Dire, Wolves?
If Colossal is offering a moral imperative, then we must corroborate that with a moral covenant.
Colossal Biosciences shared last week that they had resurrected the dire wolf. I could have turned this essay into a personal account of falling in love, again, with George RR Martin’s incomplete A Song of Ice and Fire (if I had). It could have become a satirical essay about letting the dead die. Instead I am just going to pose some questions about science ethics. I think it’s the option of those I can do best.
I know a small amount about science. I’ve been teaching it—biology, chemistry, earth science, weather, physics, genetics—for more than ten years. I also have a BS in neuroscience.
What Did Colossal Do? And How?
First, they did not “de-extinct” a dire wolf, no matter how strategically their media team has laid out this announcement.1 They genetically modified gray wolves.
They found some DNA of dire wolves and sequenced it. To find it, they had to recover some from fossils. This is not easy. Most fossils have no DNA left. Once they had the DNA, they “sequenced” it. DNA is a code—a really, really beautiful, ingenious code—comprised of four chemicals. To make them easier to talk about, scientists have assigned each chemical a letter: ACGT.
Colossal’s scientists studied the DNA in their samples—a tooth and a fragment of skull—and then arranged the chemicals in sequence. They compared this with modern gray wolves, and claim that 99.5% of the DNA dire wolves have is common to gray wolves. That statement hasn’t been peer-reviewed, the data supporting it not released, and so as far as scientists care, is not true.
Then, starting with gray wolf DNA, they made 20 changes to DNA. That’s close to nothing. They changed it so that their dire wolf2 pups would conform in appearance to what scientists speculate dire wolves looked like. They DNA was implanted in an embryo. That embryo was implanted in a dog. The dog gave birth. The animal that came out was, genetically, a gray wolf with a couple cosmetic changes.
It’s no fun, though, to let the argument die there, to say, “this doesn’t matter because you just made a Franken-wolf.” One day, a company like Colossal will actually recreate an ancient organism. So let’s assume that Colossal’s colossal claim holds its water. What should we feel about this? The answer to this lies in their motivation.
Why?
Colossal frames their actions as a “moral imperative.” Humans have to make right the extinction of these species. This premise therefore must split into two subcategories, at least: a) ancient extinct species, and b) modern extinct species. Additionally, Colossal wants to consider the protection of endangered, but not yet extinct species. Let’s call that group c.
A) Ancient Extinct Species
Of the three advertised projects (I have no doubt they are working on more), only one went extinct in “modern history.”
The dire wolves died off twelve-thousand years ago. The last mammoths died four-thousand years ago—more recently than the construction of the pyramids, but still a long time ago. The thylacine (aka Tasmanian tiger) was killed in the early 1900s by European colonizers of Australia. I want to split these considerations into two separate groups when we think about the morality behind extinction.
There is some debate about what caused the extinction of dire wolves and mammoths. Lots of factors were at play, but the prevailing consensus seems to be human activity. Dire wolves were likely both killed off because of the threat to human safety they posed and starved out because humans outcompeted them for prey. Something similar probably happened to mammoths, although climate change—not anthropogenic climate change, just good ole fashioned climate change—played a role, too. That’s not at all unlike the extinction or endangerment of many modern species, including modern wolves, both red and gray, and the endangerment of modern elephants. Humans have long been an undeniable ecological force.
Is it condescending to ancient humans to forgive them for being part of driving these two animals to extinction? I can’t imagine their motivations were all that different from our own. They “did not know” about conservationism and ecological balance—or did they? As Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapiens, you could drop a human from 10,000 years ago into modern times and teach them physics. That is to say: they were not any less unintelligent than we; they were “we.” No, they didn’t have formalized institutions issuing degrees in ecology, but they had hunters and gatherers, the first ecologists.
But whether they knew about the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model or not, they—rather, we—caused these animals to go extinct. Is it our burden to make it right and resurrect them? Colossal seems to think so.
However, too much—far, far too much—has changed in ten-thousand years for dire wolves or mammoths to reclaim any sort of wilderness; there’s hardly enough wilderness left for the animals already present. It isn’t making something morally right to return it to a world it cannot possibly recognize. How many stories of science fiction have already explored and answered this question? These animals may have research applications, may provoke sentiments of conservation in people when displayed in zoos, but won’t go back to the wild. Their wild is gone, and not entirely because of humans.
The average temperatures 10,000 years ago were about one degree cooler. The megafauna, then already on their way out the door, are now largely gone or in Africa. Had humans never discovered the secret fire of fossil fuels beneath our feet, the world today would still be an alien and offensive place to the bodies of these animals.
Colossal states, then, that there are research applications to trying to resurrect these animals. Biologically, the process of reviving dire wolves may offer insight into techniques useful to preserving the scattered, ram-shod DNA of the red wolf. I’ll get back to that.
B) Reversing Modern Extinction
Today’s world is not too changed for the white rhinoceros, or for the Tasmanian tiger. Couldn’t they be reinstated into their natural habitats? Similar projects have happened in the past—the Wolf Project in Yellowstone being the most salient example of humans intervening to reverse local extinction. Surely, the world is not too changed for these more recently departed species to return to it.
Or is it?
The last wild thylacines were killed in 1930. The small-dog-sized predator had an unearned reputation as a poultry thief in Tasmania, and a colonizing farm corporation there paid bounties for killing them. Would that be different now? Perhaps. Until 2018, the red wolf could still be shot legally, despite its severe conservation status. Why do we think people would treat the Tasmanian tiger any differently?
But that wasn’t all that was killing the Tasmanian tiger. Thousands of years prior to Wilf Batty, it had died out in mainland Australia, along with much of its prey species. Just like elsewhere in the world, mercurial climate changes—dramatically arid periods and eras of cold and ice—and the arrival of humans to the continent likely killed it. The ones left alive on Tasmania would not have been alive all that much longer, if thinking in eras, had humans left them alone: their genetic pool was severely bottlenecked, meaning they lacked the diversity of traits necessary to keep a population thriving over millennia. Plaguing them and their weakened genome were, well, plagues.
Compare that to the—still extant for now—Tasmanian devil. This marsupial walks in the tiger’s footsteps. Perhaps less offensive to farmers because of its smaller stature and more stealthy behaviors, the devil has survived so far. But similarly, millennia of bottlenecking, habitat loss, disease (devils are dying at alarming rates because of a contagious, tumor-forming virus), as well as human activity have pushed this critter to the brink.
What would the Tasmanian tiger face now, if it were to come back?
C) Modern Endangered Species
The last thing that Colossal proposes to do with their research is find ways to protect modern species on the brink of extinction. Genetically modifying mammoths, they argue, could allow them to genetically modify elephants to better survive droughts, sandstorms, and extreme temperatures. These genetic modifications, however, must be done to embryos to have any effect. Altering the DNA of an already-living organism is an, ahem, elephantine task and one still far out of science’s reach.
there’s hardly enough wilderness left for the animals already present
So how would that work? Would scientists implant GMO-elephant embryos into wild females with functional uteruses? Would these GMO elephants be bred and born in captivity, and then released, hoping that their genetics trickle down to future generations? Will they come equipped with genes for bulletproof hides and poacher radar?
What happens to cheetahs? Their populations has been in dire straits since long before humans intervened; bottlenecked be Africa’s evolving landscape, their genetic imperfections redound in an echo chamber. Will Colossal intervene, interspersing new genes—reviving ones from healthier, more ancient cheetahs? Or will we let cheetahs go? Even though humans have exacerbated the plight of the cheetah, we are not the sole contributor to its erasure from the planet. So who gets to decide which species are spared from extinction and which are not, and why is it Colossal?
What else could we be doing?
On my favorite podcast, one host said, “this feels like if I needed to do some serious housework and instead spent an hour reorganizing my 3-D printer filament, and then was like ‘mission accomplished!’”
The dire wolf does not fill in a missing ecological niche. Gray wolves are effective hunters and are thriving because of decades of coordinated, careful ecology, and for a lot less money than Colossal spent on dire wolves.
Similar money and energy could be put into actually protecting what’s left, educating people, buying land to rewild, carbon buyback programs, renewable energy sources, and a host of other things that could actually make a difference.
Here’s where I’ll consider offering a little hope
Let’s imagine that Colossal is able to artificially re-diversify the gene pool of the Tasmanian tiger. Perhaps a fossil has been found somewhere, dating to 60,000 years ago, full of rich Tasmanian tiger DNA. Furthermore, or perhaps in the nonce, Colossal develops some of those genes, or others, to reinvigorate the line of the Tasmanian devil. Miraculous.
If Colossal is offering a moral imperative, then we must corroborate that with a moral covenant. If humanity is going to let science re-create, Frankenstein, simulate, or otherwise engineer endangered and extinct species back from oblivion, we are morally bound to create and live in a world where those animals have a chance to survive.
If we have the power to do that, to make woolly mammoths walk again, I nevermore want to hear that there aren’t enough funds to protect wildlife. I never deserve to hear that protecting animals isn’t economically practical. Conservation matters. Colossal owes us protection for all the animals that are still alive, not just the darlings of ancient eras.
I can’t stop Colossal. I don’t know if I want to. But I can live and spread the ideas of tolerance, conservationism, and minimalism necessary to create a world where dire wolves, mammoths, and thylacines—no, red wolves, elephants, and Tasmanian devils—can once again thrive. And you can too.
https://www.science.org/content/article/dire-wolf-back-dead-not-exactly
by the way, a true dire wolf would be less related to a gray wolf than a chihuahua is