7 hours Ago By Rich Lowry
We have the dire wolf again. Thanks to the heroic work of Colossal Biosciences, the canine species that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago has been revived in a stunning act of so-called de-extinction. The dire wolf is a bit of a Late Pleistocene celebrity thanks to its role in the “Game of Thrones” series as a symbol of the Stark family.
What’s happening on the company’s 2,000-acre enclosure isn’t worthy of the fantasy book and HBO series, although it naturally brings to mind the blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” in which a similar project inadvertently looses rampaging dinosaurs on a remote island. Ian Malcolm, the scientist who warns about the unpredictability of nature in the movie, was unavailable for comment. In this instance, maybe he’d simply marvel at what’s been accomplished, and he’d be right.
Colossal got samples of dire wolf DNA from fossils, and edited the DNA of grey wolves to add key characteristics of the extinct species. The Dallas-based company then created modified embryos and implanted them in surrogate dogs. Now, three young dire wolves — or, to be more precise, near-dire wolves — are living in an undisclosed location.
The two males are named, inevitably, Romulus and Remus, while the female is called Khaleesi after a “Game of Thrones” character. They are recognizably dire wolves. A reporter for Time magazine notes, compared to the common gray wolf, their “white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.
” Colossal wants to do for the dodo, Tasmanian tiger and the wooly mammoth what it’s done for the dire wolf, and why not? The wooly mammoth, the foremost charismatic megaherbivore, would be the prize of this list, and, one assumes, come closest to producing the gap-jawed wonder of the characters in “Jurassic Park” when they first see giant reptiles walking the Earth again. Now, none of this is an assured success. The dire wolf juveniles will be closely monitored during their lives for unpredicted problems.
They are a long way from being introduced into the wild, and then there’s the issue that the big mammals that were its prey — including wooly mammoths — are no longer around, either. That there are obstacles — including, in the case of wooly mammoths, a nearly two-year gestation in a surrogate elephant — doesn’t mean we should credit the opponents of the project. One naysaying philosopher warns that modern-day wooly mammoths may have “potential psychological and behavioral deficits.
” Really? Members of a miraculous resurrected species might have behavioral problems? This is a little like saying humans shouldn’t go to Mars because someone might leave an empty Coke bottle on the surface of the Red Planet. A writer at Vox worries about the non-voluntary surrogacy for mother elephants, potential miscarriages and risky C-sections. The sad fact is that much of environmentalism is beholden to an overwhelmingly negative worldview where everything but doomsday warnings of the effects of global warming is unwelcome, and especially any technological advance that doesn’t accord with their ideology.
It’s certainly true that, in some cases, we want species for utilitarian reasons to maintain an ecological balance, but we also want diverse species for the wonder of them. The planet would survive without blue whales, but we’d feel poorer without them. By the same token, wouldn’t a return of wooly mammoths enrich our planet? After we hurried another potential target for de-extinction, the carrier pigeon, out of existence, we should have a lot of time for the impulse to, through sheer human ingenuity, bring it back.
If all this feels like hubris, so does all of modernity. Who thought we could create a palm-sized supercomputer, or forge any of the medical and technological advances that define our world? “Life, uh, finds a way,” Ian Macolm famously says in the movie. So it does, which is why we have dire wolves when there were none for millennia.
Twitter: @RichLowry.
