cab67
cab67's JournalThe dire wolf is still extinct.
There have been headlines – and even the cover of Time Magazine – touting the alleged “de-extinction” of the dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, based on genetic engineering.
Please let me explain why this is bullshit, and why the headlines should be (mostly) disregarded.
Full disclosure – I’m a professional vertebrate paleontologist who also uses DNA (including DNA from fossils). I don’t work on mammals; rather, I work on animals that eat mammals. And I use the DNA to reconstruct evolutionary relationships - not for resurrection. Still, I have a decent idea what did (and did not) happen in this case.
The dire wolf (which used to be recognized as Canis dirus until analyses of ancient DNA showed it to be more closely related to other canids) is known from Pleistocene (“Ice Age”) deposits across North and South America. It was long viewed as basically a much larger relative of the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus), but it’s not actually a member of Canis, and the largest subspecies of C. lupus are about the same size as A. dirus. Still, it would probably have looked more or less like a wolf - a big dog, at any rate - and would have been an impressive predator.
It's best sampled, I think, from the La Brea Tar pits. There’s an entire wall at the George Page Museum in Los Angeles (which is one of the best paleo museums in North America) dedicated to dire wolf skulls. Animals would be stuck in the tar, drawing predators and scavengers that, in turn, would also get stuck in the tar. (The image many have of deep pits of tar is mythical; in most cases, it would be a thin, but extremely sticky, film of tar at the surface, or maybe on the bottom of a shallow lake. Animals stuck in the tar would actually remain mostly exposed at the surface while they were scavenged; they wouldn’t “sink into the tar.” But I digress.)
Anyway – several companies are trying to “resurrect” recently extinct animals. This is very controversial among scientists; many of us (myself included) think the enormous amount of money being spent to bring some of these animals back (which is extremely unlikely to happen, though I’d love to be proved wrong) would be better used to conserve existing habitat and preventing future extinctions. I have some other issues that I’ll raise later.
One of these companies, Colossal Biosciences, is claiming they’ve done this with the dire wolf.
Except they haven’t. Not even close.
What they did, from a straightforwardly scientific point of view, is actually very cool. They edited some gray wolf genes. 20 edits for 14 genes. Yes, it’s an accomplishment – but the cubs are not dire wolves. They’re gray wolves with a bit of genetic tinkering.
I know GMOs are a sensitive topic here. I will neither defend nor decry them, and the debate is irrelevant to my point, which is that when genes from different organisms are spliced into something like maize or tomatoes, the resulting plants are still maize and tomatoes. They just have some tinkered genes. (Again – whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is completely beside the point here.) This is pretty much identical to what’s been done here; they’ve bred gray wolves with some tinkered genes.
Although the people at Colossal Biosciences have accomplished something of note, they haven’t resurrected anything.
Is it a species?
In response to published criticism of their claims, Colossal issued a statement arguing that we shouldn’t (or don’t) use genetic criteria to recognize species, and that we should use phenotype. This opens that great oaken door to the Pandora’s Box that is species concepts, but it’s also completely wrong.
In high school biology, we learn that species are populations of interbreeding individuals that produce fertile offspring, but can’t do so with individuals from other populations. This is known as the Biological Species Concept (BSC), and the dirty secret is that very few biologists actually use it. I, for one, usually can’t – fossils, being dead, generally don’t mate. There are asexual species, and for some groups (including mine – crocodiles and alligators) – hybridization between what would generally be considered distinct species is very common. Following the strictest application of the BSC possible, the 12 or 13 recognized species of Crocodylus would become one.
So what’s a species?
Here’s a problem I’ve encountered. Maybe you have, too. I sometimes encounter groups of biologists, and they’re all alive. What do I do about that? The ancient Greeks used hemlock, but there are way too many biologists for that nowadays. So I lock them all in a room and say, “no one gets out until you agree on what a species is.” They will all die.
That said, the myriad concepts out there boil down to three. The BSC is one of them, but there’s also the Evolutionary Species Concept (ESC), in which a species is a lineage of populations evolving over time; and the Phylogenetic Species Concept (PSC), in which a species is basically the smallest unit of biodiversity circumscribed by unique combinations of morphological and genetic features.
These aren’t mutually exclusive of each other. In effect, the ESC is what a species actually is; the BSC explains how species come into being for sexually-reproducing organisms; and the PSC explains how we know we have a species. The ESC defines the conceptual species that we hope our operational (or inferred) species, which are smallest diagnosable units, approximate as closely as possible. And reproductive isolation is the best possible evidence that a smallest diagnosable unit is a species.
What Colossal described is kind of like the PSC, but the PSC as used by actual biologists would still (in concept, at least) represent evolutionary units. These cubs don’t fit that definition. So the statement they released is nonsensical and should be ignored.
Again, what Colossal Bioscience did is impressive. But they haven’t resurrected anything.
This also brings up a broader discussion – what, exactly, is “resurrection?”
The purest form would involve the re-creation of an organism from the complete genome of another. This is cloning. And for extinct animals, it’s very unlikely to happen. We have DNA from a comparatively small number of fossils, and it’s usually degraded, so we usually don’t have the complete genome.
We obviously have complete genomes for many recently extinct species (Tasmanian wolf, great auk, dodo, etc.), and we do have complete genomes from some fossils, but unless it’s in an intact cell nucleus, it won’t do much for cloning.
And we would want this in the nucleus of an ovum or stem cell.
There’s the issue of surrogacy. Woolly and Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus primogenius and M. columbi, respectively) were much larger than their closest living relative (Asian elephant, Elephas maximus), and their calves would have been larger; would a female Asian elephant be able to carry a mammoth calf to term? And would her body recognize it as a foreign entity with different DNA and reject it? Colossal Bioscience itself ran into this problem, which is why they switched from mammoths and dodos to the dire wolf - although without a close living relative, this is still a big problem for dire wolves.
(There have been claims in the media that the dire wolf and gray wolf are each other's closest relatives. They are not.)
This is why I think efforts to clone the Tasmanian wolf are doomed; their closest living relatives are no more than half the size of an adult thylacine. It's also why I think if we're going to clone a mammoth, we should try for one of the miniature species that lived on islands in the Mediterranean or off the coast of California. (I want those resurrected because I think they'd make awesome pets.)
The closest we've come to actually cloning something extinct was with the Pyrenean ibex, which is considered a subspecies of the Iberian ibex (Capra pyrenaica). The last known individual died in 2000. A cloned individual was born in 2003, but it only lived for a few hours. (This makes the Pyrenean ibex the only extinct species to be cloned and the only species to have gone extinct twice.)
This is also the reason we'll never resurrect Tyrannosaurus rex. The oldest DNA we have is around 2 million years in age, and it's degraded. DNA just doesn't last that long.
Assuming we can’t actually clone extinct animals, we could genetically engineer them, which is what Colossal Bioscience is trying to do here. Or we could selectively breed modern animals to look like their extinct relatives. I wouldn’t try this with a mammoth – generation times are way too long – but we could, in practice do so.
But are these true de-extinction? Or have we created something new that might resemble something extinct?
Then there’s the cost. A lot of money is being thrown at the problem. Meanwhile, land use and climate change are increasing the risk of further extinctions that could be prevented.
And what do we do with these animals? Put them in a zoo? “Re-wilding” is nonsense – I’d be happy to explain why in the comments – so releasing them into the wild is not an option. How do we maintain them, given that the environments they lived in may no longer exist?
There's also a deep ethical concern if someone tries to resurrect Australopithecus, Paranthropus, or an earlier species of Homo. What rights would these individuals have? Would they be considered human in the eyes of the law? Would they be treated with the same dignity as modern humans? And where would they live? This, I think, should be flat-out forbidden.
It hurts me to say these things, because it would be totally cool to see a real dire wolf.
Anyway, my thoughts on it. The dire wolf is still extinct, and I suspect it’s going to stay that way.
He is not an American Original
This shouldn't be an issue to consider, but I consider it anyway -
In the future, biographies will be written about Twinklesphincter. They will probably also make a movie based on one of them.
My fear is that he'll be portrayed as an American Original. This is sometimes done when biopics are made of Americans who did great things in spite of being deeply flawed humans in some way. Think Theodore Roosevelt, LBJ, PT Barnum, or George S. Patton. Sometimes, the flaws are only hinted at; other times, the figure is credited for having accomplished great things both in spite of and because of these flaws. People like that could only be great in America! Only in America could people like this find their true potential for greatness! Only in America could someone so flawed and unimportant step up to the call of history! They were American Originals!
There was a miniseries about George Washington when I was in high school back in the early 1980's. There was a scene I remember very clearly - Washington stepped out of Mount Vernon to find one of his footmen - an enslaved Black man - weeping. He asked someone what was going on and was told that his wife and children had just been sold. Washington was shown them being loaded onto a wagon.
He immediately dashed off for the wagon. His tricorn hat flew off. "Stop! Stop!" he yelled. When he got to the wagon, he shouted to the white man standing there that "we don't break up families! Ever!"
He then ran back to where he was and told the first person he spoke to the same thing - we don't break up families!
I have no idea if this actually happened, but it had the desired effect - at least one naive viewer (me) thought, "OK, he was a slaveholder - but, like, he wasn't a mean one." Whoever produced the biopic didn't want to ignore the basic flaw in Washington's biography - that he owned human beings as slaves - but wanted to put a smiley face on it by depicting him as a "nice" one.
As a more mature person, I now understand what was done. Washington was the Father of our Country, but the kind of hagiography that might have been made before 1960 was no longer acceptable. The civil rights movement had happened, and it was no longer OK to pretend many the founding fathers, who came up with an ingenious (if flawed) constitution and led the US to independence, owned slaves - something that, by then, was seen as inherently evil. So slavery was acknowledged, even if only with a wink and nod.
(As George Carlin once put it, there's a fundamental hypocrisy in the history of the United States - the country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.)
We cannot let this be done with Rusty McCombover.
To begin with, he's not an original. There have been scam artists and hucksters throughout history. There have always been people who know how to appeal to basic instincts with simplified and deceptive language. He happens to be very successful at these, but there's nothing fundamentally original about him in this regard.
And this isn't the same kind of great-thing, flawed-man situation. He hasn't done great things, unless you count convincing a whole lot of people that he should be President of the United States as somehow great. (Impressive, maybe - but not in any positive way.) When he speaks, he only utters flawed words. He lies. He pretends to understand things he doesn't. He's a failed businessman who seems to think he's a great success, and he seems to think the world owes him something. And he's doing what he is because he wants to get back at people he thinks attacked him. He's a selfish, bigoted, spiteful small man with a big megaphone, and nothing more.
If there's a biopic, it can't be allowed to depict him as the great-but-flawed American Original. It has to show things honestly, and that means a film of little more than flaws.
I realize this isn't a big issue, and I'm not actually dwelling on it, but it crosses my mind from time to time.
I also hope that the Turd Who Walks as a Man Does' replacement puts the portraits of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the Oval Office, where they can be seen every time he speaks to the nation from there.
Know what the US news media should do?
I'm sure Fox "News" won't go along, but so long as the White House bans certain media outlets, all news media should refer only to "the President." They should not use the name of the diaper load currently occupying that office.
In fact, no one in the administration should be named. They should just become "White House officials," "secretaries of [insert name of department]," and whatnot.
No names. And especially not the president's.
I can guarantee the exclusion policies would be reversed in short order.
This Enola Gay business is reminding me of a virtual meeting I attended during the pandemic.
Most of you probably know this, but - efforts to scrub "objectionable" language from the federal government's web sites led to deletion of information about the B-29 that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima (the Enola Gay) and Ensign George Gay, who was the only survivor of his squadron of TBD Devastator torpedo bombers during the Battle of Midway. He ended up treading water in the middle of the Japanese fleet, watching events unfold before he was rescued.
Something similar happened in my field.
I want to preface by acknowledging that what Twinklesphincter's people are doing with "woke" language is an insult to every literate person in the world. What I'm going to describe was an amusing annoyance - not the serious effort to remove the visibility of whole groups of people this represents.
Anyway -
The primary professional meeting I attend pretty much every year is the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting. It's always a blast - my students and I present some of our research, we see others present really cool research, and I get to see friends I haven't seen for a while. I've attended almost every meeting since 1989.
When the Pandemic hit, it quickly became clear that in-person professional meetings weren't going to happen. Or if they did, smart people wouldn't be attending. This being an organization of scientists who generally understand how the germ theory of disease works, SVP's leadership moved the meeting to virtual.
A lot of my colleagues groused about the virtual format. I strongly prefer in-person, but I still got a lot out of the virtual meeting. It was virtual again the following year. Those opposed to it were loud, but very small in number.
SVP hired a company that runs online meetings to run ours. And they did a really good job, except for one thing - the language filter that was intended to prevent abuse during the meeting.
Among the words screened by their system? Bone! This was an organization dedicated largely to the study of bones, but the word "bone" was being censored. So were words like "pubis/pubic," "erect," and "hell."
There was a symposium on the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, which is famous mostly for dinosaur discoveries. Dinosaurs are known for their erect posture. Suddenly, anyone giving a talk at that symposium on the pubic bone of an erect-walking dinosaur from the Hell Creek Formation was instead speaking of the anteroventral hip ossification of a vertically-postured dinosaur from the Heck Creek Formation.
Naughtier words related to scatology or reproductive behavior were presumably censored as well, though except for people talking about coprolites, this would not have been a big issue.
The problem was caught and fixed early, so it didn't really cause any serious disruption. We basically chuckled about it. But it drove home the importance of context. The company that ran our meeting had never run a vertebrate paleontology meeting before. In fact, they'd never run any sort of scientific meeting before. I suppose it's OK to look askance at anyone using words like "pubic" at a real estate conference, but again, context is everything.
This even made it into the news media: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/16/profanity-filter-bones-paleontologists-conference
Thought some of you might get a chuckle out of it.
transgender mice?
Another day, another day to be ashamed to be an American.
Last night, Trump complained about millions of dollars being used to develop "transgender mice."
Except it's not happening. Old Twinklesphincter, or whoever wrote his speech, was confusing transgender mice with transgenic mice. Transgenic mice are used very widely to study how genes work and how genetic disorders happen. Very practical stuff.
When corrected about it, the White House doubled down, and they just released a document listing alleged efforts to develop "transgender animals." (I won't provide a link, as I don't think it should get a lot of visibility, but it can be found through a google search.) These studies add up to around 8 million dollars, but because none of them are working to create transgender animals, the document is useless.
(The document also says Biden funded them, but he didn't. They were funded by the NIH following the same competitive peer-review process all us scientists endure when applying for federal research support.)
You can look them up for yourself. These grants explore the impact of hormone treatments on on such things as vaccine effectiveness, fertility, cancer, and asthma. The rodents are being administered hormones to simulate treatments given to transgender people, but that doesn't mean these rodents become transgender.
In other words, they're not looking at the phenomenon of transgenderism itself - they're looking at the long-term impacts of some of the treatments involved in gender transition.
I know Trump is restricted by his limited anatomy - he has only two parts, a mouth and an anus, and they're interchangeable - but is it too much to ask his speechwriters to do a little proofreading?
UPDATE on Oakland County child case
Many of us were horrified this morning at the news that three children had been found in disgusting conditions with no supervision. The children evidently didn't know how to flush a toilet (even though they were all above the age of 10) and were living amid excrement and filth.
I, and many others, wanted to know where the bloody heck these childrens' father was, or their extended family, or the school system.
An update has been provided by Oakland County officials that actually answers many of these questions. The mother was actively preventing the kids' father from seeing them and misleading other family members about their status, and cracks in school system policy were wide enough for the kids to fall through.
In this case, the officials are calling out for very specific policy changes to make sure this doesn't happen again.
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/pontiac-3-children-found-living-in-vile-conditions/
My rage remains unabated, but I feel like I can direct it more precisely right now.
question a lawyer may be able to answer
For a couple of reasons, I follow the wrongful conviction/exoneration news fairly closely.
Exonerees sometimes sue police and detectives responsible for their wrongful conviction, with varying levels of success - police are entitled to qualified immunity, so the bar to prove deliberate wrongdoing is very high. (Prosecutors can almost never be sued.) But in some cases, the officers involved had died before the suit could be brought, so the lawsuit lists the estate of that officer rather than the officer themself.
If such lawsuits are successful, who would actually be responsible for paying damages? Would it be the heirs of that officer's estate, or would this be covered by former employer's insurance, which in this case would be the police department or sheriff's office?
Just curious here.
the Orange One may extend his record!
Right now, there have been four impeachments of the US president. Half of those are Trump.
Assuming Democrats can regain control of Congress in 2026, and assuming Trump acts as he did last time, he'll represent a solid majority of them.
Not saying Democrats should just look for a reason to impeach him. I'm saying there will almost certainly be a reason.
Thoughts on listening to a favorite book on audible -
Trump isn't assembling a cabinet. He's assembling an owsla.
We're headed toward the Woundwort administration.
Question on the idiotic tariffs -
Does anyone know if they include imported oil?
Most of our imported oil comes from Canada. The second largest source is Mexico.
Mind you, I'm actually in favor anything that causes consumers to conserve and use less oil. Higher gas prices do have that impact, though I acknowledge they also cause hardship. But given how loudly so many of Trump's followers were decrying high gas prices as the pandemic receded (which they blamed on Biden), it would be worth knowing whether oil is included in the tariffs.
I've said to several people (though not necessarily here) that no president since Eisenhower has had much of an impact on the price of petroleum products. Saudi Arabia's reserves are large enough that it, alone, can control the price of oil in the global market. But Trump might become the first president since the 1950's to pull off that stunt, albeit not in the way his supporters would like.
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Member since: Wed Jul 24, 2013, 01:10 PMNumber of posts: 3,329