“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," she said.
How does she know what a dire wolf looked like and acted like though? They went extinct 10,000 years ago! I hate this quite frankly . Unethical, wasteful, and they’re not even dire wolves!
I think it’s interesting and worthwhile research but I agree with you that they’re overhyping this and it leaves a lot to be desired. To make real dire wolves at minimum we would need much more complete DNA, and maybe more beyond that.
This was unethical research though. They basically tweaked a few things in a wolf without regard to quality of life.
And the changes are so superficial that it reminds me of a gimmick to raise more money; I actually looked for references to crypto and block chain, in case they went there too.
Why would a few tweaks negatively affect their quality of life? I completely agree the marketing is scummy and a gimmick but it is the next step in this type of research, if you ignore the spin.
That is a lot of effort put into making a slightly different wolf.
There are lots of people complaining about the ethics… But, but, baby woof!
Great … a wolf that’s twice the size of a normal one … while we’re at, let’s put a machine gun on it … or maybe a lazer.
Wild the amount of money spent bring back an extict species instead of trying to protect the ones we already have.
Its like trying to justify ruining the environment and driving species to extinction as no biggie because we can just have a do-over through the power of science.
That’s exactly how it’s being presented. I’m not necessarily against the research, but there are only a few species we’ll be able to do this with. This isn’t a back door to undoing damage done. Plus, why do we do it with things that will have to live in captivity, as a wild release would reek havoc on an existing biome. Actually, this is probably true of anything, even seemingly docile ones.
Well to be fair we don’t know what the ecological effects of them would be. They could well be positive. This is a species that many of our living species today coexisted with for millions of years before they went extinct in the recent past. It’s possible (I think likely) that today’s ecosystems are meaningfully impaired by their absence in ways we can’t recognize because we have never studied what the complete ecosystem would look like.
In my mind it would be worthwhile to create a small preserve and study what those interactions look like. We thought gray wolves were harmful to nature for hundreds of years until we actually did the science to find out we were wrong.
i feel the same way. they made this video, though, which explains how the end product (ie. the pups) required the development of many other technologies that can help endangered species.
