The Myth of the 'De-Extinction' of the Dire Wolf
Don't be fooled by reports of extinct animals being brought back to life, argues genetic researcher Jonathan Roberts. The truth is much scarier
Last week, a biotech company – Colossal Biosciences – announced they had brought the dire wolf back from extinction. This claim has been – sometimes quite robustly –disputed by experts. The team at Colossal have taken the approach that whether you really think they have brought back the dire wolf comes down to how you define ‘species’. Evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro of Colossal recently said in an interview in New Scientist, “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right”
Now I’m all for pluralism, but I’m not convinced “everyone can be right” is a viable approach to science. Perhaps what we can all agree on is that what Colossal have achieved is extraordinary PR. The dire wolf was a shrewd choice as it inhabits a duality: both real and fantasy. The real dire wolf went extinct around 12,000 years ago. It was similar in size to the grey wolf, with whom it shared a common ancestor roughly 4 million years ago. The dire wolf though evolved some distinct traits: a broader skull, stronger bite and bigger teeth.
Colossal Biosciences wants to convince us they have summoned this dire wolf direct from the earth’s memory. But the PR success relies on summoning not this real ancient creature but the beast of fantasy from George RR Martin’s imagination. The dire wolf from Game of Thrones is the size of a small horse and the sigil for House Stark. Colossal, with a PR flourish, has blurred these lineages.
Of course, one of the big issues here is that they haven’t really brought back either of these two dire wolves, fantastic or ancient. Instead, scientists took some cells from a grey wolf and edited its DNA. They made 20 edits across 14 genes. These edits were mostly cosmetic, to make a modern grey wolf resemble what we currently believe the ancient dire wolf looked like. These cells were used to create embryos which were transferred to domestic dogs who birthed them. The result? Not dire wolves, but something like a genetic impression of them, a sketch in DNA.
Evidence shows that while dire wolves and today’s grey wolves may have shared physical similarities they are genetically very distinct. So, beyond making the obvious point – that 20 gene edits do not a dire wolf make – the specifics of the gene editing are hard to comment on. This is largely because the company has not published their methods and results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. However, beneath this story lies an old and dangerous idea: that life is reducible to code. That if we have the sequence, we have the essence. If we accept this, then extinction is just a technical problem to be solved.
The Illusion of Undoing
So, what do these dire wolves—or rather, what do their genes – represent? It is the fantasy that destruction can be undone. That we might press rewind on extinction, as though ecosystems were a game we could reset.
There is something deeply human in this longing. Our myths, religions and stories are full of people yearning to undo loss through resurrection. Many of these stories contain warnings, perhaps reflecting a psychological unease with our desire to bring back what we know should be lost for good. Vampires and zombies – in their myriad forms – reflect an intuitive sense that you can’t really cheat death.
Horror, as a genre, is suffused with this idea. An emotive example comes from the famous horror story The Monkey’s Paw. In this story a bereaved mother and father wish their recently deceased son back to life, only to find what returns mangled and horrifying. There are similar themes in Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Sematary. In this story Louis Creed finds a cemetery that can return animals and people from the dead. Creed resurrects the family cat and later his dead son. Each time what returns is a sinister mimic of the original.
Now, let’s not get carried away. These horror stories are not prophecies. Colossal Bioscience will not unleash a plague of undead wolves upon us (though after the last few years, one might be forgiven for bracing). But perhaps we can view these stories as parables, reminding us that some losses are irreversible, not just in flesh, but in time and context. To lose sight of this risks us ceasing to value and protect what we have now. Why worry, when science can restore what we have lost?
To reassemble a genome – or to lightly edit in the case of these ‘dire wolves’ – is not to reassemble a world. Extinction is not just a biological event, but an unravelling of relationships. To bring back an animal – or in this case to genetically engineer an animal to resemble an animal that once lived – will not bring back the world it inhabited.
This point is made in the original Jurassic Park. After showing the guests around his new theme park, John Hammond asks what everyone thinks. It is the scientist, Ellie Sattler, who asks:
“The question is, how can you know anything about an extinct ecosystem? And therefore, how could you ever assume that you can control it? I mean, you have plants in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in, and they'll defend themselves, violently if necessary.”
In Jurassic Park, as with the dire wolves, it is genes that provide the illusion of control. But where does this illusion come from? Why are we susceptible to believing that a few gene edits is the same as brining back a long dead species? The key to this is the power we still, often unquestioningly, ascribe to genes.
The Ghost of Mendel
Long before we understood genetics, we told ourselves stories about bloodlines, about destiny written in the body. The Victorians had a particular fascination with the new science of heredity and so created eugenics, convinced that biology was fate. Then came Mendel, with his peas and his ratios, and suddenly inheritance had rules—dominant, recessive, neat as a ledger.
Mendel’s work was elegant and meticulous. However, his main concern was practical. He was mostly concerned with understanding plant hybrids. He had no concept of the gene. In fact, the word ‘gene’ was not coined until over 40 years after he published his (now) famous work on pea plants. He was certainly not aiming to create a unified theory of inheritance.
Mendel’s work was rediscovered in the early 1900s. Like all resurrections, his work came back changed. From Mendel’s humble pea experiments, the more grandiose Mendelism was born. A unified theory of inheritance with the gene taking centre stage. Over the course of the 20th Century, genetics built its own mythology. Or if not quite a mythology at least a set of powerful metaphors that could almost pass for mythology. Genes are life’s code, instructions and blueprints. In 1996, at the announcement of the completion of the Human Genome Project, Bill Clinton declared that we had decoded "the language in which God created life." To this day this type of language persists, and we still speak of genes for things—for blue eyes, for disease, for destiny—as if DNA really is the language of the gods.
But life is not so simple. Genes are not destiny. Metaphors inevitably constrain as much as they illuminate. They open certain avenues of thought while quietly closing others. So when we talk about genes as code, this is not wrong as such. It’s more that this metaphor (and those like them) can close down avenues for thinking about genetics that we really now want to open up.
One different way to think about genomes is to imagine them more like a jazz score. Responsive to context, environment, and chance. With jazz, the notes matter, sure, but they are open to endless interpretations and every performance will be different. This metaphor may help you, it may not (especially if you are one of those people that jazz makes physically uncomfortable). But what is clear is that we need new ways to think about genetics – ways that open us up to embracing complexity.
The limits of many deterministic genetic metaphors have been known for a long time. Evelyn Fox Keller, in her seminal book The Century of the Gene (2000), argued that while such metaphors have allowed scientists to expand their thinking, they could no longer capture the new and complex ways that scientists understand what genes do.
Similarly in his recent book How Life Works, the science writer Philip Ball writes:
“Genes are no more a blueprint for our bodies than they are a blueprint for our minds or indeed our lives. They impart capabilities; the rest is up to us, in interaction with our environment.”
25 years on from Evelyn Fox Keller’s work, we are still battling the idea that genes are all that matter. As we are talking about dire wolves, perhaps we can take a line from Game of Thrones: “Power resides where men believe it resides”– and modern society often still believes that it resides in our genes.
This conversation ties us in to broader concerns about where genetic determinism could take us. The idea that we are no more than our genes, that our biology defines us, is the main rotten core of eugenics. These ideas are finding favour again with the alt right, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk – as I have written about here.
If eugenics extends genetic determinism into society, Colossal Biosciences have extended it to palaeontology. With enough genetic knowhow, they seem to suggest, even the past is editable. This type of thinking is part of a broader fantasy: that science will absolve us of the need for difficult social change to protect the world we have now. That vaccines will negate the need for pandemic-preparedness, that carbon capture will excuse drilling more oil out of the ground, that gene-editing will atone for biodiversity loss. The extent to which science can save us is of course an open question, and while I am an optimist about science, I am also of the belief that it cannot substitute for stewardship.
For now, let’s return to the dire wolves. For me, the lesson here isn’t just about wolves (both real, fictional, and the somewhere in between). It’s about language and the stories we let ourselves believe. It’s about not letting this genetic escapism distract us from the real, urgent task: protecting the fragile, fleeting natural world we still have.
The dire wolf is gone. The living world is not. That’s where our attention—and our awe—belongs.
Jonathan Roberts is a genetic counsellor and academic. He researches health inequalities, the accessibility of genetic testing and the ethical implications of genetics.