191–200 of 208 posts
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Yes I do mean interbreeding. The rest of the NYT article ought to cite the source. I can no longer read it so you better check yourself.
THe reason I asked is because I have just read several articles in more scientific sources linked here asserting that the latest genetic evidence suggests there was no interbreeding , because wolves and dires were so genetically distant.
Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editor…
That entire article just sounds like a collection of every naysayer argument they could find, compiled into an authoritative-sounding essay on why doing nothing is better than doing some very cool proof-of-concept genetic editing tech. Are they just reflexively against tech these days? Because when the arguments they bring are so scattered and miscellaneous, it sure sounds like they're justifying a preexisting opposi…
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> The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact. In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have any sort of positive impact.
The idea is that cold-resistant elephants / woolly mammoth - like creatures would restore arctic steppe grasslands and promote carbon sequestration. It's difficult to sum up in a sentence but there are quite a number of articles out there on it, and it doesn't seem like the most bonkers idea I've ever heard. And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling & techn…
Over what timescale? They don't seriously engage with this idea at all. It's total lip-service.
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Yes, species/lineage/population distinctions are quite fuzzy at the level of divergence under consideration here (dire wolves vs gray wolves). Here's what was actually have done according to the New Yorker article, starting with a gray wolf genome as the baseline: After almost a year of computational genetic analysis, Colossal researchers used Crispr to make twenty edits on fourteen genes. Fifteen edits were derived…
I don't get it, so dire wolves were only 20 gene changes from gray wolves? Not thousands of tiny,crucial changes all over their respective genetic codes?
Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editor…
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Semi-related: very few people, even capable professional writers, use "disinterested" correctly.
Using a word "correctly" isn't actually something everyone agrees on, though. As much as certain usages rub me the wrong way, it's hard for me not to fall on the side of descriptivism and that the issue is with my reaction rather than other people; words are all just made up sounds (and written symbols, of course) that we use to communicate, after all, and if enough people use them in a certain way, it doesn't really…
Sometimes prescriptivism is pretentious nonsense (like hypercorrection), status-seeking bullshit, or bullying masquerading as erudition, but sometimes it's just an explicit contribution to that ongoing negotiation and consensus.
When one of my students submits an essay containing the word 'over-exaggerate,' I correct it, striking out 'over-.' The word appears in dictionaries, so in that sense it's standard, and my correction is wrong, but it is an ugly, stupid word and should never appear in academic writing (and literate college students should know that). In my students' writing, it has increasingly replaced the simpler, better "exaggerate."
It's my responsibility as a teacher to encourage my students to think about the choices they make and the language they use, especially in an academic context, but I'm also hoping to cultivate the habit more broadly of just thinking about their choices, understanding that there are choices, and recognizing that the alternative is to be at the mercy of whatever consensus they're receiving from pop culture.
In most contexts, outside of a classroom, I won't bother with the correction, because it would be obviously unwelcome and inappropriate, but it has its place.
The line between descriptivism and prescriptivism is also very porous. Usage largely determines correctness, so unless you want to throw correctness completely out the window, there are going to be gray areas where either usage isn't widely agreed or where it really is necessary to correct language that falls afoul of standard usage regardless of whether the incorrect use will eventually be deemed correct.
Anyhow, 'disinterest''s disputed sense fills a hole in the language: 'uninterested' is a word; 'uninterest' isn't. People have solved the problem by collapsing the two words into one -- so that 'disinterest' and 'uninterest' are synonyms -- and throwing away the meaning of disinterest they use less often.
If I accept this, English loses some of its complexity and color. I don't want that.
Moreover, key texts and concepts become harder to appreciate if its sense corrupts this way. What do people think "disinterested justice" is if they don't know the meaning of the word? This kind of literacy is, I think, a basic building block of critical thinking. One can't think effectively, particularly in a social (political) setting, if one can't use words effectively.
I think it's ethical, but I hate that it's fake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf#DNA_evidence Look at this caldogram and text > The sequences indicate the dire wolf to be a highly divergent lineage which last shared a most recent common ancestor with the wolf-like canines 5.7 million years ago. The study also measured numerous dire wolf and gray wolf skeletal samples that showed their morphologies to be highly…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wol... This however disagreed with Wikipedia, and said there was some inbreeding. That helps make this less fake.
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Using a word "correctly" isn't actually something everyone agrees on, though. As much as certain usages rub me the wrong way, it's hard for me not to fall on the side of descriptivism and that the issue is with my reaction rather than other people; words are all just made up sounds (and written symbols, of course) that we use to communicate, after all, and if enough people use them in a certain way, it doesn't really…
Language changes, sure, but only because people change language. The changes, and lack of them, are always the result of an ongoing negotiation and evolving consensus as to what words should mean and how they should be used. Sometimes prescriptivism is pretentious nonsense (like hypercorrection), status-seeking bullshit, or bullying masquerading as erudition, but sometimes it's just an explicit contribution to that o…
I'm also not super convinced that people won't be able to understand concepts like "disinterested justice" because there's plenty of other terminology for that like "impartial" that are arguably much more common; I'm honestly not sure I've ever heard the term "disinterested justice" before now. I can at least see the value of that viewpoint being expressed even if I don't agree with it though, so in retrospect I should have responded before directly to the comment about "decimate" rather than replying to your response.
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Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked. That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan t…
I think Colossal is betting on the fact that the general public will fall for sensationalism of this sort because of the low level of biology knowledge. This story makes me think Colossal is rather better at marketing than they are at genetics. What they've created here are not actually dire wolves but a couple of timber wolves with about a dozen edits to 12 million gene pairs and the result is creatures that have ph…