"De-Extinction" Delusion: The Case of The Dire Wolf
Article by qpooqpoo
The mad scientists at Colossal Biosciences recently announced that they brought back the Dire Wolf, a species that went extinct at the end of the Ice Age, by taking DNA samples from fossilized remains of the animal and splicing them into the embryos of modern grey wolves. All the debates on whether this is really a resurrected species or just a grey wolf with some Dire Wolf characteristics are a sideshow. This is typical of a media ecosystem designed to obscure far larger and more dangerous issues, and a public so psychologically conditioned to view every technical advance in the narrowest, most pre-scripted light.
Colossal Biosciences reminds the public of all the grim facts of mass extinction in the techno-industrial age: "30,000 species per year on average are being driven to extinction,"[1] "The World Animal Foundation predicts that up to half of all species could become extinct by 2050,"[2] the UN declaring that "1,000,000 animal and plant species are threatened with extinction."[3] None of this is new to the casual observer. All the data confirms the correlation between economic and technological growth and the utter free-fall in ecological health.
And the solution these technocrats propose? Wait for it... "The solution is de-extinction."[4] Yes, that's a direct quote. Use genetic engineering to simply revive all these dying species, reach back with tech and plop them back on Earth. Problem solved!
Step back for a minute and reflect on how stupid this is. Every species on Earth survives because of its ecosystem. It is deeply dependent on a highly complex environment that it has co-evolved with over the course of millions of years. It is not just physically dependent, but, as is often overlooked, deeply psychologically dependent on these conditions for a dignified, free, and fulfilling life. Species are going extinct for a reason, and it's not because there isn't any genetic engineering to keep them from going extinct. Their environments are being severely disrupted by modern industrial society. Simply resuscitating these species and plopping them back into the current world situation will do nothing but cause them more suffering and death without resolving the conditions that caused them to suffer and die off in the first place. It’s like having your pets die in a house fire, then running to the pet store while the flames are still blazing—only to release the new ones right back into the burning house. You’re not replacing them; you’re re-condemning them.
This issue is even more pronounced in the cases of long-deceased species like the woolly mammoth. Thousands of years of environmental change since their extinction creates an even wider gulf between their naturally co-evolved habitats and the environments they'd now be dumped into. There is already a word for this: invasive species. The brown tree snake drove dozens of bird species to extinction in Guam.[5] Cane toads in Australia became a toxic menace to native predators.[6] Kudzu, introduced to the U.S. as an ornamental plant, now smothers entire forests.[7] Bear in mind these were all unintentional introductions. One could go on. Now just imagine deliberately engineering such reintroductions at scale.
We can assume the scientists and regulators behind all this aren't completely stupid, and they most certainly know this. Outside of industrialized lab-zoo facilities, this can only mean placing these unfortunate creatures in carefully managed nature preserves, isolated from the vast geographies of wild biomes, where they can be studied. Even assuming zero escapes—and that's a big assumption—imagine the quality of life of these essentially caged animals, completely out of step with the world's ecosystems, and relegated to carefully managed preserves. Take the woolly mammoth, for example. It's got to be fed. Because its immune system, diet, and life patterns are out of step, it will likely have to be medically sustained, monitored, and artificially supported for life. What we have here in essence then is a zoo—stripped of their dignity and privacy, stripped of their purpose and their freedom.
And even this zoo-like future is the optimistic version. Because it will soon become obvious that these animals can’t be supported as isolated units. Every species is entangled in a dense web of co-evolved relationships—with other species, microbes, parasites, plants, soil systems, seasonal cycles. To bring back a mammoth isn’t just to revive a body, but to recreate an entire vanished world.
And that leads directly to the real implication of this project: the logical endpoint is a redesign of the entire biosphere to accommodate our engineered creatures. But here’s the problem: evolved ecological systems are not machines. They are not built from the top down. They emerge from bottom-up interactions over millions of years, through processes that are not fully understood and can never be reliably controlled. To rationally manipulate such a system, with any expectation of stability, is not just hubris—it’s mathematically impossible. The feedback loops are overwhelmingly complex, the variables are innumerable, the consequences are unpredictable and cascading. The result will not be order—it will be disruption. And once you try engineering whole ecosystems as if they were computer code, you're not solving ecological collapse—you’re guaranteeing its acceleration.
If these scientists still insist there is a virtuous and ecologically sound goal for reviving all of the species to go extinct precisely due to the ravages of modern global industrial civilization, then clearly the revival can only come after the source of wholesale wild ecosystem disruption is eliminated and the problem of mass extinction due to industrial human activity is halted. But not only is the problem accelerating in severity as the technological system grows, there isn't even a rational proposal for the halting of the problem that makes any practical sense. The world population continues to rise, and in cases where it "levels off" per capita consumption is orders of magnitude greater, resource exploitation is accelerating at a dramatic rate, the mining, deforestation, road building, dam building, overfishing, etc., etc., etc., are all continuing unabated, while the powers conferred by technology in the hands of individuals and competing organizations are growing all the more powerful and damaging to the natural world, and what is being proposed—never mind actually done—to halt any of this. There is never a consistent, rational line from leaders in politics or advocacy groups, and there are numerous competing ideologies all locked in a desperate competition for power and survival with their own mostly kooky and hare-brained ideas. Of course, the reflexive defense is that we can do both—that we can develop de-extinction technology now, while simultaneously working to solve the ecological crisis. But if society can't manage its most basic and elemental endowment—the security of the world’s biosphere—then on what basis can it be trusted to manage the rational deployment and management of de-extinct species? It can't even protect the living. The idea that it will responsibly resurrect and reintroduce the dead isn't just naïve—it's delusional.
The irony at the heart of all this: the “de-extinction” program will be entirely sustained by the same global technological system that has caused (and is causing) the mass extinctions in the first place. It’s not just that the research needs funding—it needs the entire industrial world: the schools to train the scientists, the labs to house the work, the factories to build the equipment, the power grid to run the machines, the supply chains to deliver the materials, the bureaucracies to manage the projects, and the digital networks to coordinate it all. Strip away the vast machinery of industrial civilization and these projects vanish overnight. Which leads to a sort of paradox: the only way to “save” the animals being destroyed by this system is to keep the destroyer-system running—at full speed.
And these scientists do indeed press on full speed. The question has to be asked is, why? The simplest explanation is the most credible: they continue their research because for them genetic research is their surrogate activity—it provides a crucial source of personal fulfillment, aside from the status and prestige they covet from an equally deluded and propagandized public. Their lofty talk of saving species is just a fig leaf—an ex-post-facto justification for a project they were already emotionally committed to. They didn’t begin with a serious appraisal of the extinction crisis and reason their way to a solution. They started with the desire to run genetic experiments, to pursue fulfilling work in the lab, and only afterward searched for a moral narrative to dress it up.
The other explanation is money. Modern financial capital today is desperate to find new and potentially lucrative areas to place funding, preferably one with the least potential for controversy. And for a public zombified by generations of all-encompassing pro-tech propaganda with the slivers of anxiety about the obvious ecological crisis, a "de-extinction" oriented venture provides a safe and publicly-approved opportunity for investment, an investment opportunity that flatters public anxiety while reinforcing its delusions. In addition, there are obvious side benefits for a research establishment with an ostensibly main goal of de-extinction: every scientific advance in one narrowly defined scope has obvious potential applications in a host of many other fields. And so, there is always the hope—and in closed circles probably the stated intent—that the technologies developed for de-extinction will have other lucrative applications. In their increasingly feverish and ruthless pursuit of power as a consequence of their needs for survival, the governments and corporations that fund this kind of research are desperate to get in on any action that promises them a competitive edge over their rivals. It is these facts, and these facts alone, that explain the existence of kooky "de-extinction" scientists. One is reminded of that all-important and often overlooked observation of the whole modern scientific endeavor: "Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."[8]
It may seem unbelievable that scientists could really be this naïve—that their understanding of human society often doesn’t rise above a fifth-grade level. But that’s the reality. Most are too psychologically invested in their work to entertain the kinds of serious thinking that might threaten their projects. This truth is so unbelievable, even when a few rebels tell it, no one believes them. So the secret is never in danger.
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NOTES:
[1] From Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences corporate website homepage, accessed on Apr. 8, 2025 at: https://colossal.com. The statement is attributed to biologist A.O. Wilson. See: Orlando, Alex, "What animals are going extinct?" Discover Magazine, Mar. 30, 2023.
[2] Ibid., also: McKie, Robin, "Biologists think 50% of species will be facing extinction by the end of the century," The Guardian, Feb. 25, 2017
[3] Ibid., from: IPBES (2019): "Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services," E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H. T. Ngo (editors), IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany.
[4] Ibid.
[5] U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, "Operational Activities: Brown Treesnake." Accessed on Apr. 8, 2025 at: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/operational-wildlife-activities/brown-treesnake.
[6] National Geographic, "Cane Toad," accessed April 9, 2025 at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/amphibians/facts/cane-toad?loggedin=true&rnd=1744186756317
[7] Blaustein, Richard J. 2001. "Kudzu’s invasion into Southern United states life and culture." In: McNeeley, J. A. ed. The Great Reshuffling: Human Dimensions of Invasive Species. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK. The World Conservation Union: 55-62. Accessed on Apr. 8, 2025 at: https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/ja_blaustein001.pdf
[8] Kaczynski, Theodore John, "Industrial Society and Its Future," ¶ 92.
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