Dire Wolves and fake news

Following the success of Game of thrones, a laboratory has tried to capitalize on it, pretending to have recreated the wolves of the Stark children.

That’s fake news.

The point of view of science

What is problematic is that news are everywhere on the net and in media, presenting the story as the laboratory wants it.

Time magazine cover

I have hesitated to set that here or in the media sector.

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The simpleton thinking, arrogance and hubris is beyond my conception.

Let’s bring back mega fauna, who care’s that today is an entirely different biosphere, never thought of that, hey, but look what we can do in this lab.

Tell me dystopia hasn’t arrived. :scream:

And some are trying to bring back the Woolly Mammoth…

Fine, the only species I would be against bringing back from extinction is probably us.

While many of us deeply care about maintaining the beautiful complexities of nature, as a species we just can’t help ourselves but to destroy it.

As we often ask around here, where is the peer reviewed scientific paper?

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What difference might their peer reviewed paper make for the moral of this story?

By Riley Black, April 10, 2025
"… To put it another way, Colossal’s dire wolves are like Tesla’s disastrous Cybertruck. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the co-founder of Colossal is a billionaire. Someone rich felt a pang of nostalgia and made a demand. The infamous and ugly Cybertruck was inspired by video game vehicles. Colossal’s wolves are prestige TV creatures.

"This kind of thinking is everywhere: Blue Origin is sending Katy Perry way high up into the sky, a stunt to help sell a sci-fi daydream of one day taking a bus to Moon.

"This isn’t progress; it’s a bunch of toys.

"Meanwhile, the government is actively gutting science and health agencies, and firing people who do the challenging and often-unglamourous work that research involves—not for personal glory and a shiny press treatment, but simply to advance knowledge and make the world better for the humans and creatures who already live here.

"Careful and painstaking conservation work, such as the work restoring wood bison herds to Alaska, is overlooked in favor of designer species given meme-sprinkled promo reels.

“Facts, as we have bitterly learned over the past two decades, count for little right now. …”

My guess, it would reveal that didn’t do much. They did some regular old gene splicing and made a special doggy. This is not a step toward saving the planet from the destruction humans have wrought.

In fact, this topic could be in the philosophy sector.

Is it ethical to ressuscite extincts species when they have no more space to live and prosper.

Second question: Man and chimpanzees have 99, 99 common genes.

If you implant roughly 60 human genes in a chimpanzee, you can get a simili man, or a chimpanzee with human consciousness

I believe the goal can be faster and better achieved by replacing ape-chromosomes 2p and 2q with human chromosome 2 that results in a larger brain growth.

All other chromosomes are cosmetic and adaptive to the environment, as is evident by the variety in the non-human great ape species, even as they have the same number of chromosomes.


It appears that a female chimpanzee (pan) experienced the mutated gene #2 and gave birth to the first human (homo sapiens).
https://www.pasttime.org/2013/08/episode-5-throwing-in-human-evolution/

That single mutated chromosome is what sets humans apart from all other apes.
Consider the increased and more complex growth-potential in a chromosome that is twice the size of 2 single chromosomes .

If that fused chromosome was instrumental to larger brain growth, that would logically explain that humans did not evolve via the normal gradual natural selection process over many generations, but in a single generation that produced the ape with the mutated large brain, i.e humans.
i.e. the map is incorrect.

All other minor chromosomal changes seem to be cosmetic and adaptive to a migration from mainly vegetarian tree-dwelling lifestyle to a more versatile tree/ ground-dwelling as contrasted with the strictly ground-dwelling long distance travelling hunting-gathering lifestyle and migration of humans across all continents.