It’s not lost on me that Nancy Pelosi got scores of Democrats who represented purple and conservative districts in the House to torpedo their careers to give Americans healthcare via the ACA, leading to a bloodbath in the 2010 midterms, but Republican leadership can’t get a single congressman to speak out against the current President (and thus risk harming their careers by angering Trump’s brainwashed followers among their voter base) to literally save the American economy.
And yet Democrats are always the ones in “disarray”.
they could have said, like, “we made a new wolf morph, which shows how far genetic science has advanced”. they could have said, “we’re calling them direwolves out of a love for the extinct species.” maybe too much to ask for but would have loved it if they’d pointed out some kind of ecological niche they were theoretically intent on resolving - like, “wolves are having trouble adapting to human sprawl and we are hoping that our research into the past will help us save wolves in the present.”
but alas they did not do this. and see this sucks because i want to be hype about new bigass fantasy wolves. there is a 7th grade version of me that would be ecstatic about this. she would be obsessive.
unfortunately, due to capitalism, now i gotta have beef with puppies. can you imagine.
this company is so frustratingly misleading. They did not bring back the direwolf (Aenocyon dirus). They modified a modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) into having some direwolf morphology. There has been no de-extinction. This is pure hype slop. As a friend said “these are dire wolves the same way La Croix is a fruit”.
I still think this tech has the potential to be helpful in a conservation context…. but it says a A LOT that these “dire wolves” look far more like something you’d see in Game of Thrones than any of the most likely reconstructions proposed by scientists who’ve studied the fossil record.
These pups might get more robust as they age, but right now I’m not seeing anything to get excited about. I just can’t help but suspect that this species was chosen specifically bc the public already has the idea of “dire wolf = gray wolf + big”, and that this company is using relatively minor CRISPR editing to give the false impression that they’re recreating anything that might have conceivably lived 10,000 years ago.
Again, I think this tech is interesting and merits further development (and if jurassic park is the only way they can do that, then, I guess that’s what’s happening), but it’s still extremely misleading to parade these animals around like they’ve actually 100% cloned a dire wolf.
Really reminds me of Jurassic Park. In the books, Crichton made it very clear that they didn’t actually clone dinosaurs. They just combined DNA to make an animal that looked like what people EXPECT a dinosaur to look like, because it turned out that actual cloned dinosaurs were really quite dull and spent most of their time hiding.
Aencyon dirus isn’t closely related to modern wolves at all either so it doesn’t make any sense to start with a gray wolf. (According to wikipedia they were isolated from the gray wolf lineage for over 5 million years.) we thought they were in genus Canis but turns out it was just convergent evolution and they are a whole other thing
now that I actually read the article, I realize that the lede was buried– they genetically modified this wolf, and they also cloned 4 critically endangered red wolves
I think the TIME article is really irresponsible in acting like the pups are dire wolves when they don’t contain any dire wolf DNA. The “dire wolf” pups are literally just gray wolve engineered to look more like the creatures on Game of Thrones (literally–one of the pups is named Khaleesi)
I remain cautiously optimistic though, because it seems like they are doing actually useful research for preserving existing animals and then putting a Jurassic Park type spin on it for the media.
The Dire wolf thing honestly might just be an attention-grabber to get money off of people that know nothing about ecosystems, and the red wolf might be the actual real purpose of the research. If they’ve figured out the genetic basis of body size and certain “wolfy” behaviors in wolves, they could make it possible to bring coyote-red wolf hybrids into the red wolf breeding pool without sacrificing the wolf traits
Y'all, just think about guys like Elon Musk. Rich tech bros with a 5 yr old boy’s idea of what is cool. This stuff is perfectly calibrated to siphon off some of those techbro’s billions, while on the side, being helpful to conservation
Just look at the traits of the altered pups that are highlighted in the article: snout, jaw and limb thickness and heaviness, vocalizations, body size. All key traits that separate red wolves and coyotes.
Here’s what the article says:
Recently, Bridgett vonHoldt, a Colossal scientific adviser and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, and Kristin Brzeski, an associate professor of wildlife science and conservation at Michigan Tech, discovered populations of canids along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas whose DNA included both coyote genes and red wolf ghost alleles. The four red wolves the Colossal scientists created used that natural genetic reservoir to produce what they call the first Ghost Wolf, with an eye to eventually fortifying the red wolf species with more such young carrying a variety of genes.
They’re using this technology to bring genetic diversity from red wolf/coyote hybrids back into the red wolf gene pool. As soon as I read “red wolves” I suspected this might be what was happening, and I was right. This could help fix the genetic bottleneck in red wolves and make a real chance for the species to actually return.
this approach is honestly genius
If that is what is happening, good for them! Reminds me of the urban legend about the oceanographers who love to study Loch Ness because it’s so very deep that the lower reaches behave like the deep ocean, but you can do your studying from a little motorboat and go home at night. So every time they need money, somebody reports that they saw Nessie again.
If they’re just scamming, well… at least they aren’t trying to sell us trucks that halt and catch fire…?
This goes hand in hand with pushing for only queer people to play queer roles. Which in theory sounds like a good thing to push for authentic representation when so much of the past stuff was bad.
Except the actual real world outcome has become queer leftists abusively dog piling any actor they deem “inauthentic” leading to actors being forcefully outed against their will before they were ready in an attempt to make the abuse stop. Including children. People have been justifying psychologically tormenting literal children for not publicly disclosing (and being firm and set in) their gender and sexuality in order to work.
In many wants it’s set back queer media and made people just as afraid of queer roles ruining their careers and their lives as they were when bigots were doing it. Which is not an improvement to the situation! It’s really only giving cover to people who want none of this to exist.
We could have just praised the process we wanted to see. Personally I love seeing Jim Parsons take that big normative sitcom money and fucking off to make emotionally powerful queer films with it casting queer actors whenever he can. But praising that will always be more constructive than bullying Kit Connor. If Daniel Craig wants to spend the rest of his career making charming gay detective movies about helping marginalized woman get revenge on abusive rich assholes, then I don’t care what his sexuality is because it’s still pushing queer media far forward.
We could have positively addressed rainbow capitalism by supporting queer-owed business. We could have accepted that mainstreaming queer iconography at Target (much of it designed by queer people who got to pay their bills making it) would make space for people buying that small batch t-shirt at Pride. It’s not like people only ever buy one t-shirt in their life.
A closeted-for-safety trans boy buying his first binder at Target could have created an opening for the next one to be from Shapeshifters. Instead he may never get the chance to know what it would feel feel like to take the first step because the wrong packaging could endanger him and the (fair) price mightbe unaffordable.
We can’t built perils into doing better. We can’t keep calling nigh-impossible next steps"the bare minimum" and tearing into them for every imperfection if we want people to do them at all. At minimum that’s a burnout machine. At worst it gives bigots leverage to maker sure we have nothing. Kindness and enthuses support of what we want to see happen makes way more progress.
Unfortunately many leftists are still so stuck in the purity-sin-redemption mentality, even when they surface-level reject Christianity, that instead of growth and change everything keeps getting treated as blasphemy unless it’s perfect. Even though perfection is impossible. So the whole well is primed to be poisoned by the people who genuinely hate us.
If you have ever been tempted by a Paleozoic Pal, like a a stuffed trilobite or a full size eurypterid body pillow, now’s the time to buy one, before they and a really lovely little museum are gone for good 😭😭😭
This was the museum I went to often in my childhood. I’m no longer able to visit unless I visit family, but this place holds a special place in my heart.
As stated in the article, they hold around 7 million artifacts- many of which are orphaned fossils, with the museum taking in collections that otherwise would have been trashed.
Please consider buying a Paleozoic Pal, but I’ll also leave a direct donation link as well.
I JUST WENT INTO A FUGUE STATE AND BOUGHT ME A 16 INCH CUDDLE BUDDY WITH PLATED TEETH!! DUNKIE, MY BELOVED!!
Screeching aside, anyone who can afford to, go look through their shop! They got clothes, and cute gifts, and books and all kinds of other awesome stuff! Ye, the shipping sucks, but we need to keep our museums alive! (the good ones, not the British Museum of Thievery XP)
HE’S HERE! MY BIG BOY IS HERE!! (And yes he is my BIG boy despite only being 16 inches, you shush!)
He took nearly a month to get here, but that’s because of ALL THE ORDERS THEY’VE BEEN GETTING! OVER 1800 ORDERS! This is why I love the online community!!
Now if you don’t mind I’m going to tuck Duncan into my sweater and go work on the piles of stuff I still have to do 😅
For anyone curious what’s happening with the PRI they’re digging themselves out! An anonymous donor gave them $1 mn which they used to secure a stay on the forclosure for the rest of the year and they’re approximately a third of the way to buying their way out of the mortgage.
Schwarzenegger winning seemed like the most embarrassing thing that would ever happen in politics at the time and now he’s to the left of every elected Republican and a few Democrats and just makes videos going “young men, my fadda was a Nazi and he was a contemptible loosah”
for everyone losing their shit in the notes: the movie is called Junior (tvtropes link) and arnie is the pregnant one.
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