Category: genetics

J. D. Watson dead at 97

November 7, 2025 • 1:53 pm

Some last-minute news from Greg: J. D. Watson has crossed the rainbow bridge to join Francis Crick.  He had long innings, though.  Click on NYT screenshot below, or find the article archived here for free.

I hardly need to say much about Watson, as I think most readers know about his achievements, his book The Double Helix, and his late-in-life cancellation for racism. I’ll have a few words to say about him tomorrow, along with a cute story recounting what happened when he visited our department on Alumni Day. Here’s a photo of me chatting with him in our seminar room twelve years ago:

Matthew’s biography of Francis Crick gets a glowing review in Nature

November 3, 2025 • 10:00 am

Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick is the third one published, but, according to this glowing review in Nature, is by far the best of the lot. I’ve read a lot of it in draft and, while I can’t compare it to the other two, I can tell you that Matthew’s is worth buying and reading, and you don’t have to be a biologist to understand it. Just have a gander at the final assessment of reviewer Georgina Ferry:

Of Crick’s three biographers, Cobb comes closest to making the case that Crick belongs in the scientific pantheon alongside Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, arguing that “Crick’s thinking changed how the rest of us see the world”. Ridley’s book (Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006) is an entertaining primer but brief, unreferenced and unindexed. In his authorized biography Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets (2009), Olby is as thorough as Cobb but perhaps more reverent, glancing coyly at Crick’s preoccupations with drugs and sex, whereas Cobb makes them essential accessories to his intellectual pursuits.

Ferry’s review (click on headline below to read, or find it archived here) occupies nearly three pages of the journal—the longest book review I’ve seen in Nature.  That alone tells you of the book’s importance. Matthew must be chuffed (in fact, he told me so), and the only other review he needs now is a good one in the New York Times. I hope they’re reviewing it, for Crick was one of the greatest scientists of our era, and the NYT often pays scant attention to science books.

Click to read the review. And yes, there are drugs and sex.

Crick is best known to the layperson as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with J. D. Watson, but he did far more, including hypothesizing the existence of a three-base code for amino acids, of messenger RNA to carry the code into the cytoplasm to make proteins, and formulizing the “central dogma,” best characterized as “information can go from DNA to protein, but information cannot get from the protein back to the genetic material.”

Now Crick, like his contemporary polymath J. D. “Sage” Bernal, was no saint, at least if you expect Crick to be a saint. He was a complex human being and that complexity, including affairs and drug-laced parties, is part of Crick’s life. But it can also be seen as instantiating the same tendencies that helped make his career: his need to interact with others and his desire to open the “doors of perception” when he worked on consciousness at the end of his career.

Let me give just a few quotes from the review. I tell you, had I written this book I’d be popping champagne corks today:

In a magisterial new biography, Crick, zoologist and historian Matthew Cobb revisits the double-helix breakthrough, a discovery he discussed in forensic detail in his book Life’s Greatest Secret (2015). Yet, this time, the publication of the structure and the immediate aftermath of the discovery occupy just 41 pages. Instead, Cobb explores how Crick’s thinking, writing and interactions with others transcended that brilliant, yet contested, episode, revolutionizing molecular biology and influencing evolutionary and developmental biology, visual neuroscience and ideas about consciousness.

At the same time, he makes a more sustained attempt than either of Crick’s previous biographers (Matt Ridley and Robert Olby) to answer several questions. Who was Crick? What kind of person was he? What did he care about?

Crick was notoriously reluctant to divulge personal information or even have his photograph taken. Combing through a remarkably comprehensive set of personal and professional archives with meticulous attention to detail, Cobb has reconstructed Crick’s relationships with those who were essential crew mates on his intellectual odyssey.

People will of course be curious about the Rosalind Franklin episode in the elucidation of DNA’s structure, though the whole DNA-structure narrative occupies only about 40 pages in the book. Matthew’s view is outlined below, and I believe he’s written on this site that Franklin should have gotten the  Chemistry Nobel Prize with Wilkins, but she died of ovarian cancer before the Prize was awarded (they’re not given posthumously).

Cobb presents the double-helix story as much more of a collaboration with chemist Rosalind Franklin and biophysicist Maurice Wilkins at King’s College London than Crick and Watson acknowledged in their iconic 1953 paper (J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick Nature171, 737–738; 1953). He exonerates Crick and Watson of theft, but not of bad manners. “They should have requested permission to use the data,” Cobb writes. “They did not.”

The elucidation of the triplet code and the mechanism for translating it into proteins was done by Crick in association with Sydney Brenner, who won his own Nobel Prize much later: 2002. And this collaboration brings up some of the “unsaintly” behavior of Crick. From the review:

These landmark findings involved numerous experiments overseen by Brenner’s highly skilled research assistant, Leslie Barnett; Crick himself was notoriously clumsy in the laboratory. Cobb acknowledges her “vital” role but we learn nothing about her as a person. Various long-suffering secretaries also appear fleetingly: they formed part of Crick’s essential support system, some became close friends, and it would have been good to hear more of their voices (and perhaps less of Kreisel’s). As for the lovers, they drift by like ghosts: noted, occasionally quoted, but not identified. “Not our business”, says Cobb.

After this period, Crick was fruitlessly distracted by problems of development and the origin of life, going “off the rails” according to the reviewer. But then he found his footing again when he moved to the Salk Institute in 1977 and began working on consciousness.

. . for the rest of his life focused mainly on tackling the second of the two problems that he had identified at the outset of his career: the basis of human consciousness. Homing in on the question of how humans experience the visual world, he once again became a brilliant influencer and synthesizer of ideas from both neuroscience and machine learning. His 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis argued that all conscious experience stems from brain activity and nothing else; however, it fell short of explaining how. Although this theory was not particularly astonishing to most neuroscientists, it made an enormous public impact.

Well, Crick was certainly right about that: where else could consciousness come from unless it’s some supernatural phenomenon that is outside the ambit of physics. Yet the neurological basis of consciousness is still contested by both scientists (included the deluded “panpsychists” who think that everything in the Universe is conscious) and by laypeople who haven’t thought about the problem. The problem, of course, is connected with determinism, and Crick was certainly a determinist. As I’ve written elsewhere, J. D. Watson told me that he and Crick were motivated to find the structure of DNA partly to demonstrate that the “secret of life” had a purely chemical and materialistic basis.

Here’s the final paragraph of the review: the cherry on the sundae:

Cobb is reliably excellent in maintaining the narrative momentum of a life in science that was anything but mundane. His gripping and accessible account is generous while calling out flaws as he sees them, and discreet when that could hurt the feelings of living friends and relatives. What made Crick Crick, he argues, was his lifelong attempt to “chase the intellectual high” produced by flashes of unique insight. Crick was not, he concludes, a saint or a hero but “an extraordinarily clever man with limits to his interests and perception”.

Are you ready to read the book now? I hope so, and note that I get nothing out of blurbing it here. I do get an autographed copy, though, for having helped Matthew find a fact about baseball in the book (box scores are forever).

You can order the Crick bio from the UK by clicking on the screenshot of the British version below, or here if you’re in the US. And of course there’s always Amazon. The book comes out in three days in the UK and on November 11 in the U.S. (The UK cover is much better, but the contents are identical.)

Matthew on the subject of his latest book: Francis Crick

November 1, 2025 • 11:00 am

As I’ve mentioned several times, Matthew has written what is the definitive biography of Francis Crick, one of the great polymaths of our time. It comes out in the first two weeks of November.

Today you can see an article that Matthew about the book for the Observor, but he and I both urge you to buy the book itself (the publisher’s site is here, a U.K. purchasing site is here, and the U.S. Hachette site, here, gives a 20% discount with the code CRICK20.

Click the headline to read the article for free:

But what is this about poetry?  Here are a few excerpts from the article.

n 1947, aged 31 and with his career in physics derailed by the war, Francis Crick, the future co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, returned to research, focusing on two fundamental biological problems: life and the brain. Over the following half century, he made decisive contributions to both these fields, becoming one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century. In 1994, the Times hailed Crick as the “genius of our age”, comparing him to Isaac Newton, Mozart and Shakespeare, while after his death in 2004, parallels were drawn with Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel.

Like Darwin, Mendel and Newton, Crick changed how the rest of us see the world. He drew out the implications of DNA structure, developed new ways of understanding life and evolution, and later convinced neuroscientists to adopt computational and molecular approaches, and to study the nature of consciousness.

Crick’s aim was not just to make discoveries about two fundamental scientific riddles; he also wanted to replace the superstitious and religious ideas that marked these questions. This did not mean he was stuffy or unimaginative – he was fascinated by the flux of perception and emotion he found in poetry, particularly the work of psychedelic Beat poet Michael McClure, who became a close friend. Poetry and science co-existed in his approach to the world.

Once, when I met with Jim Watson during one of his yearly visits to Chicago, he told me that part of the motivation for his and Crick’s attempt to find the structure of DNA was to confirm materialism (aka atheism): they wanted to show, as Watson told me, that the “secret of life” was a molecule that, in the right milieu, could produce a whole organism. More excerpts:

Crick’s scientific achievements have recently tended to be reduced to those few weeks in Cambridge in February 1953, when he and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. The widely believed story that they stole the data of King’s College London researcher Rosalind Franklin is untrue: Watson and Crick knew of Franklin’s results and those of Crick’s close friend Maurice Wilkins, but they did not provide any decisive insight into the structure of DNA. Franklin knew that the pair had access to her data and bore no grudge; she soon became friendly with both men, and was particularly close to Crick and his wife, Odile.

Watson and Crick subsequently explained that had they not found the structure, then Franklin, or her colleague Wilkins, or someone else, would have done so – it was inevitable. Crick and Watson succeeded because they were lucky, smart, somewhat unscrupulous, and determined

And the poetry:

The imaginative aspect to Crick’s thinking extended to his vocabulary. In 1953, he told a friend that the double helix made him swoon every time he thought of it; this was because of its beauty, a term he often used rather than the word “elegance”, frequently employed by physicists and mathematicians. Biological results are often messy and complex, not elegant. They are nevertheless beautiful, because of their evolutionary roots and the contingent factors that have shaped them.

This sense of beauty, of deep relationships underlying complex phenomena, drove Crick’s scientific work and was linked to his fascination with poetry. As he explained:

“I hope nobody still thinks that scientists are dull, unimaginative people… It is almost true that science itself is poetry enough for them. But there is no effective substitute for the subtle interplay of words and from time to time one becomes wearied by the exact formulations of science and longs for a poetry which speaks to one’s bones.”

But here I disagree with Crick:

Although Crick admired the works of WB Yeats and TS Eliot, by the mid-1960s he had fallen out of love with them because of their mystical views. As he explained in a letter to his friend, the novelist CP Snow, he felt “you can’t be a major poet without a solid foundation of silly ideas (almost everybody thinks Yeats’s ideas silly but to me Eliot’s are just as bad)”.

Yes, Yeats was a mystic, which of course is antiscientific, but both he and Eliot wrote poetry that was non-mystical (think of Yeat’s gorgeous “The Lake Isle of Innisfree“, or Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“).

. . .That Crick’s otherwise penetrating mind never challenged his old prejudices and could not master political issues highlights that he was not a flawless hero nor – no matter what graffiti in 1960s Cambridge proclaimed – a candidate for the post of God. Instead, he was an extraordinarily clever man with limits to his interests and perception.

Crick’s withdrawal from cultural debates coincided with a series of shifts in his world. He and Odile moved from Cambridge to California, where he worked on neuroscience and consciousness at the Salk Institute in San Diego.

In his 50s, Crick used LSD and cannabis and became fascinated by Michael McClure’s materialist psychedelic poetry, which he admired for what he described as its fury and imagery and for its open embrace of biology: “When a man does not admit that he is an animal, he is less than an animal,” proclaimed McClure. Crick’s friendship with McClure ran through the second half of his life, and he did not see it as being in contradiction with his scientific views.

. . .In 2004, on the day that Crick died after a long illness, McClure completed what he described as his finest poem, dedicated to Crick. Full of the muscular sensation and vivid imagery that Crick appreciated, one stanza seems to represent McClure’s attempt to grapple with his friend’s inevitable end:

PERHAPS WE RETURN TO A POOL

– STEADY AND SOLID;

ready and already completed in fireworks

and lives and non-lives – thin and faint

as powerful odours stirring

my moment’s soul in the mind of place.

Below is a photo of Crick from Wikipedia with the caption, “Francis Crick in his office. Behind him is a model of the human brain that he inherited from Jacob Bronowski.” 

Francis_Crick.png: Photo: Marc Lieberman, per ticket:2015100910022707derivative work: Materialscientist, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

The Wikipedia article also contains these quotes:

Crick referred to himself as a humanist, which he defined as the belief “that human problems can and must be faced in terms of human moral and intellectual resources without invoking supernatural authority.” He publicly called for humanism to replace religion as a guiding force for humanity, writing:

The human dilemma is hardly new. We find ourselves through no wish of our own on this slowly revolving planet in an obscure corner of a vast universe. Our questioning intelligence will not let us live in cow-like content with our lot. We have a deep need to know why we are here. What is the world made of? More important, what are we made of? In the past religion answered these questions, often in considerable detail. Now we know that almost all these answers are highly likely to be nonsense, having sprung from man’s ignorance and his enormous capacity for self-deception … The simple fables of the religions of the world have come to seem like tales told to children. Even understood symbolically they are often perverse, if not rather unpleasant … Humanists, then, live in a mysterious, exciting and intellectually expanding world, which, once glimpsed, makes the old worlds of the religions seem fake-cosy and stale[99]

Crick was especially critical of Christianity:

I do not respect Christian beliefs. I think they are ridiculous. If we could get rid of them we could more easily get down to the serious problem of trying to find out what the world is all about.[100]

Crick once joked, “Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.”[101]

Here are the covers, respectively, of the UK and US versions of Matthew’s book. Note the titles and photos are different. I prefer the UK cover with the young Crick pointing at a model of DNA—with a slide rule!

Māori council gets right of approval for releasing genetically modified native organisms in New Zealand

October 27, 2025 • 11:30 am

For the last thirty years, New Zealand has had strict regulations about the release of genetically modified organisms, including humans.  This means that gene therapy is strictly regulated (more so than in the U.S.) and release of genetically modified organisms, which has occurred in other places (mosquitoes, crops, etc.), or has great potential (e.g., golden rice) is not on in New Zealand. And gene therapy for diseases like Parkinson’s and hemophilia has great promise in our own species.

That changed last year when three New Zealand parties agreed to make it more possible to release genetically modified native species, and to use gene therapy in humans,.  Except for one thing, and you can guess what that might be.  The bill also allows for an advisory council of the indigenous Māori people to nix gene therapy based on more-or-less spiritual relationship with native organisms. There is no scientific basis for this save for the superstition embodied in Mātauranga Māori: the melange of superstition, indigenous knowledge, ideology, and code of conduct (tikanga) that is said to constitute another “way of knowing”.

Only Ceiling Cat knows why the bill was approved by parties that aren’t keen on the concept of “co-governance”.  Surely people should realize what is gong to happen: Māori, which supposedly have an advisory capacity only, but in reality can nix any release of GMOs in native species, can bargain with the supplicants, perhaps even getting money to give permission, as Graham Adams writes in this article on the N.Z. site Point of Order. I’ll give some excerpts from the article but do realize that I don’t know a great deal about the new bill save what the article says.

Click the headline to read the piece:

I’ll just give quotes, and perhaps a bit of commentary. I’ve bolded parts that I see as more significant. Note that the text is messed up, and I don’t know how to fix it.

In August 2024, the then-Minister of Science, Innovation, and Technology, Judith Collins, announced legislation to end New Zealand’s nearly 30-year ban on gene technology outside the lab. She described the move as “a major milestone in modernising gene technology laws.”

In her Beehive media release, she said, “The changes we’re announcing today will allow researchers and companies to further develop and commercialise their innovative products. Importantly, it will help New Zealanders to better access treatments such as CAR T-cell therapy, which has been clinically proven to effectively treat some cancers. It can also help our farmers and growers mitigate emissions and increase productivity, all of which benefits our economy.”

It sounded encouragingly far-sighted, but the Gene Technology Bill she introduced to Parliament last December — declaring it to be “a great day for science” that would bring New Zealand’s “regulations for gene technology into the 21st century” — included major elements that are decidedly unscientific and distinctly backward looking.

Alongside a Technical Advisory Committee staffed by scientists, the legislation sets up a Māori Advisory Committee whose members are required to have “knowledge of mātauranga Māori (Māori traditional knowledge), tikanga Māori (Māori protocol and culture), te ao Māori (the Māori world), and taonga species.”

Anyone who wants approval for work involving native species (or affecting relationships Māori claim to have with those species) must engage with the Māori Advisory Committee, which will advise on cultural, spiritual, historical, customary, and ecological values.

Somehow, the National-led government — in charge of a country that, by its own admission, is struggling to keep up with scientific advances in gene technology in the 21st century — is willing to appoint a bevy of spiritual and cultural advisers whose advice is to be officially assessed in a similar manner to that presented by scientists.

Opposition from the conservative (in the NZ sense) ACT party:

ACT’s “differing view” in the select committee report states this (ACT will not, however, oppose the bill):

“For gene technology to succeed and be trusted, it should be based on modern science, not cultural concepts that will make it difficult for the Regulator or applicants to navigate. The [Māori Advisory] committee is entirely reliant on the concept of ‘tikanga’… ACT does not believe it has a place in scientific legislation. Tikanga is not a fixed or universal concept; it varies between iwi and hapū and lacks consistent content or application, making it unsuitable as a legal standard… The inclusion of a Technical Advisory Committee ensures that the Regulator receives robust scientific and technical input… Adding a parallel cultural advisory process risks diluting this focus and undermining confidence in the regulatory regime’s neutrality and predictability.”

And the indigenous approval can apply not just to indigenous species, but to any species with which Māori have a special relationship that got to the island before 1769::

The bill grants the right to any iwi, hapū, Māori entity or Māori individual to assert they have “a kaitiaki [guardianship] relationship with an indigenous species that would be, or has been, used as a host organism.”

A kaitiaki relationship is defined as “the relationship that any kaitiaki has, or Māori in general have, as guardian, trustee, or caretaker of an indigenous species, in accordance with tikanga.”

The Health select committee report further recommends the bill should be expanded to include relationships with “non-indigenous species of significance” to Māori that are “believed to have been brought to New Zealand before 1769 [when Cook arrived] on waka migrating from other parts of the Pacific region.”

Now “native” species aren’t necessarily indigenous: they could have arrived in NZ a long time ago from elsewhere, and also be present in other places.  And remember, too, that both Māori and European descendents are both colonists of the islands, separated by about 600 years.  It’s not clear to me why the earlier immigrants have the right to nix genetic studies of native organisms, particularly when conservation of native species is a serious issue in New Zealand. It’s entirely possible that conservation of native species might some day involve genetic modification, and why should bogus claims of “spiritual connection” have any say in conservation decisions?

23andMe executive waffles before a Senate committee on what the company did with its “deleted” data

June 14, 2025 • 11:10 am

The ancestry-testing company 23andMe has had a hard go lately. First, in 2023 a data leak at the company exposed millions of customers’ personal information—inhcluding genetic information—to hackers. As Wikipedia reports:

The cyberattack gathered profile and ethnicity information from millions of users. The affected customers were reported as primarily Ashkenazi Jews but also including hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese users. The hacker(s) stole information customers had chosen to share with their DNA matches, which could include name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates, mitochondrial DNA haplogroup, Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup, link to external family tree, and any text content a customer had optionally included in their “About” section. On October 6, 2023, the company confirmed that the hacker(s) had illicitly accessed data on approximately 6.9 million users.

And now the company is going to sell off its genetic data to a new company, TTAM Research Institute. We were informed by 23andMe (I was a customer), that we could have our genetic data deleted before the sale, and I naturally did this; I believe I urged customers somewhere on this site to delete their data, too (you can always use a different company in the future).  But 23andMe is now subject to a lawsuit involving this sale:

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.

The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.

The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.

The CEO of the company was promptly dragged before a Senate committee to explain what 23andMe were going to do with the data, and his performance, as you’ll see in the eight-minute video below, was abysmal; he wriggled like a caught eel.

This wiggling and evasion from CEO Joseph Selsavage is even more waffle-y than was the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before Congress (actually, the Presidents answered accurately, but it wasn’t good enough for Representative Elise Stefanik). A reader sent me the link to the new

video with this comment:

I thought you might be interested in this.  You recommended that readers who used 23&Me to conduct genetic analysis might want to delete their data after the company claimed bankruptcy and intend to sell this data to Regeneron for $300M [JAC: see above, TTAM won the bidding over Regeneron.]  I followed your sound advice.

Very disconcerting is this hearing where Senator Josh Hawley absolutely hammers the CEO of 23&Me about whether they are actually deleting our data or not even after instructed by customers to do so.  It’s not clear if they are actually permanently expunging our data records or not given the waffling but how outrageous if they are not:

Here’s the caption for the YouTube video, which was posted on June 12:

At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned interim 23andMe CEO Joseph Selsavage.

Oy vey! Look at Selsavage equivocate and squirm! It’s a pathetic and reprehensible performance. And only Ceiling Cat knows what TTAM will do with our data. (Since I asked for mine to be deleted, Regeneron presumably doesn’t have it, but Selsavage isn’t at all clear about that.)   Hawley is civil but also persistent, and manages to show up Selsavage as somewhat of a liar.

Colossal reverses course AGAIN, now says that it did indeed bring back the dire wolf

May 25, 2025 • 9:30 am

I’ve posted her often about the follies of “de-extincting” animals like the dire wolf, dodo, and woolly mammoth, culminating in a Boston Globe op-ed on May 1.  I’ve been quite critical of de-extinction claims, particularly those of Colossal Biosciences, which claims to have de-extincted the dire wolf, is on track to de-extinct woolly mammoths by 2028, and says it’s working on bringing back the dodo and the thylacine. My Globe op-ed explains four major problems with Colossal’s program. The first was this:

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.

In the case of the mammoth, what we (may eventually) have is an Asian elephant with a handful of mammoth traits. And a handful of mammoth traits does not a mammoth make. I can paint my Ford Taurus bright red and even attach the Ferrari insignia to its hood, but it’s still a Ford Taurus, albeit with a handful of Ferrari traits. The Ferrari-ness of a Ferrari permeates every feature of a Ferrari’s engineering, just as the mammoth-ness of a mammoth permeates every feature of its biology. We know from ancient DNA studies that mammoths differ from Asian elephants at 1.4 million sites along its DNA, yet Colossal plans to mammoth-ize only a tiny fraction of these. Victoria Herridge, a mammoth expert, has described Colossal’s “mammoth” as nothing more than “an elephant in a fur coat.”

I am of course not the first scientist to point this out. Several, including Tori Herridge and Adam Rutherford, have written severely critical takes on Colossal’s claims.  But the mainstream media, by and large, ate up those claims.  Science journals and popular-science magazines like Science and New Scientist, however, did publish trenchant criticisms.

I believe Colossal was stung by these criticisms, which I’m sure they didn’t anticipate—though they should have. The company pushed back, but eventually, in an article in New Scientist (see below and my post), quoted Colossal’s chief scientific officer, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, as finally admitting that they really didn’t produce dire wolves, but grey wolves with a handful of edited genes that supposedly made the tweaked canids look more like ancient dire wolves.

Click below to see  Colossal’s partial retraction, which is also archived here:

Here’s how Beth Shapiro walked back the dire wolf de-extinction claim:

Well, yes, they had said they were dire wolves.  As the NYT reported on May 11:

The resulting animals [the gene-edited solves] were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”

Here’s Shapiro saying the same thing in a Bluesky post:

Oy!  Everybody can disagree and everyone can be right!  All must have prizes!  She says that Colossal chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves. That’s a highly watered-down version of the morphological species concept, one of the alternative species concepts that Allen Orr and I criticized in our book Speciation (see chapter 1 and Appendix). But the most trenchant and humorous criticism of using this concept to rescue Colossal’s claim also came from the NYT piece:

A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”

LOL.

In fact, we have no idea whether the three animals produced by Colossal even look a lot like the extinct dire wolf. For one thing, Colossal used mutations known in wolves and dogs (not taken from the dire wolf genome) to make the three living individuals white.  We don’t know if dire wolves were white, and some think they were reddish-brown, which seems more appropriate given that they didn’t live in the Arctic. (They lived in woodlands in the tropics and temperate zone.) And, as I’ve emphasized at great length, they can’t give the de-extincted animals the brains of the original species, for we don’t know which genes control the brain differences, much less what the brain differences were. Absent that ability, no de-extincted animal can behave like its model—something crucial if you want, as Colossal claims, to restore these animals to their “original” habitat.

But where we were as of yesterday was that Colossal, via Beth Shapiro, had finally admitted that they had not produced dire wolves but genetically tweaked gray wolves (of the 20 tweaks, five came from mutations in dogs and gray wolves, not from the dire wolf genome).

Now, however, they’ve walked it back again!  The tweet below shows a statement sent to New Scientist by a spokesperson at Colossal. Jacob Aron is the magazine’s news editor and he, like all of us, is now deeply confused. Colossal says that yes, they DID make dire wolves:

Colossal has sent us a statement, which we've added to the story. I don't feel the situation is any clearer…

— Jacob Aron (@jjaron.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T11:14:21.057Z

The New Scientist article now has this “correction:

Yep, let me put that in big letters: “WITH THOSE EDITS, WE HAVE BROUGHT BACK THE DIRE WOLF”.  And even using the concept of “functional de-extinction” is bogus, for they know nothing about the function (behavior, etc.) of the dire wolf.  All we know is that we have three white-colored gray wolves that may have bigger heads than did gray wolves when the trio grows up.  But 20 genetic tweaks is a teeny, tiny fraction of the thousands of differences between the extinct and the de-extincted creature, including the missing differences in brain structure.

The impression I get is that Colossal is now in PR chaos, stung by criticisms made by scientists and quoted in the press. They are desperate to say that they really have de-exincted animals despite the fact that all they have are three white canids, each with 15 DNA letters changed from gray wolf code to code taken from the dire wolf. Really, by any stretch of the imagination these are not members of a resurrected species. And the more Colossal opens its yap, now contradicting itself twice, the less respect I have for it.

After Shapiro admitted that Colossal hadn’t resurrected dire wolves, one of my colleagues posted this on Facebook:

I’m OK with this…I like it when scientists admit that they were wrong, or over-stated something. Although the initial press release was misleading at best, I’m glad that they clarify that these were not really Dire Wolves.

Sadly, they now say that they really are dire wolves. I’ve informed said colleague about the update, and we’ll see what he/she says.

h/t: Matthew

Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article

May 11, 2025 • 11:30 am

Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

You can read the article by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.  If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

Moreover, the discussion tacitly admits that, yes, populations do have biological differences. As Luana and I wrote in our paper, we don’t like using the word “race” because in its classical form, it is misleading. Instead we say this:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

I prefer “populations” which are still not social constructs and do have biological meaning. But our paper shows how and why, so read section 5, which is not long.

Finally, Woicik’s article calls on all scientists to push back against racism and eugenics, and of course all people of good will should do so when they can. But her article is of a Chicken Little bent, as the first claim is wrong and the second distorted (as the progressives say, “it lacks nuance”).

Click below to read, or find the pdf here. It’s only two pages long

Here are the main topics:

Eugenics.

Let’s first take up the author’s overheated claim that “eugenics is on the rise again,”  I suppose if you trawled the white-supremacist or tinfoil-hat literature, you could find a few people who espoused eugenics (the sterilization, prevention of breeding, or even murder of members of minority groups), but really, that idea is dead as a doornail in science and in the public (when was the last time you found a call for eugenics in the MSM or in a biology textbook?)  Even Trump, despite his brief remark below, has not espoused eugenics.

In fact, Woicik cites only three bits of evidence for her claim that eugenics is on the rise:

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

. . . . At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.

Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology2,3.

and this:

In the United States, a reactionary political movement has ridden a populist wave into power, using dog-whistle rhetoric about race. This has happened just when scientists have the knowledge — and tools — to make strides towards a more equitable world.

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

She does mention one case of race-motivated shooting, but that is murderous bigotry, not eugenics, which is the initiative of a government or professional body.  One cannot argue that each race-related shooting (including shooting of whites by minorities) is an instance of “eugenics.”

The only evidence for a rise of eugenics here is a throwaway remark by Trump.  The RFK Jr. statement may be misguided, but there are some “racial” differences in responses to treatment.  The last statement says that white nationalism has “eugenicist goals”.  Perhaps some extremists do, but I simply do not hear calls for the public, the government, or the scientific community to reinstitute eugenics in America.  Of course it would be bad to call for that and do that, but the threat of eugenics is simply not a problem.

The falsity of denying genetic differences between populations. The first thing to remember is what Luana and I wrote:

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

This along shows that there are biological differences between populations, and even those populations that are “self-reported races”, like white, black, Hispanic, or Asian.  But Wojcik, even disses the ancestry-testing companies. Wojcik:

One public-facing area is direct-to-consumer ancestry-testing services. These use computational algorithms to model the genetic similarity between individuals and reference populations to draw conclusions about people’s geographical origins. Many have pointed out that these services — which rely on geopolitical and ethnic categories — might be exacerbating racial essentialism.

Again we have a hyperbolic statement here; Luana’s finding out that she has ancestry that’s Hispanic, black, native American, and from other groups does not “exacerbate racial essentialism.” Ask yourself: have you ever seen anybody turn into a racist when they get their 23andMe results?

Here are a few more instances of biological differences between either populations or self-reported races cited by Luana and me. Have a look at the first study, involving “self reported race”:

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

. . . More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

We give other evidence, taking care to show that differences do not equate to a hierarchy. Populations have differentiated over time genetically, both through natural selection and genetic drift. Differences due to selection, like lactose tolerance or low-oxygen tolerance, cannot be equated to an overall superiority, only to a better ability to leave your genes in the environment wher eyou evolved.  Differences between populations will create racism only if people are motivated to be bigots.  Luana and I quote Ernst Mayr on this, who apparently was a far clearer thinker about genetics than both the author of this paper (who seems desperately afraid of differences even of the 23andMe type) and many others:

The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated it well:

Equality in spite of evident non-identity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to “conditioning” or other non-genetic factors. … An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. (Mayr 1963)

Thus, although the classical races are to some extent social constructs, they also jibe with biological differences. Wojcik:

. . . . there is broad consensus among researchers that social constructs of descent-based identity, such as race and ethnicity, do not align with genetic groupings. On the other, there is growing awareness that diversity matters for sound science and effective policy, including in health care. Embraced together, these two concepts have strengthened science and increased benefits to health.

This is misleading, as you can see by comparing the multivariate and principal-component genetic analyses that match very nicely with geographic locations.  As we said, there are “groups within groups within groups,” and thus we prefer to use the word “populations”. Here’s a genetic cluster analysis of Europeans by country of birth, which, as we note above, coincides remarkably well with geography. Are there “races” here? Well, no, but there are populations, and those populations are different in a consistent way that tells us something about geography and biology (people mate with those geographically close to them. Note as well that genetics has also helped us reconstruct the history of human migration out of Africa and across the globe.

 

Wojcik admits several times that there are genetic differences between populations.  This seems to be at odds with her thesis. Bolding is mine:

For example, the likelihood of people having haemoglobinopathies (inherited disorders that affect red blood cells) varies substantially depending on where in the world a person lives. In some regions of India, carrier rates for the blood disorder β-thalassaemia are estimated to be higher than 8%, whereas in areas of China, they can be as low as 2.7%. This heterogeneity would be missed if researchers simply grouped study participants as ‘Asian’, a term that refers to nearly 60% of the global population. Similarly, using the category ‘Hispanic’ without considering other factors would fail to reveal that the genetic variant associated with Steel syndrome, a rare genetic bone disorder, is more common in people from Puerto Rico than in those from the Dominican Republic or Mexico5.

But of course! We know this because researchers did NOT group populations as “Asian”.  Here’s another admission that geographic location is relevant to biology:

The availability of large-scale multimodal data and advanced statistical and computational tools is making it easier than ever for researchers to stop relying on race or ethnicity as proxies for biology or structural and social determinants of health. Instead, they can interrogate the effects of many well-defined variables, from people’s genetics and geographical location to their diet and income.

Again, genetics and geographical location (which of course differ among populations) are said to be relevant to biology and health.

The author seems to believe that physicians practice “race-based medicine”, but any doctor that doesn’t look beyond one’s self-identified or other-identified race or ancestry when diagnosing problems is a dreadful doctor. I’ve never met one—not even one asking me if I was an Ashkenazi Jew, which is what my genes tell me I am.  And yes, self-described race is associated with clinical risk, though some of that could be due to cultural differences among people of different ancestries.

Diversity.

Although Wojcik claims that race is a social construct, she also tells us that “diversity”–clearly of “self-defined race”—is something we need because higher (social-construct) diversity within groups leads to higher productivity and more valuable outcomes. While I agree that we need to increase diversity throughout society by affording all people equal opportunities from birth, that doesn’t mean that the sources cited bo Wojcik are dispositive:

Reports from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for instance, emphasize the need for more-diverse groups of participants to be included in genetics and genomics research2, as well as in biomedical research more broadly3. They also stress the importance of a diverse workforce — which has consistently been shown to result in higher productivity, as well as in work that has a greater impact on people’s lives.

But there are many other studies showing no effect or negative effects, and these have been summarized by Lee Jussim in his report “The downsides of DEI“, which has compiled all available studies on aspects of this topic. Go to the section called “diversity does not produce its promised benefits.” As Lee said:

I curated this list to make it easy in situations like this to track down relevant resources.  And any article touting the joys of diversity for science/performance that simply ignores
these articles is more propaganda than science.  This is true even if it is unintentional, failing to know about the existence of evidence contrary to the claims one is touting is, at best, the scientific equivalent of negligent malpractice.

Wojcik apparently hasn’t looked at these papers, many of which are recent.

According to Jussim’s data, the trope that more diverse groups always produce better outcomes is not strongly substantiated, although some studies show a weak effect. We should strive for diversity of groups simply because it will increase as an indicator of more equal opportunities from birth.

My point is simply that in calling for a reformation of science and society, Wojcik is making hyperbolic claims that are, more often than not, unjustified.  Races (or populations) don’t differ in meaningful biological ways, society is on the verge of adopting eugenics, and diverse groups don’t always do better than homogeneous ones. Of course I am not touting racism here, but I do maintain that we’re not on the verge of eugenics, and that differences between populations are biologically meaningful and will become more so as we learn more.

Near the end there is more hyperbolic rhetoric that verges on a call for censorship (my bolding):

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

Of course I abhor white nationalism, even though I don’t think its goals are eugenics, but, regardless, I’m not calling for censorship in debates about race. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and scientists need to engage with civility on all topics, including the hot potato of race.  Unfortunately, this article fails to do that. It is not a piece of science, or even of scientific analysis, but a tendentious ideological screed.

h/t: Roy