This is dire lunacy, not a dire wolf. This animal was not brought back from extinction. It’s a poor, gene-edited freak created for no purpose other than advertisement for gene editing. This animal will have no habitat and no community. He’s a lone circus freak, manufactured by horrible people whose ultimate goal is to do the same kind of experimentation on humans.
This should be illegal.
As someone who leaves more thumbs down than up on this blog and who is not wholly opposed to gene editing, I’m curious about what motivated the downvote on this one. What good can come of this “dire wolf” project?
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Seriously. If they had actually managed to bring back an extinct species… maybe? I mean, that’d be a chance at bringing back the dodo, the tasmanian tiger, the passenger pigeon…
But despite all the headlines trumpeting it, was disheartened to read that no, they had just taken a regular wolf and tampered with its genes to make something like what they thought a dire wolf might’ve been like, apparently.
Sounds like a really expensive way to make the next breed of problem dog.
And eventually, the next breed of a very messed-up human.
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I wonder what exciting problems the inbred (yes this is what you get when you zero in on the handful of desirable traits and eliminate genetic diversity) humans will have– tumors like poodles? Deafness like pitts? Hip dysplasia like Danes? Extra toes and fingers?
Such exciting possibilities!
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“First cousin marriage is not only tolerated but preferred by some Muslims”
Not everywhere… I think the highest rate of cousin fvkеrs are in the Arabian peninsula and Pakistan (world capital of reproductive cousins…. IIRC a surprisingly large amount of the NHS’s budget is dealing with the kids of cousin marriage the myriad of syndromes (known and unknown) that that brings (IIRC around 15% or so). But of course only racists suggest that there’s anything wrong with that.
Yes, the percentages vary, but it is widespread. Supposedly Mohammad married a cousin which makes it acceptable, but in one of the Hadiths he advises against repeating it for generations.
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–this is quite reminiscent of the attempt to breed cattle back in the… 20s? to re-create the aurochs, on the theory that cattle being descended from aurochs, all the genes were still in there somewhere. What they ended up with was not an aurochs, it was just a uniquely large, aggressive breed of cattle (Heck cattle, coincidentally), whose large caloric needs meant they starved to death on winter pasturage. Not exactly a mark of success for trying to re-create an ice-age animal.
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“to re-create the aurochs”
I’m torn… cause I really want real aurochs to make a comeback not isolated freaks like this direwolf but whole hears of the real thing (though how well people would deal with that is an open question)
But I remember in the Danish national museum there’s an auroch skeleton that takes up most of a (not tiny) room. Very impressive and I like cattle…
IKR? I never got into dinosaurs, but megafauna are terribly romantic. I’d love to see a wooly rhinoceros. Or a herd of aurochs. Not practical: we have a hard time maintaining habitat for the few megafauna and midi-fauna that aren’t extinct, like whales, elephants, giraffes and bison.
And, you know, gene-editing your way toward a flailing guess of what something like a direwolf may have looked like and then claiming you’ve resurrected the thing… is a lame marketing ploy. Even the Heck cattle are more respectable.
Why don’t they ever go for dodos? Or passenger pigeons? Pretty sure we still have samples of their carcasses hanging around museums… has cloning tech been wildly overhyped perhaps?
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There has been a long-term project in SA to selectively breed an extinct zebra species.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quagga_Project
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The mammoth seems like the most exciting one.
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I’m surprised that Time magazine hasn’t become extinct.
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It’d be easy enough to clone.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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