Now That Dire Wolves are Back, the Next Animal Up on the De-Extinction List is the Woolly Mammoth
If anyone was under the impression that the lab-coated geeks over at Colossal Biosciences were going to bring Dire Wolves back from 10,000 years of extinction:
... call it a day, go home, grab a bottle of Kombucha and celebrate their world-changing scientific breakthrough playing Diablo IV, you've got another thing coming.
If we've learned anything from every SciFi story ever told, once you start playing god you never stop. Not ... until ... it's ... too ... late. Bringing back a 7-foot long Alpha predator is all well and good. But you don't call yourself Colossal Biosciences unless you've got bigger land animals to fry. And these mad scientists have their sights set on larger game, indeed. In fact, making furry mice:
… only amounted to stretching so they don't pull a muscle working on their grand design. The woolly frigging mammoth:
Source - The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.
If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. …
“We are an evolutionary force at this point,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, speaking of humanity as a whole. “We are deciding what the future of these species will be.” The Center for Biological Diversity suggests that 30% of the planet’s genetic diversity will be lost by 2050, and Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm insist that genetic engineering is a vital tool to reverse this. Company executives often frame the technology not just as a moral good, but a moral imperative—a way for humans, who have driven so many species to the brink of extinction, to get square with nature.
Let's address the massive, extinct pachyderm in the room, shall we? Beth Shapiro's words are exactly the sorts of positive, altruistic, selfless sounding rhetoric we hear from every scientist in every story where they're treating the awesome power of nature like a Lego set. Something to be constructed and deconstructed and constructed again to suit their mood. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to The Substance and every cautionary tale about mankind's hubris ever told. To cite the best monologue ever delivered about this very subject:
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"Gee, the lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh… staggers me.
"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.
"I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you wanna sell it.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. [Woolly mammoths] had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction."
We have no idea what the consequences of bringing back dire wolves and mammoths will be. No one can foresee the effects of reintroducing their species to our world 100 centuries since "nature selected them for extinction." For sure we haven't the first clue where all this is going to end. Though an educated guess tells me - to use another Ian Malcolm quote from the sequel - it'll involve a lot of "ooh and ahh. Followed by the running and the screaming."
Having argued against de-extinction, allow me to totally contradict myself. Yes, all this is true. But you can't argue that having a world with dire wolves and woolly mammoths running around will be a lot more interesting. Give me a game preserve someplace in say, the midwest, where we can hunt these critters like our hunter-gatherer ancestors and I'm there. Give me a spear and and a sling and some fur clothes and I'm ready to party like it's 8,000 BC.
Plus knowing we can make as many of these things as we want takes all the guilt of enjoying some good grilled mammoth tenderloins totally away. No more Endangered Species List. No more PETA protests. Just us at the top of the food chain where we belong, making our food and harvesting it to our heart's content. Sign me up for this.
So sincerest thanks to Beth Shapiro and Ben Lamm and all the gang over at Colossal Bioscience. The dinosaurs can't come soon enough. But this is a heck of a good start.