Did Colossal bring back the dire wolf?

Daniel and Kelly talk about de-extinction.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
According to some scientists, we are in the middle of
the sixth mass extinction, well past extinctions with the result
of things like giant asteroids. This one's probably on us.
Species go extinct on their own in the wild, but
scientists estimate the extinction rates are about one hundred times
greater than baseline extinction rates due to human impacts, and

(00:27):
this rate is increasing over time. When I was a kid,
I remember hearing the phrase extinction is forever? But is it?
With current and future technologies, can we undo the damage
we've done and bring back the species whose demise is
our causing. Today we're going to talk about the science
of d extinction. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think I've
tasted eight different kinds of animals.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Hello. I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study space and parasites,
and I didn't expect you to start with that, so
I don't know that I have a good count. Give
me your list. What are the eight kinds of animals
you've eaten?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Let's see, of course, pork, I've eaten cows, I've eaten deer,
I've eaten snake, I've eaten alligator, chicken, turkey, duck, goose.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
All right, that's nine?

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Oh is that nine? Oh my gosh, I already beat
my record.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, it's a good job, Daniel, You're a winner. Let's
say I've done chickens and ducks and turkey and.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Moose, deer, pigs and cows.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Alligator, pigs and cows. We currently have deer in our
freezer from our property.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Really sheep?

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Right, Yeah, that's right. And you've had sheep too, right, Yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
That's ten for me, and I've had goats. What's the
weirdest thing you've eaten?

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Then?

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Moose hearts?

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Ooh yeah, it was dried oh, moose heart jerky.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, it was like moose heart jerky. And it was
in a paper bag and the host that I was
visiting pulled it out of the paper bag and there
was still fat on top of it and it looked,
you know, like a heart, and it got sliced and
then put on a cracker with some butter and if
I shut my eyes, it was delicious, but I kind
of had to like not make eye contact with the food.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well that's my question for you today, is which extinct
animal do you think is the tastiest? Oh, what in
the past did humans really savor that we will never experience. Gosh,
I wonder how wooly mammoth tasted.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, well we might know soon, according to Colossal, in
five years we might be able to find out.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Do you think this is the real motivation for bringing
back species?

Speaker 1 (02:49):
I don't know. But there's an interesting movement called invasive war.
I think it's what it's called. And the idea is
that if you have an invasive species, you try to
kick up a market around eating it. Some people will
help you bring those numbers down. I can't think of
any particularly delicious animal we drove to extinction.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
I always wondered about that with Australia, because don't they
have a bunny infestation? And I thought a lot of
people eat rabbits. Yeah, don't they just eat the rabbits.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
I mean, at some point there's a lot more rabbits
than people. I know some people who can't eat bunnies
because they're cute and they have like a cute filter
for what they'll eat, and so I think there are
some people who just can't have bunnies for that reason.
And maybe there's just not enough people. I don't know
I've eaten rabbit. There's another one, Have you eaten rabbit?

Speaker 2 (03:33):
I don't think I've knowingly eaten rabbit, but I've eaten
at some French restaurants where I didn't understand the menu,
and so there's always a question there. Oh wait, snails,
I've had snails. Oh so boo, I'm up to eleven.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, snails get infected by lots of trema toad species,
and you can't get sick by eating the snails. But
that knowledge, I won't be able to ever eat a snail.
I don't think I also have a texture thing. I
don't think snails are for me.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, it's not sort of second serving kind of a
thing either.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
I'm also not an oyster person, and I know loads
of people love oysters.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah yeah, oh wait, we didn't even count the kinds
of fish. Oh, the whole other category of animals. Wow,
we've eaten a lot more than we imagine. Yeah, we
should do a thorough accounting.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
We should. We should. I guess if you include plants
and herbs and stuff, I'm sure we've conde many many
species in our lives.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Katrina tries to eat thirty different kinds of plants every day.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Wow? Why why not? Okay, yeah, sure, sure.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
I think the diversity is good for your gut, you know,
keep all those little microbes.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah yeah, Oh wow. I would get on a Katrina
diet if she were like a fitness instructor, you know,
I think it would be science informed.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
You know, she's working on a recipe book, Science Informed
Recipes for your Health.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
Sign me up. I want that book.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
You know.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Ever since we had her on the show, I do
make sure that I have a cup of beans every day.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
There you go, all right to your health.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Zach does not say thank you, but I feel better.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
All right. Well, we're not here to talk about what's
coming out of Kelly. We're here to talk about what's
coming out of a really interesting research project that's made
the news recently.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
I love your transitions.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Sometimes it's a big step to get us back on track.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
But do you always find the cleverest path between them.
So today we're talking about a company called Colossal, and
Colossal is all about de extinction. So they're trying to
bring back animals that have been driven to extinction in
every case by humans, and they made the news recently
because they are claiming to have brought back the dire wolf,

(05:29):
And so we asked our listeners did Colossal bring back
the dire wolf? And here's what they had to say.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
I have no idea that you got me on that one.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
No, they created something that will resemble the dire wolf
but is not actually a dire wolf.

Speaker 5 (05:46):
Did Colossal bring back the dire wolf in the sense
of that a being is the product of using a
specific DNA recipe in an Earth environment to recreate a
member of the species.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yes.

Speaker 5 (05:56):
On the other hand, did they bring back the dire
wolf to be a staple resident of this planet? We're
far a cry from that.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Did what bring back?

Speaker 3 (06:04):
The what philosof falling into a parallel universe is that
the gene.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Editing thing probably not clickbait. I'm not buying it.

Speaker 4 (06:14):
It's a genetically modified gray wolf that happens to have
some traits of a dire wolf. So I did see
the headlines on this, and I guess it depends on
the quality of the sequence. If they didn't have a
complete sequence and had to splice in like regular wolf genes,
then maybe not. I saw a direwolf skeleton at the

(06:37):
Libret Tarpitz and on Game of Thrones, but I don't
know anything about Colossal. Seems to be like a rock
band touring, but with only one of the original band members.

Speaker 6 (06:47):
They really only brought back certain traits of a dire wolf,
but not necessarily every single trait.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
So it looks like a dire wolf, but we don't
really know if it has all the other traits of
a dire wolf.

Speaker 6 (06:58):
Colossal brought back the dire wolf like Jurassic Hark brought
back to velociraptor.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
I always thought dire wolves were fictions, so I didn't
know they could come back. I thought they were just
from like Game of Thrones and things. I'm going to say,
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
No, I didn't think so three individuals are not a population,
let alone any species. That doesn't mean that it's not interesting.
I'm sure they learn a lot about the phenotypical features
that make wolf differentiate extinct wolves from current wolves, so

(07:39):
I'm sure it's a very interesting work.

Speaker 6 (07:42):
I think that they brought it mostly back, but I
think that because it had to be an animal from
today and DNA from a dire wolf, then technically it's
not actually the one hundred percent complete dire Wolf.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
A lot of skepticism here, a lot of skepticism. The
answers either fell into I have no idea what you're
talking about mmmm, or no they did not. I don't
think anybody was like, yes they did. One person said
it was interesting, nonetheless, but they didn't completely bring back
the dire wolf.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
So give us some background. Tell us about this project.
What is de extinctification and why would somebody want to
do it?

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Okay, so you've added a lot of unnecessary syllables.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
What do you mean de extinctification?

Speaker 5 (08:24):
Is this?

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Let's see a lot. We can get it by the
end of the show. I'm digging it. I think the
way that most people imagine the extinction is that you
are bringing back exactly the organism that we drove to
extinction at some point in the past, and so it
has the exact same genotype. You could PLoP it back
in the environment and it would be exactly the same.
Behave the same have the same genome, all the same.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
All right, But if we're going to be really technical
and nerdy about what is and isn't de extinctificationism, then
you know, what does that even mean? Because when you
had an extent population. It's not like you had a
single genome that define the species, right, You had a variation,
you had diversity, and so what does it mean to
say I'm going to bring back the exact species in

(09:08):
that context anyway?

Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, so you're already starting to hone in on some
of the problems here. So, especially for long dead organisms,
you probably don't even have one complete genome from that organism,
let alone genomes from I don't know the one thousand
organisms that you would need to have a functioning population.
In the more near term, we are sort of raising

(09:30):
from the dead genotypes for for example, black ferret. So
the black ferret population is in decline. This is happening
right now. But every once in a while, some lab
or zoo will find a black ferret frozen in their
freezer and they'll extract genetic material from that black ferret
and bring to life of black ferret with that genome.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Is this something that happens to biologists? They just like
find black ferrets in their freezer, like, oh, what's this,
there's a chocolate pie from last week. Oh, here's a
black ferret.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
I mean, Katrina has never found bags fecis in your
freezer that.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Got lost, yes, but never a ferris.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Oh okay, all right, Well she's not the right kind
of biologist. If you were dating the right kind of biologists,
there'd be ferrets in there.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Okay, So this is something you put in your freezer.
It's not just something you discover. Oh my gosh, look
there's a ferret in my freezer.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, that's right, Like, you know, maybe it was part
of your zoo population. You thought maybe I could use
this for later, because that's something biologists think, and so
I ended up in a freezer and then it got
found and they're like, oh, that could help. So one
problem is that it's very hard to get the genetic
diversity that you need, especially when you're working with very
long dead organisms.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
So I think you're saying that the population had diversity
and it's not easy to pull back the whole population. Yeah,
But I'm wondering, even on a more technical level, like
which individual would you pull back, and would any of
them qualify or would some sort of mixture of them qualify.
Like when you say de extinctification, you mean you've resurrected
an individual that previously existed or a representative individual from

(10:53):
that species. Like I want to know exactly what it
means and what qualifies.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah, all right, so let's get to that. So let's
start with Colossal's definition of de extinctificationization and they are
calling it functional de extinction, and they say it's the
process of generating an organism that both resembles and is
genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost
lineage of core genes, engineering natural resistances, and enhancing adaptability

(11:22):
that will allow it to thrive into day's environment of
climate change, dwindling resources, disease, and human interference. Wow, I
know it's low.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
That's not a definition, it's an essay.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
They've got a lot of words on their website, but
you can see already a couple things popping up. They're
not saying that they are bringing back the entire genome
or a diversity of different types of genomes. They are
bringing back core genes. So they are picking which genes
they think are critical to making a particular extinct species
and comparing that to the nearest living relative, and they're

(11:54):
bringing those genes back.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Do you think that they're doing this way because this
is all that's possible, or do you think, as maybe
implied by their little essay, they're doing it this way
because they want to create a version which could actually
survive in today's environment rather than something which died out
and lived in a previous environment.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
It's probably both, I see, But that limitation in what's
possible is really important. So DNA degrades pretty quickly after
an animal dies, so by the time you're looking at
something like the dire wolf or mammoths, if you find
a specimen maybe that was frozen very soon after death,
there's going to be a lot of the genetic sequence

(12:30):
that you can still read if you're lucky, but you're
not going to have the entire genetic sequence. And with
mammoths in particular, we're lucky because there have been more
than one specimen where we can get some genetic material.
But you can't put together an entire exact genome for
the wooly mammoth. There's not enough intact genomes for organisms
that are long dead.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
All right. So then before we dig into the dire
wolf real project, I just want to know from a
philosophical perspective, Kelly, say, if I gave you infinite resources,
there are no technical limitations. You could create any organism
you wanted, what would you consider de extinctification OFSM It
would be like you create a whole population. You pull back,
look the last time there was a thousand living entities

(13:11):
and you created all of them, or you just picked one,
or you like average them. Like, if you could do anything,
what would be the most pristine version of de extinctification.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
My answer is also going to include my thoughts on
motivations for de extinction. I think that if you are
bringing an animal back into a world that it never
existed in and it can't fill its prior ecological role,
I think from a conservation standpoint, I'm not super interested
in that. And so if the blackfooted ferrets were to
go extinct tomorrow and you were able to bring back

(13:40):
enough individuals so that there wouldn't be in breeding problems,
and that would depend on how many and what kinds
of genomes you could get, I don't know, say it's
five hundred individuals, and then you could put them back
in their natural environment and somehow they'd be able to
still have their wild behaviors, which sometimes is you know,
through learning from other individuals, So that could be to
get back. But if you're able to get enough genetic

(14:02):
diversity where they won't decline because of inbreeding, and then
they can go back into their wild habitat and survive.
That to me would be successful de extinction. What do
you think?

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, well, I think that's fascinating because it says something
about what a species really is. It's more than one individual,
it's a community, and it's also their environment and how
they interact and as you say, like learned behaviors that
are passed down. So it takes a lot to really
recreate a lineage. I guess my motivation would be different.
I'm not an ecologist. I would just be wondering how
many do you have to bring back so that I

(14:32):
could have a tasty burger of each kind, you know,
in a sustainable way. Of course.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah. Absolutely, Let's jump a little bit more than into
motivation for de extinction before we get into the method.
So Colossal is pushing for de extinction as a method
to protect ecosystems that are in some form of decline.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
For example, like bees are going extinct and we need
them as pollinators, so let's make sure we can bring
them back.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
That kind of thing kind of although I can hear
a bunch of people saying, the honeybees that we use
are not native, and so you've already created something artificial.
But the big example that they use are mammoths. Mammoths
used to live in like tundras in Siberia, for example,
and as they walked across the landscape, they would crush
or knock over trees and their impact on the environment

(15:20):
resulted in a sustainable grassland. Oh interesting, Yeah, and that
grassland absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide. And I should
say I'm parroting exactly what I saw on their website.
So this is all assuming that they are correct on
their website, because this is out of my area of knowledge.
But these grasslands absorb a lot of carbon, which could
help us in this period of global climate change. And

(15:41):
having that grass there helps the permafrost not melt, and
as the permafrost melts, that releases more greenhouse gases and
is bad for a variety of other reasons. So they're
arguing that if you de extinct the wooly mammoth, who
can put it back into this environment which is maybe
still in the process of changing, and it can push
the environment back to a more ancestral state, and actually

(16:02):
that more ancestral state is better for the ecosystems and
the globe.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
Wow, I'm even more skeptical after hearing that, because this
sounds to me not like we're going to resiss the
data species because we think it's cool or it's a tragedy,
but instead as an element of ecological planetary geoengineering, like
we think we bring this back, it can change the climate. Like, wow,
is that a huge Rube Goldberg machine that we do

(16:27):
not understand? And you start banging on those levers like
who knows what's going to happen? That seems very dangerous
to me. To me, that's as bonkers as like the
folks who want to put sulfur in the atmosphere to
make it more reflective and see what happens.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
And I think they would argue that putting sulfur in
the atmosphere to see what happens is different than trying
to revert back to a state that once did exist.
I totally see your point. And I'm also skeptical that
you're going to be able to release wooly mammoths. I mean,
there's some parts of the world where they'll survive, but
there won't be a lot of people, and somebody in
Russia has put a side land that they've called Plistocene

(17:02):
Park for these mammoths. But you know, like in the US,
farmers were not happy when wolves were reintroduced. Can you
imagine suddenly needing to deal with wooly mammoths. I see
a lot of human animal problems if you actually try
to work this out.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
I can imagine all sorts of videos on Twitter and
TikTok of a mammoth like crushing a playground, like walking
through a soccer game, or you.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Know, they kill people accidentally. Elephants do accidentally just because
they're big, lumbering giants. You know, people die to try to,
you know, give the colossal argument here. The other reasons
for why they do it are one along the way,
you learn things you didn't expect. And so I watched
a video from the chief science officer, her name is
Best Sapiro, arguing that along the way to studying elephants,

(17:47):
they came up with a vaccine for this virus that's
really bad for elephants today. So you have to understand
elephants today in order to edit them into being something
mammoth like. And then they explicitly make this space argument
that when we went to the moon there were all
of these side benefits along the way, and as we
shoot for this you know crazy dream of ours, there's

(18:07):
probably all sorts of cool stuff we're going to come
up with along the way. I feel like you could
also argue that if you really wanted to solve this
virus problem for the elephants, you should have just invested
in solving the virus problem for the elephants. But anyway,
so these are the current arguments for de extinction. You
and I discussed a book called Venomous Lumpsucker. It's a
fictional book, but it deals with some of the ethical
problems that might arise if people are like, oh, we

(18:29):
don't have to worry about driving that animal into extinction
because we can just bring it back. But you're not
bringing back the exact same thing. Any of the like
learned behaviors get lost when that last individual dies, and
they don't come back when you bring the last one back.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah. I really did enjoy that book, Venomous Lumpsucker. It
talks about like the corporatization of it and how it
just gets folded into economic formulas. But it's fascinating to
me that none of the arguments you've made so far
about de extinctification and the motivations of it touch the
reason I think it's exciting, or the reason I would
be enthusiastic about it, which is this that every lost
species is like a lost bit of treasure. You know,

(19:03):
each one is evolved over millions or billions of years.
It's a solution to a really complex optimization problem. It's fascinating,
it's inherently valuable. It may be potentially that creates some medicines,
you know, like aspirin from the bark of a tree.
Who knows what solutions evolution has come up with that
might be useful. You know, we're just like the value
of a species to exist, and it's so tragic that

(19:24):
it seems so one directional. You know, once a species
is extinct, it's gone, maybe gone. I remember having that
drilled into my head as a kid. It just feels
so tragic. It's like a black hole almost right. Things
fall in and they never come out. So the idea
of being able to pull these things from beyond the
biological event horizon, to me, that's exciting because it opens
up a whole world of species that we could maybe

(19:45):
bring back I don't know if that's a terrible idea,
and I don't actually really want to eat burgers made
of these animals, But to me, there's an appeal to
just bringing things back from beyond the event horizon.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
I think we should revisit this question at the very
end of the episode. You should decide if what it
is that is being brought back actually checks that box
that you're talking about, like this thing that's been lost
is back. So let's take a break and when we
get back, we'll talk about what exactly was done to
bring back the dire wolf, and we'll revisit your question.

(20:30):
All right, we're back, and we were just talking about
why you would bring an animal back from extinction. So
now let's go into a little bit of detail about
what Colossal did with the dire wolf. So what exactly
did they bring back. They had two dire wolves that
had died in a way that preserved some of their
genetic material.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
And when did dire wolves go extinct?

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Then went extinct about thirteen thousand years ago, which is
a lot of time for DNA to degrade.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Even when it's frozen, it still degrades.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
Even when it's frozen, it can still degrade. Yeah, And
you know often if you're in an area that's frozen,
and every once in a while it will thaw out
a little bit and then it will freeze again, and
so you know, over time you get these sort of
fluctuations that break down the DNA. And so what they
did was, first they figured out what the most closely
related species alive today is and they determined that that's
the gray wolf. So they got the genome from the

(21:18):
gray wolf and they use that as a reference. And
so they put together the genome of the dire wolf
as best they could from the sequences that they had,
and they matched that up to the gray wolf so
that they could try to figure out where the like
chunks of DNA that they had collected, because a lot
of time the DNA gets like broken into pieces and
then it's like a puzzle. You need to figure out

(21:39):
where the pieces are supposed to go, and if you
match it up with the gray wolf, that kind of helps.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
You, all right. So we don't have a complete genome
of the dire wolf. We have some snapshots and bits,
some snippets here and there from a couple of dire
wolves that were frozen thirteen thousand years ago, just from
two individuals. Yep, Wow, that's amazing. And so to fill
it out, they compare with the gray wolf, which they
think is similar, and it's sort of like sketching out
the bits that were missing and then also understanding the differences.

(22:03):
Is that what's going on?

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yes, And so to try to understand the differences, what
they did is they'd look at areas where the genomes
seemed to differ, and they would say, Okay, this genetic
code in other species has been associated with, for example,
white fur coats or with more muscular thighs, and so
they'd look for areas where the genomes differed and they

(22:25):
found Why does that make you laugh?

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Because I'm imagining dire wolves with the like really chunky thighs,
like looking out the gym like direwolf says, don't skip
leg dais.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
That is a trait that they honed in on.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
How do we know that just from the frozen diar
Roves were like, wow, look at those.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
I don't actually know if they were able to tell
from the frozen dire wolves, but they looked at the
genotypic sequences and they were like, Okay, this looks a
little different, and I think often they'd say this looks
a little different in ways that are consistent with more
muscular legs, So that's probably what they had. So they
ended up deciding that probably dire wolves differed from gray

(23:03):
wolves by having increased size, broader skulls, a white coat,
stronger shoulders and legs, and a thick and sort of
condensed coat.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
They sound kind of awesome. Why did they go extinct?

Speaker 1 (23:17):
They do sound awesome. I don't know why they went extinct.
Probably humans, that's my guest.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Too many dire wolf burgers.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
It sounds like, yeah, well, animals can be delicious. It's
not their fault. And so they found twenty genes that
they thought, you know, it looks like these are important differences.
So we're going to take the gray wolf genome and
we're going to edit it in those twenty locations so
that it looks like the dire wolf genome. But it's
important to keep in mind that when an organism is

(23:47):
expressing a trait, it's not just about the genes that
it has. It's also about when those genes are turned
on and how long they're turned on. So you might
remember when we were talking about coat color when we
were answering our listener questions episode, Whether or not a
particular hair cell makes black or white is all about

(24:08):
whether or not this promoter for a gene is turned
on or off, whether or not a gene is getting
the message to make black or not. But none of
that timing information is probably incorporated in this technique. But
they did end up getting organisms that look like what
we imagine dire wolves look like. They sort of look
like the specimens we've collected. They look like what we

(24:30):
all saw in Game of Thrones. And so the stuff
that they took after they edited the genome is they
put that genetic information into an egg from a gray wolf,
and then they got that gray wolf pregnant, she carried
it to term, and she gave birth to a dire wolf.
And they did that three times.

Speaker 5 (24:48):
Mm.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
So this sort of answer is the deep philosophical question, right,
what came first the dire wolf for the puppy? I guess,
because here you implanted a dire wolf into another species
and it was able to gestate and give birth to it. Yeah,
and does that require the species to be similar? Like
you couldn't put that inside an elephant for example.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Right, that's right. It requires the species to be similar,
but this is another area where things could be different.
So maternal effects refers to all of the different ways
that a fetus is impacted by the mom's body. It
could be the hormones that she's producing, right, and you know,
subsequently it can be the bacteria that she passes on
to her offspring, or the things that you get from

(25:27):
the milk, including bacteria, and so any of that maternal
effects stuff that was dire wolf specific, they are now
getting gray wolf versions of.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
And give us a sensum like the distance between these
two species. I mean, it's sort of amazing to me
that you can have one species give birth to another.
I mean, could you put a human baby inside a
gorilla for example. I'm not suggesting anybody do that. Yeah,
this is a thought experiment to think about the difference,
Like how far away from us could you get and
still have a live birth.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
I don't think enough experiments have been done where we
could have a good answer to that.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
It sounds like you're suggesting some human experimentation in there.
I'm not signing on to that.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
I have absolutely not suggesting that kind of human experimentation.
I think that's wildly unethical to be clear on the record,
shouldn't do that.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
But you're saying that the only way to know is
to do the experiment.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah, I think in a lot of cases that would
be the best way to know. I mean, I think
closer related species probably have similar requirements. It wouldn't surprise
me if a chimpanzee or a bonobo could well. But
so like, we're much bigger than them, and so at
some point you get to how big is the head
that's coming through a tiny opening? And like, chimpanzees might
not be able to survive that part.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
You know, Well, do we know how much experimentation Colossal did,
Like is this their first attempt and their first success
or did they have a bunch of failures first?

Speaker 5 (26:41):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (26:41):
You know, I don't know that they have publicly reported
if there were gray wolves who had miscarriages or who
died in childbirth or anything. I don't remember seeing anything
like that. I think in general, they've kept this project
pretty close to the vest and haven't been releasing too
many details. But we know that it worked at least
three times.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
And is this like a scientific project or they can
be publishing papers in peer review journals, or is it
a commercial project like they're going to be selling dire
wolf puppies both.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
I don't have any evidence that they're selling dire wolf puppies.
They have been publishing scientific papers as they go. So
for example, they have a paper in review right now
showing that gray wolves are the closest living relatives to
the dire wolfs. Beth Shapiro does study ancient DNA, and
she works on these questions about relatedness between species, and

(27:27):
so as they go, they're doing a lot of science
and they're publishing it and sharing it as they go.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
And do you get the sense that this is cutting
edge science? I know that a lot of times in
popular science we hear about something and we're told it's amazing,
and then people in the field are like, yeah, that's
not very impressive, and Bob over there at Georgia is
already doing that. Is this cutting edge science?

Speaker 1 (27:47):
I would say that in addition to doing solid science,
they are doing pretty cutting edge stuff. I do feel
like bringing back these ancient genes is impressive. I'm not
feeling completely satisfied at an emotional level that we have
undone any damage our species might have done. Like, I
don't necessarily feel like this method does that, but I

(28:07):
do feel like they've done some pretty interesting stuff.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
All right. So they've started from a gray wolf and
they've basically taken a big step towards dire wolf DNA,
not completely all the way there, only twenty edits, but
still in the sort of information space of DNA. They've
gone from the gray wolf towards a dire wolf and
then successfully given birth to this critter which is like
alive in running around and baying at the moon and
stuff like that. So I guess the question then is like,

(28:31):
is this a dire wolf? What is this thing?

Speaker 5 (28:34):
Right?

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, so that is the big question. And I want
to real quick say something that maybe I wish I
had mentioned earlier, which is that we don't yet have
the ability to print genomes. So even if you did have,
for example, the entire direwolf genome read out, we don't
have a machine that can print an entire genome at
a reasonable cost, like I think it would be like

(28:54):
a billion dollars or something. And so that's another reason
why you take gray wolf genomes and edit them and
then use that to make the next round of babies.
So it's possible that in ten twenty years or something,
you could print everything you know about the dire wolf
genome instead of picking these twenty genes to tinker with,
and then you could fill in the spaces with whatever
you know about the gray wolf genome and get a

(29:14):
little closer. But these are the techniques we have right now.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
And so when you say print, you mean like synthetically
assemble from the basic amino acids, because in the end,
it is just chemistry, right, or like, let's bring these together,
click them together. This is a molecule we know can exist.
But you're saying that's still really expensive.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Exactly, Yeah, it is very expensive. And you know you've
got billions of base pairs or something in a genome.
So even if the cost is fairly minor, it adds
up pretty quick.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
It's the kind of thing that feels like, in ten years,
it's going to cost seventeen cents. Yeah, maybe it's somebody's
Pahd thesis and it cost millions of dollars. But biology
makes these leaps and bounds all the time, where like
things that used to be Peachd thesis are now like
a little machine that sits on the bench and it
takes two minutes and you press the button.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
And I imagine that's both frustrating and exhilarating if you're
a student who's like I, I spent five years on
something that now takes thirty minutes. But you know you
had to be part of the people who made the
path to get there.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, and that's why biology can do so many amazing
things because things that used to be impossible are now trivial,
which opens up the space of possibilities for like new
whole emergent concepts that nobody even imagined before. So yeah,
I look forward to that.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
So let's get back to the question. Yeah, is this
thing that they made a diar wolf Kelly, what's your ruling?

Speaker 1 (30:26):
Well, so before I give you my opinion, I'm going
to back up and say that, you know, when this
announcement first came out, apparently, I think it's the New
Yorker broke the embargo. So when a research group has
a finding that they want to share, they will send
a report out to major news organizations and they'll say,
you can't mention this until we tell you you can
mention it. But if you want to start writing the

(30:47):
story now, so that when we give the thumbs up
you're already ready to go, then we'd be happy to
talk to you now. And apparently the New Yorker broke
the embargo. And the way that I heard this story
was that they have brought back the die wolf. And
you know, Zach even sent it to me and he
was like, the dire wolf is back. How cool is that?
And we both actually should have been a little bit

(31:08):
more skeptical because we had interviewed Beth Shapiro, who's the
chief science officer for Colossal, for our book Soon Is,
because we had a little section on de extinction and
she had made very clear in that interview what the
process actually involves, which is not making an exact replica.
But in the days after that article that Zach sent
me from Time that was like, we have the dire wolf. Now,

(31:30):
there's been a lot of like anger heaped on Colossal
for being like, this isn't a dire wolf. And so
Beth Shapiro, again the chief science officer, has said, you know,
there's something like thirty definitions of a species out there,
and she's right, there's a big debate about what counts
as a species and the dire wolf that Colossal made
fits some of those definitions, but doesn't fit others I see.

(31:54):
And so the question is, you know, to what extent
should you be excited about this? And I think from
the standpoint of of wonder, you know, like bringing back
an organism that so many people want to see, like
from Game of Thrones for example. You know, I can
imagine you put these dire wolves in a zoo and
people get more excited about conservation. I can see some
benefits in that regard, but I guess again, my concern

(32:17):
is that people are going to feel like the moral
responsibility that should be on our shoulders for killing a
species could go away if we're able to bring these
species back. But again, we don't know if their behaviors
are natural. Maybe there were very unique behaviors that were
taught to them by their mothers that they'll never express
now because there's no one there to teach them those things.
And so you know, to me, they differ in ways
that matter because I don't think you could ever release

(32:39):
them back out into the wild. They'll never fill their
ecological role. They won't be what we lost.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Could be something else though, right like if they escape
into the wild. They could create some new niche from themselves.
They could be invasive, right, and we could be overrun
with dire wolves or you know, ancient guinea pigs with
really strong legs or whatever we're going to bring back next.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah, what do you think they bring back the dire wolf?
Are you excited?

Speaker 2 (33:02):
I think it's really cool and an awesome demonstration of
biological technology. It doesn't feel to me like they brought
back the direwolf. I mean, I imagine if humans went
extinct and then in the future AI brought back something
kind of similar to humans and they're like, look, yeah,
we didn't kill them all there back. I wouldn't really
feel like we're back. And so, yeah, it doesn't really

(33:22):
feel like the direwolf, but doesn't have to be, right, Like,
this shows that you can do biological engineering in a
really cool way. You can start from one animal. You
can move through that information space towards another animal you
think is interesting or useful or cool or worth bringing back,
and you could do that multiple times. Right, You could
go in the direwolf direction and you could add a
little bit of fox or something. I think this opens

(33:44):
up a whole new avenue. I think that's the exciting
thing about it, not like, oh, we have cleansed ourselves
of this crime we committed.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
And I think that is a great point. So if
you're trying to understand what makes two species that are
closely related different, this now does get of us the
tools to answer those questions. You know, is it this gene?
Is it that gene? What happens if you take her
with this gene? And so we do now have this
amazing ability to better understand how the genome results in
differences in appearance and function for organisms. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
And we could take chihuahuas and give them like really
strong legs, that would be really amazing. I'd like to
see that totally buff chihuahua's.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, my daughter would absolutely adopt one of those. But
she would adopt any chihuahua, no matter how pitiful they look.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
You know, I used to be kind of anti chihuahua
because I thought about them as like little gappy dogs.
But the dog that we adopted, he's like forty percent chihuahua,
but he's really wonderful and he never barks. He's like
German shepherd and chihuahua, which is an interesting combination.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
How did that happen?

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, there was an interesting evening or somebody somewhere. Yeah,
one night in Mexico. But he's got this wonderful German
shepherd plus chihuahua face. It's like German shepherd but a
little bit of sad eyes. I don't know. Oh, I
love him.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
That sounds wonderful.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, so I'm warming up the chihuahua.

Speaker 5 (34:57):
All right.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Well, let's take a break and then when we come
back to talk a little bit more about their plans
for bringing back the mammoth, which we talked about a
little bit earlier. So start dreaming of mammoth steakes and
we'll be back to you soon. And we're back from

(35:27):
the commercial break, which seems like a fine time to
mention that. On Apple, if you subscribe to our podcast,
you can get this podcast without ads. But thank you
for listening to the ads because they allow us to
do all of the research that we love doing for
this show.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
If you love the show and don't like the ads,
you can make the ads go extinct.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
Check out, and if Apple changes their mind, they'll de
extinct the ads.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
And you'll be forced to listen to them all retroactively.
Oh no, that's not what we're doing today. We're talking
about retroactive undeletion of animals called de extinctificationisism. Tell us
about how we might bring back the wooly mammoth. Now,
I've been joking about dire wolf steaks, but a lot
of humans made it through the winter on the meat
of the wooly mammoth. Isn't that true? It's really something

(36:11):
humans have eaten for a long time.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
I think that is true. Yeah, I think we did
eat wooly mammoth. I mean they give you a large
quantity of food, whether it's delicious or not.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Based on my research, mostly from reading Farside comics, I
think a lot of humans have did with the mammoths.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
I mean, Gary Larson never got anything wrong ever, I
think so I'm on board with that.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
You have the best science consultants.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
For sure, he did. He did so. Mammoths went extinct
about four thousand years ago, and so when you find
a specimen preserved the right way, you can get more
information out of it. And they tended to live in
cold areas like tundras, so I think you've got a
slightly better chance at getting their DNA in the first place,
and so we found a lot of mammoths that are

(36:52):
preserved in a way where you can get some DNA
from them. So we have a lot more information to
work with than we did with the dire wolf and
so in this case. But again it's still difficult, and
I just want to highlight a couple of reasons why
it's difficult. We talked about the DNA degrading, and that
makes it hard and it breaks into little pieces. But
you also have to be sure that you're not getting contamination.
So for example, when that mammoth died, bacteria probably started

(37:15):
to break it down before it completely froze through, So
you have to make sure you're not getting any of
those bacterial genomes in your genome. Or you know, some
clumsy scientists didn't have their gloves on the whole time.
Now you've got human DNA in there. So not only
do you have to try to find the ancient DNA
and figure out what to do with it, you need
to make sure that all of the DNA that's contaminating

(37:37):
it has been removed.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
This sounds like an awesome update of the fly Guman
accidentally injects their DNA into the mammothtinctification project. Weird mammoth
baby comes out with like Jeff Goldbloom's head on.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
It, I'd feel so weird about that. Jeff Goldbloom is
so handsome.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
You'd make a great mammoth. I think, okay, all right, anyway, Netflix,
call us if you want to turn that into a
real project.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
We've got lots of other ideas too.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Few more terrible than that, but yes, we do, right,
all right. So you get this DNA from the specimen,
and I think it is similar living species, right for
a reference, don't you? What are you using the case
of the mammoth.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
So there are three living species of elephants. There are
two African elephants. One lives in the forest and one
lives in the grasslands or the savannahs, and then there
is an Asian elephant. The Asian elephant they think is
closer genetically to the wooly mammoths, and so they're using
the Asian elephant as their reference genome. They are trying

(38:32):
to essentially make a more cold adapted Asian elephant because
again they are saying that they want to release the
wooly mammoth into what would have been its native environment,
so they're trying to create a wooly mammoth that can
survive there, and so they're looking at things like shaggy hair,
fat deposits. They also want to bring back the curved tusks,
and I think maybe that's partly because those are just

(38:54):
like iconic mammoth things, but also maybe they're important for
knocking down trees. And so they've identified sixty five genes
that they think could make the Asian elephant more cold tolerant,
and so they're going to make these edits to the
Asian elephant genome. And then they're not sure if they're
going to impregnate an African elephant or an Asian elephant,

(39:17):
because the African elephant is bigger than the Asian elephant,
and so they think it might have a better time
giving birth to a wooly mammoth baby. And elephants are
pregnant for some crazy amount of time, like a whole
year or something. Maybe if it's even longer basically.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Like two years, two years, I think, yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
Yeah, I think it's something like twenty two months. Can
you imagine carrying around a wooly mammoth baby for twenty
two months If they're bigger than Asian elephants. That sounds
incredibly unpleasant. But anyway, and it's not even yours, and
it's not even yours, right, but in.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Some sense it is right you were saying earlier. The
maternal environment is an important factor. Right, It's not like
when you're the surrogate, you're just some sort of irrelevant host.
Like the maternal environment plays a role in the development
of the baby.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yes, that's right, and the things you eat might be
playing a role. And then also after elephants are born,
Beth Shapiro was telling me that they often consume some
of the feces of family members to get their microbiome.
Makes sense, Yeah, And so if the wooly mammoth had
a wooly mammoth specific microbiome, they're going to be getting
an Asian or African elephant specific microbiome. But anyway, so

(40:28):
they're going to be growing up with an Asian or
African elephant parent. And then the plan is to yeah,
release them into the wild at some point to try
to recreate what the wooly mammoths were doing.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
That's a whole fascinating other angle. I never even thought
about the microbiome of these creatures, right, which is usually
passed down from the parents. If you bring a species back,
it's microbiome has gone extinct with it, And obviously you
don't have the DNA or its microbiome unless you like
dug into its gut and found those bacteria and sequence
their DNA also, and that could somehow replicate that. That's

(41:00):
a whole other fascinating dimension it is. Or maybe you're
just going to end up with decincified species members with
like bad digestive problem.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
Direwolf with IBD could be I mean, maybe they were
essentially the ecosystems that like cold adapted bacteria were thriving in,
and maybe you've lost those bacteria altogether. Maybe you can't
bring them back. I don't know, who knows.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
We could end up with like wooly mammoths with horrible diarrhea.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Oh man, IBD wooly mammoths. That would be a bummer.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
That'd be quite a science achievement, though, wouldn't it.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
So, So where do we stand on this progress towards
creating these diarrhea spraying elephants.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
So they are claiming that in five years they will
be able to bring a cold adapted Asian elephant into
the worlds that you could call the colossal wooly mammoth.
That's a pretty short timeframe.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
How reliable are they with their predictions? Did they predict
their ability to do the Direwolf or is this sort
of like Elon Musk like projections.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
I don't know that we have the data to make
those statements yet, because my sense was that the dire
Wolf surprised everybody, like they didn't really let folks know
where they were, and then all of a sudden they
were like, hey, we've done it. I don't know. This
sounds like an incredible amount of work. And additionally, you know,
I don't think they've gotten to the step yet where
you try to impregnate either of the elephants, and you know,

(42:18):
if you get halfway through that pregnancy and then it fails,
you've got another year to wait. And so I think
it's hard to figure out the timing for that stage
in particular, Like maybe they have a good handle on
how long the gene editing takes now, but if it's
going to take in the elephants or not, I don't
think we know yet. Fascinating one of the benefits that
they're touting to this technique is that along the way

(42:39):
they've done research on elephant endoheliotropic herpes viruses, which are
a leading cause of death in wild elephants. You'll note
I can't correctly say prions or prions, but I think
I got endoheliotropic herpes viruses out. Okay, sounded good, Yeah, great,
thank you. And so they've been working to understand that
this is a leading cause of death in wild elephants

(42:59):
and I think also in zoo populations. And so you know,
they're arguing that one of the benefits is all of
this science that comes along on the ride that they
figure out our moonshot. They say they're about five years away,
and we're gonna have to wait and see how they do.
They also have a project in the works on the
thylacine and another one on the dodo.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
What's the thylacine? That sounds like an amino acid?

Speaker 1 (43:19):
That does sound like an amino acid. Now you're making
me wonder today. Write the name wrong. It really sounds
like an amino acid. No, that's actually an animal.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Oh it's a Tasmanian tiger.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, and that only went extinct in nineteen thirty six,
and so I think we have a fair number of
specimens that were like stuck in freezers from animals that
were held in zoos back when we were like, oh wait,
we should try to turn this all around. Oh we
waited too long. So yeah, they're working on that. They're
working on the Dodo, and the Dodo went extinct something
like three hundred years ago, and so you know, both

(43:50):
of those projects, the animals are thousands of years less
dead than the others, but those projects are also in
the works.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
And those feel like efforts to write some wrong, you know,
to undo some crime that we committed by like lazily
or sloppily or greedily or selfishly wiping out some species.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
And you know, I should be clear that Colossal's website
isn't saying de extinction rights past wrongs. I think what
they are arguing is that the science is important. I'm
sure a lot of people go to work every day
because it sounds awesome to bring back the dire wolf,
and it's important to be excited about your job, and
they believe in this, like replacing of ecosystem processes that

(44:29):
were lost when the organisms went extinct. But I agree
that does feel to me also like a get out
a jail free card for the things that we've done
in the past.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
Then let's revisit one of the Solar System's greatest crimes,
which is wiping out the dinosaurs sixty five million years ago.
So Kelly is Colossal going to open Jurassic Park at
some point.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
So I asked Beth Shapiro this like a decade ago,
and her answer was no. And I was like, but
like maybe when the technology advances, and she was like, no, never, never, never,
why never? And she's like, look, you almost certainly can't
read DNA sequences that are over a million years old,

(45:08):
and so we just don't have the DNA to work
off of from fossils. And so what you could do
is you could say, all right, I know that this
gene controls feathers, and this gene controls teeth, and this
gene controls mouth size, and you could try using what
you knew and some dinosaur like reference genome to like

(45:30):
tinker with that and make something dinosaur oid. But she's like,
you're never gonna bring back t Rex as it was.
You could bring back some frank and Rex that was
your best.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Guess you could bring back t Rex with even stronger
thighs and diarrhea like the Wooly Mammoth.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
You're really on the thigh thing. I'm guessing you never
skip thy day, Daniel or leg Day leg Day.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
I think that's too personal a question, Kelly. I'm not
going to answer that on the pod.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Daniel. No, I just want to cheat. I just want
to borrow the Direwolves DNA so I don't have to
do leg day.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
No, that'd be great. Just a little crisper in your
thighs and so that it takes care of it for you.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Sounds like a menu option now, Daniel's crisper thighs. Would
you like it with barbecue sauced.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
I know that question is too personal, right, Let's return
to this observation you made at the beginning of the show.
It is awesome to bring back, you know, something beautiful
that existed once and we lost it and now we
get a chance to interact with it again, and that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Ya.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Do you still have that sense of wonder with the
version that we are able to bring back?

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Doesn't feel like traveling to the past or undoing something
we've done. It feels like a simulation of that or
an approximation of that doesn't totally scratch that itch, but
it definitely goes in that direction.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, I think I would go to see the dire
wolf exhibit at the Zool for sure, Or maybe i'd
go to see a wooly mammoth exhibit at the Zoo
where you're ring cook and bring your bleach wipes. There's
part of me that feels a little sad thinking about,

(47:13):
you know, like if only one wooly mammoth is brought back,
because it turns out it was really dangerous for the
elephants to go through that childbirthing process, and so we
get one wooly mammoth and we decide that's all we're
ever going to do.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Oh, it's all alone.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
Something about that feels sad, like we're observing an animal
going extinct all over again. And maybe I'm just being
like too sentimental, but I don't know, what do you think?

Speaker 2 (47:34):
No, I think that's an important aspect. You're creating a creature,
It has an experience. What have you created? And it's
like in great pain because you've created some weird Frankin
creature and it doesn't really work or it's miserable for
some other reasons. So I think that's definitely something we
should consider, especially the more intelligent species. I mean, wolves
are smart, right, they're pack animals, they have emotions, they
have relationships. Philosophically and morally, there are a lot of

(47:57):
questions there.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Yeah, Zach asked me, what would I think if we
could bring back Neanderthals and try to, you know, figure
out what a close human relative was like, you know,
are they as intelligent as we are? Were we just
more aggressive? And so we managed to like knock them
out of the species pool.

Speaker 5 (48:13):
M hm.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
I feel like that is quite clearly unethical. But what
do you think where is the line?

Speaker 3 (48:19):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Wow, that is a thorny question. Yeah. I mean even
just like editing your own babies he's in crisper, is
pretty unethical. But I feel like philosophically it's kind of fuzzy.
I mean, you choose your mate. Also, that affects the
DNA of your kids. You have some influence over it,
but it's weird to edit it directly. I don't know
exactly where that line is or why there's the line there.
There's lots of things we do. Like I created children,

(48:41):
brought them into this world. They didn't get to choose
it at all. Maybe they're happy, maybe they're miserable. You know,
it's sort of on me. I feel like having intelligent
babies is already a philosophical quandary.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Yeah, fair enough. Then bringing Neanderthals would be yeah, complicated too,
because they're like a scientific creation. To be clear, Colossal
has no plans to bring back the Neanderthals.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
That they've made public.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Don't start trouble, don't start trouble. So let's say Gigantic
Evil the corporation decides they're going to bring back Neanderthals,
and they bring back two of them, and it turns
out those two need a lot of support. Yeah, and
then Big Evil goes out of business. What happens to
those Neanderthals who would be responsible for them? Would they

(49:25):
be happy in this world where they're the only two
representatives of a different species?

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Sounds like a great Black Mirror episode. You should write.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
There, you go. Well, if somebody wants to pay me
to write that, I am ready. I will always take
your money.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
All right, Netflix, right to us. Two questions at Danielantlly.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
As you can see, we have loads of ideas. All right. Well,
on that sort of dark note, that's all I have
to say about the extinction today. I think I just
like to bottom line by saying I am still excited
about this. I think it's cool. I think they have
made some interesting breakthroughs. I just have complicated feelings about
the extinction in general, what about you.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
I think it also tells us something about the science
communication universe. This is an impressive step forward technologically and
fascinating scientifically, but it was over sold in the press
a little bit, and now there's like this back reaction
against it, and I think, you know, the whole science
communication ecosystem encourages people to over sell every time you
step forward as a revolutionary advance, which means that the

(50:25):
folks out there don't really know what they're reading. Is
this just overblown hype or not? And so there's a
lot of sort of cynicism out there, and you can
see that in people's responses to the questions. And we
got a lot of emails, and I get emails all
the time about science headlines, people like is this real?
Daniel did now so really discovered thirty seven extra dimensions. No,
they didn't. So you've got to become like a critical

(50:46):
thinker and an educated consumer of this science news.

Speaker 5 (50:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
I think that's a great point, And I think conveying
exactly what was done is a little bit more complicated
and requires an attention span from the reader to like
get through the entire description. But I think that if
you fail in that goal, then you lose trust with
your audience, and that has massive implications for any kind
of science you're trying to communicating, like vaccines and stuff,

(51:14):
for example. So I think you've got to be really
careful about how you do this stuff.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Big problem that we're not going to solve today on
the pod. But thanks everybody for listening to our effort
to communicate real science in a credible way to you,
because we know you're interested in learning more and digging
deeper beyond what's covered in the popsie articles, and that's
what we try to bring you here on the pod.
Thanks everyone for listening.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
Thank you so much. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is
produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you,
we really would.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
We want to know what questions you have about this
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Speaker 1 (51:53):
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