More on the “dire wolf”: Adam Rutherford is furious

Like me, Matthew Cobb, and all straight-thinking scientists, geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford is sick of hearing claims about the return of “de-extincted animals.” The latest one is the Dire Wolf, a tricked-out gray wolf I wrote about yesterday. (See also Rutherford’s strong critique in the Guardian of the woolly mammoth de-extinction project.) The hype about the “de-extintcted Dire Wolf” involves making only 20 DNA base changes in 14 genes of the Gray Wolf (there are probably a bit more than 20,000 genes in wolves), so that only a few superficial characters like body size, jaw structure, and color were changed in the wolf genome. (The “Dire Wolf” came out white, but that was done using edits of wolf genes, not the insertion of color genes from the ancient DNA of Dire Wolves. We don’t know if real Dire Wolves were white.)

All these de-extinction projects involve changing just a few genes among thousands in the genome of living species, making something that only superficially looks like an extinct species. But, as Adam points out in his piece I highlight below, we know nothing about the behavior, gestation, physiology or digestion of these ancient creatures, and so are powerless to even get close to a real Dire Wolf—even if we had the ability to edit thousands of genes or even to insert a Dire Wolf genome into a wolf cell whose nucleus had been removed. (We can’t do that.)

Yet despite this, Colossal Bioscience keeps proclaiming that it’s resurrected an extinct wolf, and will soon be bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo and thylacine.  This is pure hype, and it’s not gonna happen—not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids.  Yet compliant journalists play along with Colossal, pretending that, yes, the Dire Wolf is back and the woolly mammoth is right around the corner.  To anybody who appreciates accurate science writing, this unholy collusion between the media and Colossal is reprehensible.

And so Adam has gotten more and more pissed off in the past few days, finally writing a short piece on his Substack post that takes the whole de-extinction hype apart. And it’s laden with plenty of expletives and profanity! I don’t blame him, for that same language goes on in my brain, but I lack the courage to put it on paper. But I’ll quote him below.

First, Adam announces his piece with a link.

The resurrection circus keeps clowning, but make no mistake, Dire wolves remain very extinct. An angry, sweary piece by a frustrated geneticist. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T06:22:55.899Z

The link is above, or you can go to his Substack site and read it (for free, but subscribe if you want to support his writing). Click below:

A few excerpts:

Extinction, with that one shitty exception, is forever. I’ve talked about this incessantly, with increasing humourlessness, for a number of years, once explaining to an Irish priest on live radio about the difficulties in artificial insemination due to the right-angled bend in the vaginal tract of an African elephant. Last year I appeared on the Infinite Monkey Cage and shat on the whole idea from a great height. This was unlinked to any particular press release, just a very popular subject that is worthy of interrogation, and ripe for a few gallows humour gags. Last month, when Colossus Bioscience – the company fuelling the mammoth resurrection gargleballs – released an un-peer-reviewed paper in which they unveiled a genetically modified mouse, its genome edited to include mammoth versions of a couple of genes. The hirsute mouse came out not cold adapted as was intended, but certainly a bit hairy. My write up was in the Guardian, and there’s little more to add to it.

Today, the press is awash with fawning headlines about the successful de-extinction by Colossus Bioscience of the Dire Wolf. Three pups are now alive, and they are cute.

Let me be absolutely clear on this though: no matter how cute they are, this story is absolute bollocks. No amount of fancy pictures, cool legendary names (Romulus, Remus and one from Game of Thrones), or American-brand biotech TED-style glossy hubris can change this. I’m just going to list the ways that this vexes me, and should vex you too.

ONE: The newborn wolves are not Dire Wolves. There isn’t a definition on Earth by which they could be considered Dire Wolves. Romulus, Remus and the one from Game of Thrones are Grey Wolves, an entirely different species, whose genomes have a very small number of edits that make those genes a bit more like Dire Wolf versions of the same genes. They are, by any sensible definition, genetically engineered grey wolves.

There are four ways that Rutherford’s kishkes are roiled by Colossal, but I’ll let you read the list. He does, however, make a good analogy to explain how far Colossal was from creating a genuine Dire Wolf, or even a Dire Wolf-ish canid:

I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you.

Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.

And of course he points out that dire wolves ran in packs, but “these three Grey Wolves have been brought into the world without their packs, without wolf parents (their surrogate mothers were dogs), as gaudy boutique animals for a greedy, morally suspect company.”  Yep, we can’t resurrect their social life, which we know nothing about, so we’ll never be able to let these things go free in nature, where they’d probably revert to gray wolves quickly. They’re only good for gawking at.  And we have learned almost nothing about the Dire Wolf from this project. It is the media’s distortion of what was done, and its credulous acceptance of this exaggeration, which leads Rutherford, Matthew, and I to a state of peevishness.  For in the end this kind of science reporting simply deludes the public.

Rutherford, like many of us, has great respect for Carl Zimmer’s science reporting, but Adam thinks that Zimmer reverted to “client journalism” in his NYT piece on the Dire Wolf (free access), more or less accepting that Colossal had come “close” to recreating a Dire Wolf.  When one respected science journalist disses another, you know that something has gone wrong. Rutherford says this:

Even Carl Zimmer, a mensch and doyen of American science journalism couldn’t quite manage to debunk their claims in the New York Times’ fawning write up.

On de-extinction…‘Colossal Bioscience appear to have done it, or something close’, he writes. Well, they haven’t done it, and if by ‘close’ he means ‘have done minor edits on a grey wolf so that it could barely be described as a hybrid let alone a resurrected species’ then fair game. And I’m pretty sure Carl knows that.

‘Or something close’. Disappointing client journalism from one of the best science journalists.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T22:00:48.349Z

As the Time magazine cover shows below (with one obvious edit by Rutherford), the press guzzled it like a cat with cream.  Rutherford:

. . . the press have just lapped all this wolfshit up, and regurgitated it, mostly without the slightest questioning of the corporate press release. Barely ANY reports have rebutted the dubious claims by Colossus. Time magazine has it on the cover, the word ‘extinct’ crossed out. That scientifically illiterate megalomaniacal fragile lunch Elon Musk tweeted it to his 218 million twitter followers (I will not call it X), with a picture from Game of Thrones.

Clearly, Time crossed out “extinct,” while the insertion “not’ is from Rutherford:

Many of us were surprised that Beth Shapiro, a a highly-regarded molecular evolutionist at UC Santa Cruz, took three years off to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal. Why? One can guess, but I don’t psychologize. At any rate, Shapiro appears to have bought into the Colossal hype, as Graham Coop (an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis) points out below:

Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] http://www.newscientist.com/article/2475…;

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T21:50:13.253Z

WHAT?  A morphological species concept in which changing a couple of traits creates a new species? How much does the “de-extincted” Dire Wolf have to look like the real Dire Wolf before we can say “we have it back!!”?  This species concept, which I discuss and dismiss in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, has many flaws, including the fact that many truly reproductively incompatible species nevertheless are hard or impossible to tell apart by looking. (These are often called “sibling species.”) Would Shapiro classify Japenese, the Dutch, and sub-Saharan Africans as belonging to different species?

As Coop notes as he quotes Shapiro, what she says about species concepts is “transparent BS”. (Read chapter 1 and the Appendix of Speciation if you want to learn more.)

Coop gets in one more lick:

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:56:25.311Z

Another science communicator joins the crowd of people with a beef against this faux “Dire Wolf.”

Scientists love to debate and argue, but if there are 3 things every scientist absolutely agrees on, it's that:1. Climate change is real2. Vaccines work3. Those are NOT dire wolves Read More