US Company Claims to Have Revived Extinct "Dire Wolf"— They Lied
Mainstream media has joyfully parroted Colossal Biosciences colossal lie that it was revived the Dire Wolf. Instead, it altered the genes of a couple Grey Wolves.
In October 2024, Colossal Biosciences announced that it had successively bred two Dire Wolves—a large, long extinct species of wolf. Thanks to Game of Thrones fervor, the news went viral.
The mainstream media—ever-eager to hype stories which they think will harm the Christian worldview—quickly picked up the story, gushing over every detail. As has become the norm for American journalists, these articles were devoid of any of the skepticism one would expect from a journalist investigating such wild claims as the resurrection of an animal which we are told has been extinct for 10,000 years—let's not forget that these are the same people who find Christ's resurrection so unbelievable.
But the scientific community, eager to learn of how this supposed breakthrough occurred, did the work journalists were unwilling to do: ask basic questions.
The verdict: the whole thing is a colossal fraud.
Gene editing is nothing new. In fact, advances in genetics and microbiology have done much to make evolution an untenable and absurd position. For example, in his Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, Dr. John C. Sanford shows that mutation is never an advancement, but a loss of genetic material — thus affirming the Biblical witness that the created world is in decay — the mechanism of mutation/selection cannot create a functional gene. It is, therefore, absurd to believe that a process of degradation, which cannot produce a single functional gene, can manage to create more advanced and survivable species over a period of time.
Simply put, if someone repeatedly takes a sip of water from a cup, the cup does not fill up as a result of this process—much less does it become a larger, more functional cup, but instead runs dry.
But we have no need to refute the ravings of Darwin, that is not our task. Instead, let's focus on the publicity stunt, shall we?
New Scientist reviewed the claims of Colossal Bioscience. What they found was that, instead of reviving the Dire Wolf, Colossal simply edited the genes of Grey Wolves—ie., they watched too much Jurassic Park and took Hollywood screenwriting for sound scientific theory.
The modifications were, of course, not so extensive as those proposed in the movie. Instead, they simply edited those genes which effect:
- The color of the animals fur
- size and muscular structure
In other words, they bred a larger Grey Wolf with white fur.
"but hold on, what if those genes were the only one' which needed to be edited to bring the dire wolf into existence? After all, Colossal Bioscience said that the two species share 99.5% of their DNA."
Yes, they do share—according to the company making the claim—that they share 99.5% of their DNA. But as New Scientist points out, even if this is the case, "the grey wolf genome is around 2.4 billion base pairs long, that still leaves room for millions of base-pairs of differences." In other words, Colossal Bioscience's 20 edits to the grey wolf genome in absolutely no way turned these Grey Wolf pups into Dire Wolves.
And in typical modern scientific fashion—in which there is no "truth," only "models"— Colossal's Beth Shapiro admitted they had not revived Dire Wolves, trying to use jargon to cover or their lies: "We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal."
In other words, Beth is saying "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck!"
And we agree: if it looks like a fraud, lies like a fraud, it's a fraud.
