Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)
The NYT from a week ago tells us how this is happening to the Sierra Club, which has lost money and membership after deciding to branch off into Social Justice Warriorism. Read about it by clicking the headline below, or find the article archived here for free.
I’ll put the upshot under bold headings, which are mine. Indented bits come from the article:
Why the club was good.
The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to protect the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but it grew into a giant of American environmentalism.
It helped expand national parks, keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and establish Earth Day.
In 2016, the club was at the height of its success, leading what many in the green movement consider the most successful environmental campaign put on by anyone in the 21st century: “Beyond Coal.”
Its secret was focus, according to activists involved. The club put its energy behind the single, measurable goal of closing all of the country’s 500-plus carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. Armed with more than $120 million from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, they used lawsuits, petitions and protests to convince regulators and utilities that coal plants were too dirty and expensive to keep operating.
The move to social justice:
During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.
. . .It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.
The club hired Mr. Jealous, its first Black executive director, that year to stop that slide, but his tenure accelerated it as accusations of sexual harassment, bullying, and overspending piled up.
The club became one in a string of “resistance” groups from Mr. Trump’s first administration that arrived at his second already exhausted from liberal infighting.
“It’s almost like uprooting a sequoia and converting it into an ax handle,” said Aaron Mair, a former board president.
Things got worse:
At the same time, the club asked its supporters to agree with positions farther from the environmental causes that had attracted them in the first place.
It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.
The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.
You can see part of the language guide below and a link to the whole thing, which is simply ludicrous.
They even came down on Israel:
In 2022, a group of union members asked the Sierra Club to “follow [its] values of antiracism and justice” and cancel sightseeing trips it operated in Israel, in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said in an interview. “People are a huge part of our environment.”
The club postponed the trips. But Sierra Club officials said the club heard a backlash from donors including Mr. Bloomberg, the major funder of “Beyond Coal” who also gave to humanitarian causes in Israel. His staff declined to comment. The Sierra Club said he is still a donor.
Within days, the Sierra Club reversed itself and announced more trips to Israel.
If Palestine is part of the Sierra Club’s remit, and that includes “people” because humans are “part of the environment,” then there is nothing that does not become part of the Club’s mission!
The outcome: the Club lost members and money. and membership fractured:
The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.
Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.
And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.
Here’s the NYT chart showing the decline in “champions” (volunteer helpers or people the club endorses, but see below for the decline in membership), as well as the rise in expenses, which are now higher than donations:
They surveyed the members, who aren’t happy:
In late 2020, the club surveyed its dues-paying members, its most hard-core supporters. The members said they supported racial justice, but when asked to choose among priorities they ranked climate change first, and racism tied for last.
More than half of members also said they were worried that the club’s shift toward social justice “will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment” and alienate conservatives, according to a copy of the survey obtained by The New York Times.
Well, it already has detracted from its core mission, which is always the problem. Once again we see an organization flaunting its virtue when it should be institutionally neutral except for issues affecting its core mission. But it was not like that, and lost out.
Then culture began permeating the organization, with allegations of sexual misconduct arising. In response, the Club instituterd a system to “discipline its volunteers”, and some volunteers got investigated without even being told why. The deficit continued to increase and they chose as Executive Director Ben Jealous, who ran the NAACP and “promised employees to make the Sierra Club ‘the most progressive and inclusive employer in the movement, if not the nation.'”.
That, of course, is the kiss of death. Jealous fired 10% of the staff but also hired several “longtime associated as high salaries,” something that smacks of nepotism. Two of those salaries were over $300,000, which is simply ridiculous for the Sierra Club. Its “champions” declined by 60%, and dues-paying members were down by 27% from 2021. Even Jealous himself was accused of sexual harassment, and left the organization:
Is the Sierra Club moving away from Social Justice and back to its core mission? Don’t be ridiculous. Since Jealous left, the Club has shown no signs of reverting to its focus on strictly environmental issue:
In recent weeks, supporters who clicked on the group’s website for “current campaigns” were presented with 131 petitions, some out of date, like calls to support clean-energy funding that Mr. Trump has already gutted, or to support a voting-rights bill that died in 2023.
Patrick Murphy, the club’s current board president, who has helped lead the group since 2020, said in an interview that he could not name any decision he regretted.
“I have a hard time pinpointing how I believe we should have made different choices,” Mr. Murphy said. “And I’m happy with where we are today.”
It’s amazing that in the face of the Sierra Club falling apart, Murphy sticks to his guns. Seriously, they should adopt an institutional neutrality policy, which I think would make the group hew to what it’s good at. But they won’t, and they’ll learn their lesson the hard way.
My favorite part: The Sierra Club put out the Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide. It tells staffers to avoid words like lame. Fine. But it also tells them not to celebrate clean energy jobs unreservedly because fossil fuel jobs are more likely to be unionized, so maybe we’re pro-coal now. Maybe we’re sort of a coal lobbying shop, actually. The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide says not to use the words vibrant or hardworking because they have racial overtones (I’ve never heard that one. Seems kinda racist.). And then there’s this list of words to avoid, which, for an activist organization, is really hard. Especially when trigger itself is a trigger word, triggering them into a new dimension of triggerdom.
Imagine explaining this to the guy who lives in a cabin in Yellowstone and whose job is to check water levels in creeks.
Predator Free NZ (“PFZ”, and “NZ” is New Zealand) is apparently a science-oriented trust whose goal—a worthy one—is to keep non-native predators, such as the common brushtail possum, out of New Zealand, as they destroy native wildlife and have other bad effects on the ecosystem. (The possum, for example, destroys native New Zealand birds and carries bovine tuberculosis, and it’s a constant battle to destroy them). But, like apparently all science in New Zealand, the organization is getting infiltrated with indigenous “ways of knowing” and “lived experience”, which in the case at hand appear, at they so often do, not to be based on real science at all. Real science means you use data to test a hypothesis, not simply adduce “lived experience”.
A Kiwi who apparently gets PFZ’s newsletter sent me a copy that started this way, already showing, by the profusion of Māori words, that there lies danger ahead. (Although there are some translations, they don’t mention that “Aotearoa” is the Māori term for “New Zealand”):
Kia ora NAME REDACTED,
It’s Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. For the 50th year, Aotearoa is coming together to celebrate te Reo Māori. Learn some kupu (words), set your tārore (traps) and keep protecting our manu (birds) and other taonga species.
And this newsletter links to an article that touts trapping predators using the Māor lunar calendar, a method for which there’s no evidence at all. There are three links given at the end of this article, but they are not scientific references: they’re simply expositions of the Māori lunar calendar, with a few undocumented assertions about when to trap based on the moon. In other words, there’s no “science” as we conceive of “modern science.”
Click on the headline below to read the piece:
The article shows 30 phases of the Māori lunar calendar, and says that the author (Cam Speedy) knows that these phases are associated with hunting and fishing. But experience is not science. A quote from Mr. Speedy:
As a hunter, I have always recognised similar distinct patterns when night shooting. Sometimes, there is just nothing doing; other times, there are critters there, but they are very shy or just too fast. Sometimes, it’s simply all on – critters everywhere that hold in the light.
It is the same with fishing – fishing is more productive at ‘bite time’ – when the moon is directly above, especially when that happens at dawn (Tangaroa phase) or dusk (Tamatea phase).
Deer are also more active at ‘bite time’. With over 40 ‘deer roars’ under my belt, I now plan my roar trips to coincide with the end of the third lunar quarter (start of the Tangaroa phase) – when hind cycling and stag activity is much higher – and I make sure I’m looking over hot spots at ‘bite time’.
As I began applying maramataka [JAC: lunar calendar] principles to my predator trapping, my diary notes started to speak for themselves – for example, the serviced traps were fresh for the ‘Tangaroa’ moon phase (seven to 12 days after the full moon) and out-performed other traps.
. . .I have consistently found that traps serviced a day or two before the Tangaroa phase catch more pests.
If you also start to layer in weather influences (most critters stay home during cold, wet stormy periods to re-emerge once the weather fronts clear), take note of and follow wider seasonal patterns in animal behaviour (eg., mating, breeding and dispersal) and understand seasonal diet changes, you will transform your trapping success.
And indeed, Mr. Speedy might be right, but there are no data supporting his assertions. He calls this approach “holistic”—always a red flag in these type of articles. As my correspondent emailed me:
As far as I can find with search engines, this is an article with no evidence base to it at all – even CHatGPT agress (below). Given that many of the species we target (mustelids and, regrettably, hedgehogs) have not been in New Zealand for more than 150 years, and have been seen as an existential threat to wildlife for a far shorter time, it’s a bit rich to claim centuries of experiential learning!
And so my correspondent asked ChatGPT the question below, followed by the answer:
Does maramataka improve pest trapping?
The bot’s response (bolding in the last paragraph is mine):
Yes, maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, can play a role in improving pest trapping, especially in agricultural or ecological contexts.
Maramataka is based on the phases of the moon and the positions of other celestial bodies, and it dictates the best times for planting, fishing, hunting, and other activities. Some people believe that certain phases of the moon, as well as specific days in the lunar cycle, can influence pest behavior. For instance:
Feeding and Activity Cycles: Some pests may be more active or easier to trap during certain lunar phases. For example, it is believed that during the waxing moon (when the moon is growing in size), pests such as rats or insects might be more active, making them easier to catch or trap.
Moon Phase and Tides: In some cases, particularly in coastal areas, the moon’s phases can affect the behavior of pests that are tied to tides or certain weather patterns. For example, high tide during a particular lunar phase might affect the movement of certain pests in coastal areas.
Cultural Knowledge: In Māori culture, there’s a deep understanding of how animals and pests behave in relation to the moon’s phases. Traps or hunting methods are sometimes planned around the maramataka to align with times when pests are most vulnerable or more predictable.
In short, while there’s no definitive scientific proof for maramataka’s direct effect on pest trapping, the knowledge embedded in the lunar calendar could help guide better timing and more effective pest management practices based on natural patterns observed over centuries.
“It is believed,” “might”, “no definitive scientific proof”: all these are euphemisms for “this isn’t science but guesswork.” So not only has Kiwi science been infiltrated by the “sacralization of the oppressed,” but apparently so has ChatGPT, which hedges its answer into meaninglessness.
I am reporting this here simply to show that eBay is selling cowboy boots made from sea turtle, which is a prohibited item made from endangered species skins. I keep reporting these items to eBay, and they keep saying they have decided they are okay. (Sellers often disguise sea turtle as “sea alligator” or “sea turtle print,” but I know sea turtle when I see it, having looked at several of these boots over the years (needless to say, I don’t own any). Here are two of my reports to eBay which were rejected. I tweet them to both @eBay and @askeBay.
.@AskeBay .@ebay Once again you are selling illegal endangered species products: sea turtle boots (there are no “pre-ban” boots that are legal. Item 146744914076 is labeled as sea turtle and the price and appearnce support that. Stop selling endangered species and remove item. pic.twitter.com/ESGE1pUI9a
.@AskeBay .@AskeBay eBay continues to sell prohibited items made from endangered species, like these labeled “sea turtle” boots, item 177310379158. Scales, label, and price prove provenance. Please retweet to eBay as above to make them stop selling endangered species. pic.twitter.com/dbWAHiVAlA
Here was their response to the boots above, which were guaranteed to be sea turtle and in fact labeled as such:
eBay used to accept my complaints and take these items off sale, but now they simply sell them. I guess that, for them, the lure of their cut is greater than their care for endangered species. I do not know how to proceed further except to complain to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which I’ve done without results. So I’m putting up this post just to complain that eBay is violating the law by selling prohibited items, and that those items are made from endangered species.
Reader Lou Jost, a naturalist and evolutionist who works at the Dracula Reserve of Ecuador’s EcoMinga Foundation, just sent me this Facebook post put out by an Ecuadorian province a few years ago. It features MY frog, Atelopus coynei (it’s got a Wikipedia page, too), so it’s a bit self-aggrandizing of me to post this, but in fact the species is critically endangered and I want it saved. There are surely other undescribed and endangered species on the property (here’s a new tree frog discovered and described by the tem on the reserve.)
The story of the frog, how it got my name, and how it seemed to have gone extinct, but, Lazarus-like, was discovered by Andreas Kay decades later in Chinambi, Carchi, Ecuador, can be seen here.
Isn’t it a beaut? I suspect that its colors indicate that the frog is aposematic, i.e., toxic or dangerous to eat or touch. (The photo is by the late Andreas Kay courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Click photo below go to the FB post:
Lou adds this:
The province is proud to be the only place in the world where your frog survives. It is one of the fruits of our work trying to raise awareness for the rare species of our reserves.
Our president, Noboa, is firing massive numbers of public employees from ministries he doesn’t like, and closing or re-organizing them so he can do what he wants. Last week he placed the ministry of the environment into the ministry of energy and mining, and this is expected to make it harder for us to fight our main threat in the Dracula Reserve, mining.
There is at least one population of A. coynei outside our reserves. It was the first one that Andreas Kay found. We tried to buy it but the property was apparently involved in drug trafficking and arms dealing, and this scared us too much to deal with it. Maybe someday we or others will be able to protect this population too. We also continue to search for more populations using eDNA. Meanwhile we are monitoring our own populations and they are doing well. Each individual can be identified by their back pattern, so we can keep track of many of them.
If you want to donate to the reserve to save not only the frog, but tons of rainforest wildlife, Lou gave me this information:
Thanks Jerry, the Orchid Conservation Alliance is a US charity that can accept donations for us, and give tax credit for the donations. Donors should specify that their support goes to EcoMinga’s Dracula Reserve (which protects your frog)
I hope some readers can cough up a few bucks for the Reserve! Any amount will help.
photo by Juan Pablo Reyes and Jordy Salazar/EcoMinga
If you’ve read this site at all, you’ll know that Colossal Biosciences has pretended that it’s brought an extinct species back to life: the dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus), a carnivorous denizen of the temperate regions of North and South America. The dire wolf became extinct about 10,000 years ago, when there were already humans in the Americas.
The “dire wolf” project is only one of a number of de-extinction efforts Colossal has on tap, including bringing.back the dodo, the thylacine, and, most famously, the woolly mammoth.
None of these will work. What Colossal is doing is simply inserting a small handful of genes taken from “ancient DNA” sequences of fossilized animals into a close living relative (in the case of the dire wolf, that was the gray wolf), and then rearing this tweaked gray wolf in a surrogate mother (in this case, a domestic dog). Voilà: you get a gray wolf that, if you want fame and money, you can call a “dire wolf.”
But th0se genetic “edits” comprise a pitifully small fraction of the genes in the modern relative. In the case of the dire wolf, I wrote this:
There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren’t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from mutations in dogs and gray wolves that resembled what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We’re still not sure.) And among those five dog/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.
Note that gray wolves have about 20,000 genes, so a maximum of only 0.07% of the gray wolf genome had been changed to something similar to the genome of dire wolvees, and some of those changes actually came from mutations in dogs and wolves.
For example, Colossal decided to color their dire wolves white, so they found color mutations in dogs or wolves that made these canids white, and inserted those mutations into the gray wolf genome. It is highly unlikely that ancient dire wolves really were white; Colossal probably did this because the model “Dire Wolf” in the series “Game of Thrones” was white! A white canid on the savannah or plains would stick out like a sore thumb to its prey. I know of no temperate-zone canid or felid that’s white; the only white canids we see live in the Arctic, where they turn white in the winter.
I summarized four big problems with the dire wolf project in a Boston Globe op-ed called “De-extinction is a colossal disappointment” or go here to read the several posts I’ve written here about these misleading projects. It’s important to realize that Colossal did not de-extinct the Dire Wolf. As I wrote in the Globe:
First, and most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.
Eventually Colossal, through its chief scientist Beth Shapiro, admitted in a New Scientist article that no, it hadn’t made dire wolves but simply slightly genetically modified gray wolves. To wit (click to read):
But, realizing that this admission undercut the “gee-whiz” aspect of “de-extinction,” Shapiro and Colossal immediately did a 180º turn and asserted that yes, they really had made dire wolves—simply because they made a gray wolf that, they assumed, would grow up looking like the ancient dire wolf (they made three of these white wolves). In other words, if they made an gray wolf that resembled in some slight degree the extinct dire wolf (and let’s ignore behavior and ecology, which are unknown for the extinct canid), then they had brought back the dire wolf. This is, of course, arrant nonsense.
Now Colossal, in a newsletter, doubles down again, affirming that it really has brought back the dire wolf. There are two videos and enthusiastic celebration of “de-extinction”. I quote from the newsletter (I’ve bolded every reference to their claim that they do have de-extincted dire wolves):
The dire wolves are growing. Fast.
Catch up on their latest milestones and massive growth in Pupdate 002.
Colossal’s Chief Animal Officer Matt James and animal husbandry manager Paige McNickle share the newest updates on the world’s first de-extinct dire wolves. At just over 6 months old and already weighing more than 90 pounds—around 20% larger than a gray wolf of the same age—they are hitting some major milestones. The pups are headed to their first vet visit for bloodwork and CT scans, and their diet has advanced to bones, chunk meat, and organ meat, and will soon move to full carcasses to mimic natural wild feeding.
Pack dynamics are also shifting as Remus steps into the alpha role with quiet confidence, while Romulus embraces his beta energy. And with Khaleesi’s introduction on the horizon, everything could change again.
Do not miss the first major update since their de-extinction debut.
Well, of course they doubled in size: they were just pups when they were released in their Secret Pasture somewhere in America! In the video below, Colossal is also crowing that the wolves are up to 20% larger (heavier?) than gray wolves at the same age, but they don’t say that this could be due to the highly enriched diet that the three white wolves have been given. The Colossal wolves do not have to hunt, but are handed high-quality kibble, organs, and ground meat, as well as bones: Could that have made them larger?
This is disingenuous all the way home. I have no respect for Colossal, which has allowed the “de-extinction” hype to overwhelm the science. They are shills and should be ashamed of themselves.
If you want more of this, Beth Shapiro got the most publicity possible in this day and age by touting, among other stuff, the “de-extinction” stuff on the Joe Rogan Show. Rogan!
I can’t bear to listen to all three hours of this, but perhaps a patient reader can and will report in the comments:
Yes, we’ve all heard that three white dire wolves are running around at some secret location, and we’ve heard about Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based firm that, it says, is going to fix the “colossal problem” of extinction. The main way they propose to do it—and the bit that’s gained all the attention—is to “de-extinct” animals by finding fossil DNA of extinct species, sequencing some bits that presumptively code for a few of their traits, and then, using CRISPR, put those bits into the fertilized eggs of a living species that’s a close living relative. That way you get a hybrid animal, which is by necessity genetically about 99.9% or more of the living species but with a few traits of the extinct species. Then–voilà–you can say you have “de-extincted” the species. The misleading hype involved in that verb is obvious.
For example, dire wolf genes were extracted from fossil specimens, and 15 of those bits were edited into 14 genes in the fertilized egg of a grey wolf (they actually put in 20 bits, but 5 of those involved mutations existing in dogs and wolves. Since the grey wolf genome has 2.4 billion bases, you can see that only a tiny bit of dire wolf genome went into the wolf genome. The edited wolf egg was then transferred into surrogate dog mothers, and the mostly-grey-wolf hybrids were extracted by caesarian section (the dogs weren’t killed). Voilà: they got three largish white wolves that they called dire wolves. (The white color, by the way, did not come from the dire wolf DNA bnt from dog or coyote mutations. They edited whiteness into the hybrid because dire wolves were white when they featured, much larger, in the t.v. show Game of Thrones. We don’t know what color the dire wolves really were, but I doubt it was snow white. They did not live in snowy areas.)
The Big Project of Colossal, however, is the “de-extincting” of the woolly mammoth, a project I’ve discussed on this site before. (The dodo and thylacine are also on tap to be edited back to life.) Colossal promises that we’ll have faux mammoths—which paleobiologist and mammoth expert Tori Herridge denigrated as “elephants in a fur coat” because a few of the changes will involve hairiness—by 2028. Good luck with that!
There are many problems with the “de-extinction” scenarios that have nevertheless raked in $435 million for Colossal thanks to donors like Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods. And although other scientists like Tori and Adam Rutherford have described some of these problems, I decided to summarize them all in one place for American readers. Thus my op-ed in today’s Boston Globe, which you can find here, though it may be paywalled. Clicking on the headline below, however will take you to a non-paywalled archived version of the text.
The article summarizes four major problems with “de-extinction”, which you can read in the article. The Globe had a special piece of art made to illustrate my article, and I absolutely love it (see below, and notice the hook). The illustration is the creation of Patric Sandri, a Swiss artist. Thanks to the artist and especially to my editor, who was perhaps the most amiable and easiest op-ed editor I’ve ever worked with.
Enjoy (unless you work for Colossal)!
Illustration by Patric Sandri for the Boston Globe
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…
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.
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:
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.
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 😤🧪
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…
