meaning that overrides that. Language evolving isn't
| a new thing, and once a meaning reaches enough mindshare,
| there's no turning back.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Interestingly, the macOS Dictionary app (which I believe uses
| some version of the OED) has this note about the word:
|
| "Ironically, the earliest recorded sense of disinterested is
| for the disputed sense."
| furyofantares wrote:
| Decimated is from Latin decimatio, where a large group of your
| army would be split into groups of 10, each group would draw
| straws, and the shortest straw would be stoned to death by the
| other 9. A completely brutal form of military punishment for
| capital offenses such as cowardice. It is not really adequately
| captured by reducing it to "kill one in every 10".
|
| Wikipedia says it may be ahistorical though.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)
|
| It also notes "In modern English, the word is used most
| commonly not to mean a destruction of a tenth but rather
| annihilation."
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| This is like saying people misinterpret the word "awful" or
| "literally"
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| We're overdue for a horse archer empire as well
| logicchains wrote:
| I never realised the Dire Wolf was a real historical animal, not
| just a fantasy one like the Owlbear.
| p_ing wrote:
| It's not just an MtG card.
|
| https://scryfall.com/card/ice/230/dire-wolves
| evanb wrote:
| Even if it weren't a real extinct animal it wouldn't have
| just been an MtG card
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_Wolf_(song)
| ourmandave wrote:
| Oh shit, the next instagram thing will be DnD cosplayers trying
| to get selfies with them.
| imzadi wrote:
| I think Game of Thrones cosplayers would be more likely
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There's a reason horses are so fast; they co-evolved in the
| Americas with something they had to outrun.
| mkl wrote:
| That seems much more likely to be cheetah-ancestors than dire
| wolves.
| billnad wrote:
| So disappointed that this isn't an article about the Grateful
| Dead
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| In the timbers of fennario..
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| The wolves are running round
|
| The winter was so hard and cold
|
| Froze ten feet 'neath the ground
|
| Don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Username checks out
| mikey-k wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK948fIFYpE
| gambiting wrote:
| I got really excited that it's about Minecraft's once popular
| modpack
| natebc wrote:
| Dire is still at it. New pack for Minecraft 1.21 updated as
| recently as a few weeks ago!
|
| https://feed-the-beast.com/modpacks/126-ftb-presents-
| direwol...
|
| You can even see some history/stats for all the Direwolf
| packs: https://feed-the-
| beast.com/modpacks?search=direwolf&sort=fea...
| githubholobeat wrote:
| There is an article about this in Time magazine, no paywall.
| https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/
| freedomben wrote:
| Thanks, that's a terrific article
| lightedman wrote:
| Its a horrible article. Grey wolves and dire wolves arent
| even genetically related in a way that allows for this sort
| of gene editing and we have known this for a few years now.
| If anything, a dire wolf is closer to a red wolf.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| Yep, an absolutely empty PR grab. And seems not closer to a
| red wolf either, but entirely distinct from wolves as we
| know them. Only similar via convergent evolution.[0]
|
| 0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dire-wolves-
| were-...
| mmmrtl wrote:
| It seems their deeper sequencing of dire wolf samples
| clarified the phylogeny - they claim the dire wolf's
| closest living relative is the gray wolf, at 99.5%
| identity. The 2021 study was only able to sequence the dire
| wolf genome at 0.23x coverage and put a 0.56 probability on
| their species tree (Fig 2A). https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstre
| am/2268/255832/1/NatureDireWol...
| alexggordon wrote:
| Archive.org link
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250407131025/https://www.newyo...
| johnecheck wrote:
| Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind
| this.
|
| Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and
| combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of
| Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that
| they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will
| pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"
|
| [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-
| de...
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| In the beginning, only "a few wealthy people" could afford
| cars. This does not seem like a very good argument against
| anything new.
| buttercraft wrote:
| Yeah, as if we're all going to be riding dire wolves and
| mammoths to work in a few years...
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| We'll perhaps visit them at the zoo.
| lolinder wrote:
| Oh, good, so when that happens they'll be making some
| flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate
| change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic
| Park that wealthy _and_ middle class people can visit.
| lukan wrote:
| True philantropists it seems.
|
| (Never mind, that they never conserved anything)
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| "HN is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves
| into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about
| it"
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think people are conflating (fiction writer) Michael
| Crichton's claims of _Jurassic Park_ being for the
| wealthy and well-connected with the real-world economics
| of a zoo.
| lolinder wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As people have noted in other threads: Zoos, generally,
| maximize revenue (and community value, which is its own
| ineffable thing that matters a lot... The economics of
| zoos aren't just in dollars and cents, they're also in
| the local community thinking of them as a shelter, care
| space, and opportunity to see exotic animals without
| going to another continent and not, say, an animal-prison
| and a blight on the community, the kind of opinions that
| matter when zoos need more land to operate or want to
| form research or educational partnerships with
| neighboring institutions) by being a place the public can
| afford to go.
|
| As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an
| exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a
| whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely
| on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are
| places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to
| keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-
| demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go
| to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very
| detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot
| device to make sure our characters were _trapped_ on the
| island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and
| drive away.
| leesec wrote:
| Why would a zoo or something just be for wealthy people
| johnecheck wrote:
| Investors expect returns on the hundreds of millions of
| dollars they've invested.
|
| At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| They could just get the government to pay the company gobs
| of money for conservation efforts...
| renewiltord wrote:
| In fact, Apple has invested so much money in the iPhone.
| The only way they can make it work is if they sell the
| iPhone only to billionaires. Yes, just like Disney. The
| cost of Disneyland and Disneyworld mean that the only way
| it could provide a return is if the only people who can
| attend are the very wealthy. I think my model of the world
| is very good. It accurately describes things.
| johnecheck wrote:
| iPhones are very expensive.
|
| If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a
| large chunk of the planet.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh I see. When you meant "very expensive" you meant
| "easily accessible for the median American" and when that
| guy said "wealthy people" you interpreted that to be "the
| median American". It's true that Europeans and so on are
| quite poor but the company is in the US. Yep, factually
| most Africans can't go to Disneyland either.
| johnecheck wrote:
| Spot on.
|
| If Disneyland claimed to be helping fix world problems
| like biodiversity loss and climate change, that would be
| worth criticizing as well.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, fortunately, the US won't be involved in fixing
| world problems any more now that USAID is out. Our dirty
| dollars shan't taint the virtuous poor any longer.
| upghost wrote:
| I don't know who you are or why you charge 850/hr to book
| but I like your brand of snark and I hope you post more
| often
| amarant wrote:
| Nah. The zoo's expenses will be pretty much fixed,
| regardless of number of visitors. They'll want as many
| visitors as possible: there's more money in selling a
| million cheap tickets per day than there is selling 5
| expensive ones!
|
| At worst, it'll be a very crowded zoo
| johnecheck wrote:
| Presumably those expenses will be a lot higher than a
| regular zoo, at least in the short/mid term.
|
| I'd assume that translates to relatively costly ticket
| prices, right?
| amarant wrote:
| I dunno. If we assume rational, greedy owners and the
| costs are fixed(as in, there's a cost per animal, not a
| cost per visitor), the costs are pretty much irrelevant
| to pricing. They'll want to maximise income. The
| parameters that matters are how many visitors you'll get
| at any given price point, multiplied by that price point.
|
| Ofc, I'm assuming Homo Economicus run this zoo, that
| might not be accurate irl
| aetherson wrote:
| The business model of Colossal is to patent and sell
| genetic editing techniques that they prove out in their
| deeextinction process, for whatever that is or isn't worth.
| kayge wrote:
| Would you say they "spared no expense"?
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Id pay to go to a zoo full of wealthy people in cages
| vrosas wrote:
| The mammoth is the big PR project but Colossal is working on a
| number of species, and the idea is the research will enable us
| to easily "de-extinct" or prop up the population of any number
| of species if and when they're in danger.
| johnecheck wrote:
| _Any number of species_?
|
| Maybe in theory, but propping up an entire ecosystem in
| collapse is well beyond Colossal's reach and incentives. This
| money and research would be better spent preventing the
| ecosystems from collapsing in the first place.
|
| If we fix climate change, I could see an argument for
| investing in restoring the ecosystems that were destroyed.
| But 'de-extincting' a species without addressing the root
| causes of that extinction is idiocy.
|
| Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing
| the original organism and instead create a bioengineered
| version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this
| path will not end well for us.
| vrosas wrote:
| Climate change is only one reason for extinctions. Humans
| also tend to hunt a lot of things out of existence, like
| the dodo, that Colossal is also trying to bring back.
| oyashirochama wrote:
| Non climate hunting and direct habitat destruction is
| likely the largest cause of the current mass extinction
| event going on, life will eventually find a way to take
| advantage of humans like rats and pigeons already do or
| avoid it entirely like bats do.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| > Realizing this, these types will give up on re-
| introducing the original organism and instead create a
| bioengineered version that can survive in the changed
| world. I fear this path will not end well for us.
|
| Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing
| populations isn't the worst thing in the world.
| Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile
| offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with
| invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows
| from this R&D.
| throwanem wrote:
| The sterile-insect technique has been practiced since the
| 1950s. There is nothing novel or newly promising in that
| regard presented here.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Are you saying that a company like Colossal has nothing
| to offer to the field of genetic biocontrol or are you
| saying there is nothing of interest in the field?
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm saying that even if they can do it, which nothing so
| far suggests, then the enormous prior art in the field
| should still make it uninteresting to them in any case.
| Nothing you could patent, and it isn't charismatic to
| billionaires. Why bother?
| johnecheck wrote:
| Agreed, engineering our environment is hardly the worst
| thing. But it comes with some real risks that we
| shouldn't take lightly.
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| I'm continually disappointed they didn't decide to call it
| "reinstinction."
| lolinder wrote:
| Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take
| an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make
| it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've
| brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still
| just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked.
|
| That _could_ be just a limitation of the current technology and
| one that they 're working on fixing--maybe some day they plan
| to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity--but
| their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this
| as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it
| look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not
| actually rebuilding true biodiversity.
| bbor wrote:
| Plus, at a certain point we should probably ask what we're
| even doing here. At the same time and using the same
| ostensible "pro-environment" framework, we:
|
| 1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-
| homeless species like the Axolotl,
|
| 2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing
| biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up _owl hunting
| permits_ to protect the western US 's shittier owls from
| encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and
|
| 3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase
| biodiversity.
|
| If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably
| decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K
| species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making
| up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead.
|
| Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human
| aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all
| this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not
| only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent
| capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature
| is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific
| ones!
|
| TBH, the _Red Mars_ books ' discussion around when and why to
| preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me
| on this issue...
| octopoc wrote:
| A big reason why we should support biodiversity is that
| once an animal is extinct, it's practically impossible to
| bring it back. With small effort now we can avoid great
| effort later. And any ecosystem is so unbelievably complex
| that we just aren't yet at the point where we can predict
| exactly how things will adapt.
|
| I haven't read Red Mars but these are both very different
| from an abiotic landscape. You can easily go back to an
| abiotic landscape on Mars because that's the default. It
| doesn't take delicacy. And, an abiotic landscape is
| extremely simple compared to an ecosystem. We can easily
| predict what will happen if we go back to one.
| naravara wrote:
| I really don't even see the point in "deextincting" animals
| that went extinct due to climate or geological changes.
| They're not even fit for the present ecology anymore. De-
| extinction of species that died due to industrialization or
| human stress on the environment makes a lot more sense since
| there is, presumably, a vacant ecological niche they could be
| filling. Like bringing back the passenger pigeon or dodo
| bird, or repopulating the oceans with species that have been
| critically overfished. But who cares about bringing back
| wooly mammoths and giant sloths?
| gweinberg wrote:
| I do. I couldn't care less about passenger pigeons though.
| To each his own.
| kakapo1988 wrote:
| Because humans wiped out the mammoths, giant sloths, and a
| host of other megafauna. All those species survived
| millions of year, and numerous previous ice ages, but had
| no defense against human hunters. So as each area on earth
| was colonized by our species, the megafuana were quickly
| wiped out in that area.
|
| I'm from NZ, and we had that event in our recent history.
| The islands had numerous species of giant birds, but these
| were wiped out quickly by the first humans who came here,
| just a few centuries ago. Same everywhere. We've been
| driving species to extinction for a long time.
| fragmede wrote:
| 14 isn't enough for you, though it is enough to influence
| looks to the point that it does look different enough, but
| how many genes need to be changed for it to count, for you?
| There's some 40 million differences between humans and
| chimpanzees, but only about 700 that are unique to humans.
| mulmen wrote:
| Humans aren't chimpanzees. For this to be a direwolf there
| would need to be zero differences.
| mkl wrote:
| Source for those numbers? Your last sentence doesn't seem
| to make sense.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Wealthy people, huh? Well now I'm against it!
| johnecheck wrote:
| Lmao 'wealthy people bad' was definitely the substance of the
| critique, thank you for your valuable insight.
| qoez wrote:
| The main lesson from 90s movies is that we must build the
| torment nexus
| generalizations wrote:
| That entire article just sounds like a collection of every
| naysayer argument they could find, compiled into an
| authoritative-sounding essay on why doing nothing is better
| than doing some very cool proof-of-concept genetic editing
| tech. Are they just reflexively against tech these days?
| Because when the arguments they bring are so scattered and
| miscellaneous, it sure sounds like they're justifying a
| preexisting opposition to the idea.
| lolinder wrote:
| Collosal would face less pushback if they were upfront about
| the fact that they aren't a serious attempt at solving any
| ecological issues but that maybe they could push the tech
| forward enough that someone else could use it to solve real
| problems.
|
| There's nothing wrong with building cool proof-of-concept
| tech as a prestige project that might actually lead to real
| solutions some day, but Collosal's dire wolf lookalike and
| mammoth lookalike and whatever else lookalike aren't a
| serious solution to a problem nor a direct path towards a
| solution, so they get valid criticism for pretending that
| they are.
| generalizations wrote:
| I suspect the environmental pushback is from a vocal
| minority which dislikes the cynical lip-service companies
| have found it necessary/expedient to give.
|
| "nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there -
| I see no reason to push back against a company that is
| figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If
| you're claiming that their attempts _yet_ a solution, then
| your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the
| entire problem on the first go. If you 're claiming that
| their attempts aren't even going in the right direction,
| and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require
| much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet
| been raised here - enough to say that they should
| definitely give up now.
|
| In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success
| is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like
| to see them keep trying.
| lolinder wrote:
| > a company that is figuring out how to run back the
| extinction process
|
| Are they, though? This isn't a dire wolf, it's a wolf
| with a few genes tweaked to make it look more like a dire
| wolf. I see no evidence that they have any intention of
| pursuing the far more arduous task of actually preserving
| an endangered species or restoring one with all of its
| actual DNA, and I don't see a compelling reason to
| believe that introducing a lookalike in the wild will do
| anything to fill the gap left by the real thing.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to
| fill the gap left by the real thing
|
| The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I
| believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered
| woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental
| impact.
|
| I personally don't care if they "really" restore an
| extinct animal or not (perfect clone vs. hairy
| elephants). Their creations are cool proofs of concept
| for the genetic engineering tooling that they're creating
| and captures public/investor imagination much more than
| more mundane (but monetizable) aspects of the work, like
| working with massive amounts of data, gene editing tools,
| etc.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I
| believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered
| woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental
| impact.
|
| In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more
| inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think
| a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have
| any sort of positive impact.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| The idea is that cold-resistant elephants / woolly
| mammoth - like creatures would restore arctic steppe
| grasslands and promote carbon sequestration. It's
| difficult to sum up in a sentence but there are quite a
| number of articles out there on it, and it doesn't seem
| like the most bonkers idea I've ever heard.
|
| And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are
| visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling &
| technology that they can spin off and sell for more
| mundane purposes.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay
|
| Perhaps they could have a coupon day?
| nopelynopington wrote:
| Someone's rewatched recently :)
| silisili wrote:
| > a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a
| Mammoth!"
|
| Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich
| to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post
| tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.
| silexia wrote:
| Farmer here. The return of the regular wolf has been a tragedy of
| historic proportions. Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.
| Farmers are not allowed to protect their herds at all. What will
| a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back? So dumb.
| gambiting wrote:
| Where is this? In US the deer herds have grown so much out of
| control that they are worse than biblical locust - they trample
| and eat everything they find because there is no natural
| control of their numbers, until they eat everything they can
| find and starve. At least in theory wolves are meant to thin
| out their numbers.
|
| >>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back?
|
| Is a dire wolf any worse than regular wolf here?
|
| >> Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.
|
| Almost no predator slaughers their prey "for fun". Hunting has
| a massive cost to it - risk of death, injury and expenditure of
| energy always have to be balanced with the potential gains.
| Wolves hunt when they are hungry, not because they are bored.
| silexia wrote:
| Hunters are happy to take all the deer that they are legally
| allowed to. This is the fault of poor government management
| of hunting.
|
| Do some actual research on wolves. They will kill a dozen
| cows in a day in a pen and not eat any of it.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>They will kill a dozen cows in a day in a pen and not eat
| any of it.
|
| To be honest with you - I don't even know where I'd begin
| to look for stats like these - have you got any links I
| could read?
|
| I was only really able to ask Gemini about it which seems
| to confirm that wolves generally don't kill animals for any
| reason other than sustenance but obviously LLM so I accept
| it might be fully wrong -
| https://g.co/gemini/share/e1ce79cd97de
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Don't farmers get reimbursed for livestock lost to natural
| predators?
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| farmers/ranchers always wanna bitch bout something (at least
| in the US). and we like the myth/nostalgia of the small
| operations out on the frontier so that's gets a lot of play.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| A local small farmer nearly got bankrupted when mountain
| lions killed most of his alpaca herd along with a bunch of
| sheep and goats. The cats engaged in surplus killing and
| didn't bother eating most of their kills (the state thought
| perhaps a mother was teaching a cub hunting skills, but
| it's not like they got an interview with Mom).
|
| Easy to talk smack until it happens to you or someone you
| know.
| silexia wrote:
| Not in the USA. There a variety of random government programs
| that give money in ways that do not make sense. It would be
| better to have zero government support and have the market
| naturally raise prices up a bit to cover things directly.
| Right now, government programs are set up to take care of a
| variety of special interests, most of which are silly and
| don't really help farmers and are very wasteful. I had four
| government people visit my farm for several hours recently
| and spend several weeks writing papers, all for a possible
| $25k well grant. The admin costs far surpass that, and most
| of the farmers using these programs don't really want what
| they are getting that much.
| codingdave wrote:
| Yep, they are in my state, and at least a few others I know
| of.
| tokonoma wrote:
| A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric
| fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting
| livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is
| significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned.
| Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for
| policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of
| wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These
| policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for
| farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.
| silexia wrote:
| Most of these studies are done by politically motivated
| people with zero connection to the real world. I have
| permanent electric fences all over my property and wolves and
| coyotes and deer easily jump over them. Unless a farmer is
| willing to spend so much money he goes bankrupt on a 10'
| fence with tons of welded wire, the wolves come through.
| iSnow wrote:
| Well, even more recent reports from Germany also claim that
| wolves are damn clever to cope even with e-fences.
| Unfortunately, the question of wild wolves roaming the
| country now has become a cultural war issue where you can
| easily guess the left/right divide.
|
| For our ecosystem, a well-managed wolf population is probably
| a good thing, but rationality is about to go out the window
| over here. Of course, wolves do not slaughter herds out of
| pure fun, but also true is that the can wreak quite a bit of
| economic damage if they break into a holding pen.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > need for policy change that allows for coexistence where
| the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological
| benefits
|
| A more reliable approach might be to enact policy change
| where the return of the wolf to the ecosystem offers
| financial benefits.
|
| One way to do this is with licensed trophy hunting. Nobody
| argues thousands of dollars in revenue from hunting tag
| lotteries, trophy fees, etc. is "fake news" as they might
| with an appeal to ecological reasons.
| ashenke wrote:
| > "He explained that I was looking at a plan for a restored
| ecosystem. It was also a perfectly adapted money machine. There
| was a large area where the ancient elephants could graze, and
| this would be funded, in part, by carbon-offset payments from
| governments and corporations. The carbon value of a single
| elephant is about two million dollars, he told me. (An elephant
| increases biodiversity, in part, by spreading seeds in its dung
| and by crushing dense vegetation on forest floors, giving slow-
| growing trees the space to survive.) He added that the
| interesting educational opportunities and "sexiness factor" of
| Colossal's creations would make its carbon credits "trade at a
| premium.""
|
| So it's a startup, valued at 10 billion?! How exactly do they
| plan to make money?
|
| Seriously, could anything be more 21st-century? Resurrecting
| extinct animal species (ones that supposedly went extinct
| naturally, mind you, not because of humans - what's the point
| then?) just to reintroduce them into parks and sell carbon
| credits.
| vrosas wrote:
| The real prize is the technology and techniques to do this sort
| of stuff. CRISPR is a fascinating technology that we're just
| now seeing the benefits of[0]
|
| 0 - https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/crispr-technology-cure-
| dis...
| jkmcf wrote:
| I'm unsure we want or need a real Dire Wolf, but American
| Alsatians have been bred for a while:
| https://www.marvelousdogs.com/american-alsatian/
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Thank you; the opening paragraph of that article was fantastic.
|
| > American Alsatians were first bred to create a family
| friendly dog breed that looks like a dire wolf. (The dire wolf
| is an ancient North American wolf species that became extinct
| around 13,000 years ago.) This dog has all the benefits of
| looking like a dire wolf, but it is calm and gentle enough to
| be a great pet. They are an intelligent, loving and gentle
| family dog [...]
|
| "Has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" is a great
| phrase, and I think highly relevant to the OP article here and
| the disagreement I see in the HN comments between the people
| who think "the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" are self-
| evident and those who think they're non-existent. :)
| keepamovin wrote:
| _Subscribe now to witness the rise of the Dire Wolves, step by
| primal step:_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPX4tm-J2bU
|
| Colossal has just released a 1970s style nature documentary about
| the Dire Wolf pups (now quite large)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Iko9w
| zombiwoof wrote:
| What could go wrong
| droptablemain wrote:
| Be neat if they opened a theme park on a remote island filled
| with de-extinct creatures.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Probably should hire more than 1 IT person, and, don't skimp on
| the generators and battery backups for the electric fences.
| archagon wrote:
| Winter is coming.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| The term "dire" in "direwolf" comes from the Latin word "dirus,"
| which translates to "terrible" or "fearsome." This name reflects
| the wolf's large size and predatory nature, as well as its status
| as a formidable hunter during the Pleistocene era.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I think it's ethical, but I hate that it's fake
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf#DNA_evidence Look at this
| caldogram and text
|
| > The sequences indicate the dire wolf to be a highly divergent
| lineage which last shared a most recent common ancestor with the
| wolf-like canines 5.7 million years ago. The study also measured
| numerous dire wolf and gray wolf skeletal samples that showed
| their morphologies to be highly similar, which had led to the
| theory that the dire wolf and the gray wolf had a close
| evolutionary relationship. The morphological similarity between
| dire wolves and gray wolves was concluded to be due to convergent
| evolution. Members of the wolf-like canines are known to
| hybridize with each other but the study could find no indication
| of genetic admixture from the five dire wolf samples with extant
| North American gray wolves and coyotes nor their common ancestor.
| This finding indicates that the wolf and coyote lineages evolved
| in isolation from the dire wolf lineage.
|
| There are a lot of extant species that are as closely related as
| the wolf. Cheating based on phenotype sucks. We want real genetic
| diversity!
|
| Best case, the female wolves they just just made are suitable
| mothers for the next round of hybrids, so they converge over
| time.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wol...
|
| This however disagreed with Wikipedia, and said there was some
| inbreeding. That helps make this less fake.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Do you mean "interbreeding?" If so, I'd like to see the
| actual source for that claim.
| echelon wrote:
| The first robots were toys and wishful thinking. But look at
| the path that's set us down.
|
| Be it a pale shadow or not, this is a first milestone down a
| path I hope we continue on.
| srik wrote:
| At some point far in the future, humanity will populate an
| entire planet with custom designed species, something like
| the engineers from prometheus. If only there were a way to
| live long enough to see all that.
| echelon wrote:
| Maybe the future lightcone denizens are of masters of
| physics. Perhaps one day they get bored of building Dyson
| spheres and decide to tap into the past for amusement.
|
| Maybe they have unimaginable access to such vast energies
| that they can capture every photon that ever left earth and
| effectively reverse the lightcone.
|
| Maybe they can sample the neural state of every lived human
| with exacting precision and wholly create the history of
| life on earth down to every single human thought and
| experience. Every neurotransmitter flux. If you've
| conquered galaxies and bent physics, perhaps this
| unimaginable resolution of observation is quite trivial.
|
| Maybe they'll resurrect us. Hopefully into a world
| palatable for us, not some hellscale dystopia
| horror/torture simulator the quadrillionaires of the future
| enjoy putting us through.
|
| Maybe that's you now. Being resimulated.
|
| This is all ludicrous, implausible, science fiction
| fantasy. But maybe your next waking moment will be meeting
| the future. Hopefully they have something good in store.
| whyenot wrote:
| I wish people would focus more on increasing dog lifespans
| instead of stuff like this. How about a Bernese Mountain Dog that
| lives 15+ years instead of 7 years.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes - but put the emphasis on healthy, productive lifespans.
| NOT on "prolong the suffering, for the benefit of the private-
| equity-owned veterinary clinic" crap.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Why does this feel like they'll eventually get to modifying
| humans and this is a first step.
|
| 'Son, you weren't an accident, you were custom designed to be
| smarter than Einstein, faster than Bolt, with musical attitude
| rivaling Mozart.'
|
| Sounds like a dystopian nightmare waiting to happen. Ban it now.
| fragmede wrote:
| just because a couple of writers wrote some sad stories?
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