Like me, Matthew Cobb, and all straight-thinking scientists, geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford is sick of hearing claims about the return of “de-extincted animals.” The latest one is the Dire Wolf, a tricked-out gray wolf I wrote about yesterday. (See also Rutherford’s strong critique in the Guardian of the woolly mammoth de-extinction project.) The hype about the “de-extintcted Dire Wolf” involves making only 20 DNA base changes in 14 genes of the Gray Wolf (there are probably a bit more than 20,000 genes in wolves), so that only a few superficial characters like body size, jaw structure, and color were changed in the wolf genome. (The “Dire Wolf” came out white, but that was done using edits of wolf genes, not the insertion of color genes from the ancient DNA of Dire Wolves. We don’t know if real Dire Wolves were white.)
All these de-extinction projects involve changing just a few genes among thousands in the genome of living species, making something that only superficially looks like an extinct species. But, as Adam points out in his piece I highlight below, we know nothing about the behavior, gestation, physiology or digestion of these ancient creatures, and so are powerless to even get close to a real Dire Wolf—even if we had the ability to edit thousands of genes or even to insert a Dire Wolf genome into a wolf cell whose nucleus had been removed. (We can’t do that.)
Yet despite this, Colossal Bioscience keeps proclaiming that it’s resurrected an extinct wolf, and will soon be bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo and thylacine. This is pure hype, and it’s not gonna happen—not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids. Yet compliant journalists play along with Colossal, pretending that, yes, the Dire Wolf is back and the woolly mammoth is right around the corner. To anybody who appreciates accurate science writing, this unholy collusion between the media and Colossal is reprehensible.
And so Adam has gotten more and more pissed off in the past few days, finally writing a short piece on his Substack post that takes the whole de-extinction hype apart. And it’s laden with plenty of expletives and profanity! I don’t blame him, for that same language goes on in my brain, but I lack the courage to put it on paper. But I’ll quote him below.
First, Adam announces his piece with a link.
The resurrection circus keeps clowning, but make no mistake, Dire wolves remain very extinct. An angry, sweary piece by a frustrated geneticist. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve…
— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T06:22:55.899Z
The link is above, or you can go to his Substack site and read it (for free, but subscribe if you want to support his writing). Click below:
A few excerpts:
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.
There are four ways that Rutherford’s kishkes are roiled by Colossal, but I’ll let you read the list. He does, however, make a good analogy to explain how far Colossal was from creating a genuine Dire Wolf, or even a Dire Wolf-ish canid:
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.
And of course he points out that dire wolves ran in packs, but “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.” Yep, we can’t resurrect their social life, which we know nothing about, so we’ll never be able to let these things go free in nature, where they’d probably revert to gray wolves quickly. They’re only good for gawking at. And we have learned almost nothing about the Dire Wolf from this project. It is the media’s distortion of what was done, and its credulous acceptance of this exaggeration, which leads Rutherford, Matthew, and I to a state of peevishness. For in the end this kind of science reporting simply deludes the public.
Rutherford, like many of us, has great respect for Carl Zimmer’s science reporting, but Adam thinks that Zimmer reverted to “client journalism” in his NYT piece on the Dire Wolf (free access), more or less accepting that Colossal had come “close” to recreating a Dire Wolf. When one respected science journalist disses another, you know that something has gone wrong. Rutherford says this:
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.
‘Or something close’. Disappointing client journalism from one of the best science journalists.
— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T22:00:48.349Z
As the Time magazine cover shows below (with one obvious edit by Rutherford), the press guzzled it like a cat with cream. Rutherford:
. . . 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.
Clearly, Time crossed out “extinct,” while the insertion “not’ is from Rutherford:
Many of us were surprised that Beth Shapiro, a a highly-regarded molecular evolutionist at UC Santa Cruz, took three years off to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal. Why? One can guess, but I don’t psychologize. At any rate, Shapiro appears to have bought into the Colossal hype, as Graham Coop (an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis) points out below:
Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] http://www.newscientist.com/article/2475…
— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T21:50:13.253Z
WHAT? A morphological species concept in which changing a couple of traits creates a new species? How much does the “de-extincted” Dire Wolf have to look like the real Dire Wolf before we can say “we have it back!!”? This species concept, which I discuss and dismiss in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, has many flaws, including the fact that many truly reproductively incompatible species nevertheless are hard or impossible to tell apart by looking. (These are often called “sibling species.”) Would Shapiro classify Japenese, the Dutch, and sub-Saharan Africans as belonging to different species?
As Coop notes as he quotes Shapiro, what she says about species concepts is “transparent BS”. (Read chapter 1 and the Appendix of Speciation if you want to learn more.)
Coop gets in one more lick:
Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.
— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:56:25.311Z
Another science communicator joins the crowd of people with a beef against this faux “Dire Wolf.”
Scientists love to debate and argue, but if there are 3 things every scientist absolutely agrees on, it's that:1. Climate change is real2. Vaccines work3. Those are NOT dire wolves 😤🧪
— Science Sam (@samanthayammine.com) 2025-04-08T20:36:29.683Z
And somebody couldn’t resist comparing the Colossal wolf to the famous jackalope!
I’ll close with a few final posts from Rutherford, who, though unable to contain the profanity, is correct in what he says below:
Reposting this from last month, cos it’s the same bullshit from the same company that is flooding your media with wolfshit. Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossiblewww.theguardian.com/commentisfre…
— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T06:16:47.426Z
Amen, brother! No clones, either!
Apropos of nothing:THERE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE A CLONED MAMMOTH. <Message ends>
— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T16:56:07.751Z
While I agree—clearly no one is resurrecting a woolly mammoth or dire wolf—Rutherford’s behavior is insufferable. He’s a sanctimonious scold who thrives on moral grandstanding. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he’s convinced even Ceiling Cat harbors transphobic leanings. He has a track record of maligning individuals I deeply respect.
I’m vomiting over here. I despise Rutherford.
Also, for whatever it is worth, Graham Coop is also a colossal asshole.
I did some online surveillance 4 years ago. He was involved in online mobbings of various people. I blocked Coop due to this.
I’m a geneticist. But I have to say that the vast majority of geneticists are worthy of an expletive I wonder lower myself to utter here.
Why is this? Why do all fields of genetics draw so many virtue-signaling pietists?
That is enough! Stop the invective!
I know Coop and disagree.
I understand. I was trying to help and warn you.
I’m glad some of things I said on WEIT were of some value to some.
This has run its course for me.
Be well, Ceiling Cat.
I am not a Geneticist (my background is in Chemistry). However, I have found Geneticists to be quite sane. Let me offer Collins, Frudakis, Kahn, Reich, and Risch as examples. Now I have found Anthropologists to be crazy (I was making fun of them decades ago). The obvious exception is Physical Anthropologists.
I clicked over to his Substack but I didn’t care for it. He’s just started it and hasn’t waded into the trans argument, at least not there.
“While I agree—clearly no one is resurrecting a woolly mammoth or dire wolf”
Agreed. However, I diverge from Rutherford on the issue of ethics. If real Woolly Mammoths or Dire Wolves could be resurrected, they should be (in my opinion). Perhaps someday this will really be possible.
I know of only one case (quite debatably) where a species was resurrected. Spanish Flu was grown in a lab. 100 years later, it remains as deadly as ever.
The general belief that Dire Wolves and Woolly Mammoths have been brought back is easy to understand. We live in an age of wonders. Does the average person (or average educated person) know how unlikely this is? Of course, not. Of course, species resurrection is PC. Add some corporate hype and you get a general belief in a fiction.
Yes, for those of us that follow Adam Rutherford on X, he does not seems like a nice person. When the Cass report came in the UK and here was a lot of discussion about “gender affirming care” on X he did not seem to be willing to discuss the issue rationally. I have lost all former respect for him. He, as president of UK Humanist should be open to discussion, but I have lost all former respect for him (and the same goes for former UK Humanist pres Alice Robert). Both of them even blocked Emma Hilton for her gender critical wiews
The so called Humanist orgs have really gone downhill the last few years
💯
Rutherford is woke! He trades in dissing others to gain power.
Agreed. Rutherford is entirely right on this topic, but on any topic of woke salience he spouts ideology rather than science.
Trans ideology is one example, but, also, on anything related to genes, race and IQ (and especially the combination of those three) he acts as a woke attack dog, seeking to shut down necessary science.
“anything related to genes, race and IQ”
Yes, on this issue he is just like PZ Myers. Really like a woke attack dog
Is Rutherford adamant that Dire Wolves are not real, but believes in men pretending to be women are women?
In the case of the dire wolves, it’s socially easy for Rutherford to refute the idea.
In the case of a man acting out female stereotypes so he can prance around naked in the women’s locker room after taking the gold medal in a female category, it’s much more socially hazardous to disagree within the social circle.
As Mencius Moldbug put it in An Open Letter To Open Minded Progressives, “For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty”.
I’m not limiting this to the progressive mindset; it’s easy to see the same thing among many other groups.
@ Darryl, who writes “In the case of a man acting out female stereotypes so he can prance around naked in the women’s locker room after taking the gold medal in a female category”
I always wondered why an individual would undergo transition, with hormonal treatments, surgery, and a good deal of public suspicion. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Enough dissing of the guy, okay?
Blocking “fond of beetles”? (she is a hero of mine)
ABC World News Tonight reported the story, uncritically, on its newcast the other evening. The story was reported by its “chief national correspondent” who had been given “exclusive access” to Colossal’s lab. The latter’s “chief scientist” one Beth Shapiro appeared on camera stating “..it is a dire wolf.” Unequivocally. The only caveat reported was critics’ (unidentified, of course) concerns that the de-extinction could harm fragile ecosystems. Does ABC have a chief science correspondent? If so, why wasn’t that person doing the story? It was absolute cheerleading and essentially unquestioning reporting that swallowed the whole fable. And is there any wonder why people cannot trust the MSM when even easily debunked stories are presented as breakthroughs?
This failure is a measure of how badly the press is at discerning plain truth from sparkly fiction. This is largely the result of competition for eyeballs and clicks.
Yep. Or we say “that’s a bunch of hogwash” on this one, and then the next story is about some other topic that we swallow hook, line, and sinker. Gell-Mann Amnesia.
So discouraging. How will the media ever bring around the “vaccines cause autism” crowd if they’re not rigorous?
I have no training in biology past high school but it crystal clear to me that this animal is not a dire wolf.
The suggested links between the MMR vaccine and autism have long since been disproven. The suggested links between other vaccines and autism have long since been disproven. The suggested link between Thiomersal and autism has long since been disproven.
However, the broader point remains intact. The number of vaccines (for children) has risen from 3 after WWII to at least 17 (my data is out-of-date). Perhaps vaccines have some cumulative effect? I am not making this claim or the reverse. However, further study is certainly warranted.
Not a Dire Wolf. There are almost certainly many thousands of genes in the real Dire Wolf that are not present in this creature fashioned by Colossal. Without the complete genome from the extinct Dire Wolf, we don’t even know what’s missing. Colossal Biosciences is very far from engineering an actual Dire Wolf.
I suspect that projects of this sort will continue. The prospect of bringing back extinct animals is irresistible to the public—no matter how improbable.
(Dammit, I can no longer resist this.) “Colossal” Biosciences should be “Colostomal”, since they produce no additional species but many additional a-holes.
No publicity is bad publicity
I learned recently that one of the tactics the Red Bull company built its brand with was to deliberately fill waste bins outside pubs with empty Red Bull cans.
IMHO Colossal Biosciences is playing into this, with full knowledge, deliberately. This fits a dialectical model, or perhaps more likely George Soros’ reflexive alchemy model of operational strategy – just here, it’s literally business/brand building instead of Hermetic world-making.
I wonder what David Deutsch would say – probably that knowledge is simply insufficient to transform an embryo into an extinct animal, but when knowledge is sufficient it will be inevitable.
Since one of his favorite sayings is “no interesting problem is insoluble”, you’re right – it is inevitable if we find the problem to be interesting enough to solve once we have sufficient knowledge and resources.
He’d probably also say that in one of the infinite multiverses, dire wolves are not extinct. And in another one, we’re already resurrecting them. And in another, we never found any dire wolf bones so we have no idea what they are.
I agree – and just to note why I brought that up, the other day Jerry emphasized – in a calm and collected tone 😁 – a number of pieces of information we do not know.
If certain true information is unknown, yet is necessary to produce a result, how would anyone know any of the input information was true or false? An experiment maybe, but also this particular one is proprietary. It is confusing.
… the GIGO principle comes to mind… as does a control experiment (which I probably did not pay attention to in the avalanche of dire news….
If 20 base changes make you a different species, then I’m a new species. Cool!
…and shat on the whole idea from a great height.” This was funny! But also true.
There are many other hilarious flights off the handle, and I encourage people to read the whole thing.
I guess Colossal geneticists have taken the books of Jasper Fforde not to be fictional but rather manuals/guidelines which species to de-extinct. Perhaps they didn’t notice that the wholly mammoths, the dodos, and the other de-extinct creatures in the Thursday Next book series are just an additional and fun plot twists.
So few changes in such a huge dire wolf genome can’t have brought the extinct species back. That’s even obvious for me, and I have no background in the biological sciences. <>
These claims of recreating extinct species in some ways reminds me of the famous ‘Piltdown Man’ scandal. In both instances, scientists are manifesting a long-gone species to fit our ‘image’ of them but this is not necessarily reality. After watching Game of Thrones everyone wants Dire wolves to be big white social wolf-like creatures who can interact with people–who knows if the real Dire Wolves were gray, nocturnal and extremely isolationist and skittish?
I had no idea until this post that the images are white because dire wolves were in GOT and were white. I never watched it. I wondered why all these images were white!
Same here.
Here is the most reasonable headline I have seen on this outcome: Pups with extinct dire wolf traits bred by biotech company https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5355686/dire-wolf-extinct-colossal-biosciences
Now, THAT I can agree with.
And they quote a scientist who debunks the whole thing nicely.
Saying there will NEVER EVER EVER be a cloned mammoth is going a bit too far, since NEVER is infinite. In our lifetime, by Colossal Biosciences (Michael Crichton and Ian Fleming could not have thought of a better, more “hubris full” name), sure.
I admit I hope that some day, there will be.
They’re going to try to impant a mammoth embryo in an Asian elephant, but if they can’t, they’re going to use an artificial uterus (e.g., the “Biobag”), which has already been used successfully for sheep.
You can be almost guaranteed that they will indeed recreate a “mammoth” eventually.
But of course it will just be a genetically modified elephant.
Technical details aside, what about the money? It looks like this company is funded by private investments. Where is the financial return going to come from? I don’t get it.
Echo the above – Rutherford may be right here, but he’s wrong on certain other matters, and is a horrid little bully.
No species was resurrected, for sure—but what about gene resurrection? Genes and alleles can also become extinct. Once a species goes extinct, all gene lineages that coalesced after its last speciation or hybridization event (i.e., after it split from its sister species) cease to exist. This must have happened to countless gene lineages when the dire wolf went extinct thousands of years ago. But has Colossus not now revived some of these genes/alleles?
If these puppies ever come to breed and pass on their transgenic genes, they will give continuity to gene lineages that had ceased to exist for millennia. The replicators will be able to replicate again after a 10,000-year hiatus. To allude to Dawkins’ metaphor, individual wolves themselves are merely vehicles for the genes’ replication; the individual wolves are not the interesting story here, but their genes.
If my line of thought is correct, is this not still a remarkable feature of scientific innovation? A new evolutionary phenomenon: the resurrection of gene lineages.
I’m sympathetic to this idea that it’s the genes (flying in loose temporary formation via organisms) that evolve over time. And if you can sequence a gene that’s gone extinct (no longer found in living organisms) and then synthesize that same DNA sequence then you’ve sort of resurrected that gene.
It still has to get expressed in cells and embryos, and interact with other gene products, and maybe what that resurrected gene does is regulate some other target gene’s expression so the downstream targets also have to be about the same for the resurrection to have the expected effect. But it’s a fun idea.
If only a fraction of what these projects cost would be spent on preventing the extinction of endangered species it would be money more wisely spent.
Resurrecting the Koala, for example, will be far more difficult than saving them now while they are still around.
Amen.
Spending wisely to prevent extinction is not nearly as a cool as being that rich person, corporation, or zoo who ends up with their very own dire wolf, mastodon or T-Rex and the bragging rights for how noble they are for doing so. /s
What a waste of research and resources. We’re on the brink of losing so much.
The picture of the ‘Jackalope’ has made me curious about the suffix ‘lope’. In Australia there is the <a href=”https://allpoetry.com/The-Triantiwontigongolope”>Triantiwontigongolope, a fictitious insect from a poem by C. J. Dennis. Maybe ‘lope’ was a way of saying ‘take this with a grain of salt’.
As a small child I was quite in fear of the triantiwontigongolope. My grandparents warned me that they lived in dams and creeks and rivers, which made me fearful of such places. But I did make great efforts to actually get a sight of them. I would sneak behind trees and hummocks and tussocks to get close enough to the water to actually see one. It never happened:(
Jack Rabbit + Antelope = Jackalope.
Yes. I thought I had taken down my original post before I replaced it. But maybe even ante-lope is a portmanteau word 😉
Vaguely related: in the Royal Navy there is a trope of pronouncing HMS Antelope the same way as Penelope. Once you’ve done it, it is hard to stop!
The picture of the ‘Jackalope’ reminded me of a fictitious insect in Australia, known as the Triantiwontigongolope, from a poem by C. J. Dennis.
As a small child I was quite in fear of the triantiwontigongolope. My grandparents warned me that they lived in dams and creeks and rivers, which made me fearful of such places. But I did make great efforts, in spite of my terrors, to actually get a sight of one. I would sneak behind trees and hummocks and tussocks to get close enough to the water to actually see one. It never happened:(
Adam Rutherford seems to be an angry
youngmiddle-aged man. I worry that he’ll have a coronary, or get in a road-rage car crash. Seriously.WaPo isn’t buying it either. Wake me up when they at least make a pigeon with a beak like a Dodo. Or a Pileated woodpecker with a stance like an Ivory-bill.