The Case for the Dire Wolf

Colossal Biosciences recently announced the birth (creation?) of three de-extincted dire wolves, a canid species that disappeared 10,000 years ago due to pressure from a changing climate, extirpation by ancient humans, and competition from grey wolves. Colossal produced the pups by editing just 14 genes in grey wolf cells to express phenotypes typical of dire wolves, including white fur, a more muscular jaw, and larger size. Chris Mason, a professor of genomics and advisor to Colossal, hailed the effort as a victory for “both science and for conservation as well as preservation of life, and a wonderful example of the power of biotechnology to protect species, both extant and extinct.”

The rest of the scientific community was, shall we say, more mixed on the accomplishment.

“They’re an abomination,” declared Popular Mechanics. “No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction,” read a headline in The New Scientist.

“A grey wolf with 20 edits to 14 genes, even if these are key differences, is still very much a grey wolf,” paleontologist Nic Lawrence told Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova. “The three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves. Nor are they proxies of the dire wolf,” declared the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which evaluates such things.

But those evaluations are far from uncontested. "I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it's filling the role of that species then you've done it," argued Colossal’s Beth Shapiro. “Those 14 alleles were truly extinct,” tweeted de-extinction advocate Stewart Brand, “and they have been brought back to functional life in a living canid…which could function in the wild as the large apex predator dire wolves used to be.”

I find these technical disputes fascinating, and they are certainly worthy of scientific deliberation. But I have to admit I can’t help but resent the scientists so obsessed with technicality that they seem unable to appreciate the magic in front of them: we created modern dire wolves! Worse than that, I can’t help but notice that environmental scientists readily cling to scientific technicality only when it suits their political project, while stretching the bounds of technicality when it doesn’t.

Just compare and contrast the wolves to the snail darter, a tiny fish infamous in environmental circles for temporarily obstructing the construction of a dam in the 1970s. Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum, and his colleagues recently argued that the snail darter, actually, never really existed, and is in fact genetically identical to the stargazing darter, which is not threatened. The two subpopulations of fish were originally classified as distinct species based on morphological differences, but subsequent analysis found even these differences to be exaggerated. As the New York Times reported in January, Near “contends that early researchers ‘squinted their eyes a bit’ when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam.”

Near’s critics actually conceded this charge, accusing him of “lumping” the subpopulations together. “Whether he intends it or not, lumping is a great way to cut back on the Endangered Species Act,” Boston College’s Zygmunt Plater told the Times. Plater by implication prefers the “splitting” school of classification, or what other scientists have called “taxonomic inflation.” Splitting has been leveraged to protect subpopulations of killer whales and owls among other things, and its function is something of an open secret in the conservation community. As one scientist put it to National Geographic in 2021, “The potential positive conservation impact of splitting forest and savanna elephants into separate species cannot be overstated.”

Certainly if morphological traits were enough to “split” the two fish pictured above, then the much larger morphological differences between grey wolves and the de-extincted dire wolves merit separate species classifications. So obviously there is something more than strict adherence to taxonomic classification going on here. As Stephen Jay Gould put it in 1985, “splitting is often more a record of our inability to comprehend variation than a depiction of evolutionary reality.”

Instead of consistently applying scientific principles, environmental scientists selectively apply genetic frameworks to arrive at a preferred result. Scientists lump grey wolves and dire wolves together to oppose hubristic commercial de-extinction efforts, while splitting snail darters and stargazing darters apart to oppose construction of a dam. In each case, genetic diversity—the putative scientific purpose of species conservation—is an afterthought; shrugged off as insignificant in the case of the wolves and as immaterial in the case of the fish.

“This isn’t de-extinction or conservation, but invention,” wrote Vox’s Bolotnikova of the wolves. It’s not obvious to me how one would draw an unambiguous distinction between these things. But it is clear to me that if scientists “invented” the modern dire wolf, they also “invented” the snail darter.

It’s entirely legitimate for scientists to simply prefer wolves and fish the way they are. But they should just be honest about that, instead of expecting science to tell us what to do with them. As Dan Sarewitz wrote in the aptly-titled paper “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse,” our values and goals “must be fully articulated and adjudicated through political means before science can play an effective role in resolving environmental problems.” Instead, the dire wolf doubters and snail darter conservers selectively deploy frameworks like the Endangered Species Act and the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission, calling upon science to settle questions of values.

Conversely, as Ted Nordhaus wrote a few years ago, we could steward nature because we want to, not because “the science says” we have to. (Science, after all, is not a mystical deity that “says” anything.) In reviewing Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, Ted considered the many ways in which humans engineer and intervene in nature, and the ways in which science fails to resolve the conflicts created in the intervening. As Ted wrote, we don’t protect species and landscapes because science tells us how. We do so “because we think they are beautiful, or at least because we think the idea of them is beautiful. Also, because we can.”

We can preserve existing grey wolves, or we can de-extinct their vanquished dire wolf cousins—or, indeed, we can do both. We can protect stargazing darters, or we can build a dam that wipes out those fish that swim in its way. These are all choices for humans to make. To the extent science can help decide between these choices, it is because science, too, is a human invention. As the American Conservation Coalition’s Isaiah Menning tweeted regarding the wolves, “This is dominion.”

Humans have been genetically engineering wolves for our purposes for tens of thousands of years. They’re called dogs. Just as modern, hyper-productive corn bears little resemblance to its ancient grain ancestors, and just as we still call it the Mississippi River even after humans altered nearly every inch of its shores, the classification of nature is informed, but not decided, by science. Humans named the ancient dire wolves, and we will name the modern ones.