Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Part I

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Crying Wolf? A Look at the Complicated Worldview Behind Supposedly Bringing Back Long-Extinct Species

Well, what if I told you that we could take an extinct species and bring it back? What if I told you that right now, there are some white, cute, cuddly wolf cubs, and that they are living representatives of a species that had been, for thousands of years, extinct. Good news or bad news? Well, it’s news, because that is exactly what is brought to us in a report from TIME Magazine on the return of the dire wolf.

We are told that the dire wolf is a species that has been extinct for about 10,000 years. As the TIME Magazine report tells us, not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. But now, we have three little puppies, or we have three little wolves. The two of them, born together, are Romulus and Remus, bringing up ancient Roman mythology about the origins of the city of Rome. But in this case, we’re not talking about Rome. We’re talking about dire wolves, and we’re talking about the fact that two of them, now three of them exist. They haven’t been seen in 10,000 years.

Now, this would be a big story under any circumstance, but in this particular circumstance, it is these three young dire wolves or three animals called dire wolves that now exist due to a commercial company seeking to use genetic engineering techniques to try to bring about the enlivening of extinct species. They’re not stopping with dire wolves. They’re looking at the woolly mammoth. They’re looking at other animals, the saber-toothed tiger, and they’re wondering about bringing them back. Because isn’t this good news, that long-extinct species, and remember, we’re talking here about 10,000 years. That’s not really long by the calculus that these folks are using. We are told that it’s good news that now, we can see these species again.

You’ve got these little pups. They’re playing. They’re functioning. They’re eating. They’re not in the natural environment, at least at this point, but clearly, the effort would insinuate that one day, they will be reintroduced back into the natural environment, whatever that is. Because whatever the natural environment is, it wasn’t the natural environment that dire wolves knew when dire wolves naturally walked the earth. All of this is part of a larger commercial product undertaken by a company that says that it has the highfalutin mission, as a corporation, to try to bring about the reintroduction of extinct species back into nature.

Now, there are a couple of qualifications I need to make right up front. In reading from these reports, I have to use the data as is presented in the reports, and let’s just say they are not holding to a young earth creation, which I am. But nonetheless, in order for the report to make sense, I’m going to read it exactly as it is stated here. They’re claiming to be able to bring back into existence species that have been extinct, in some cases, for multiple tens of thousands of years. They’re talking about an ear bone that they date as 72,000 years old of a dire wolf that was supposedly unearthed in American Falls, Idaho, was the source for some of the material here.

We’re told, again, that this species, the dire wolf, has been extinct for about 10,000 years. We’re also told that this company is absolutely committed to something of an ecological agenda, seeking to return nature and to return these species to nature. The big cover story in TIME Magazine has the word extinct, and it’s crossed out, no longer extinct. Underneath, we read the words, “This is Remus. He’s a dire wolf, the first to exist in over 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever.” But of course, there’s some very interesting things that come out of this, and in this report, Jeffrey Kluger, the reporter for TIME, has at least raised several of them. 

For one thing, are these dire wolves? They look like dire wolves. They are claimed to be dire wolves. They’re the products of a biological experiment in which DNA, identified in terms of the dire wolf, has more or less been produced by modifications on the DNA of existing wolves. Now, some of the people who are looking at this say right away, “This isn’t a dire wolf. It isn’t one. It’s an artificial dire wolf. This company is claiming to have done what it hasn’t actually done.”

The company’s known as Colossal Biosciences, and they’re really talking about, they claim that they have produced three young dire wolves. As the TIME Magazine report says, “Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient preserved DNA, Colossal,” that is the company, “Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, two-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter, effectively, for the first time, de-extincting,” that’s the word they use, “de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.”

Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here. This is a big story. So let’s just take it at face value here before looking deeper into the story. Let’s just say that even as we know, there are a lot of animal species that have gone extinct, some of them, multiple thousands of years ago. If some of the DNA, enough of the DNA to establish that basic genetic structure exists, and then you can have an embryo developed, and that embryo can be transferred into, in this case, a living dog, and if, indeed, that dog can give birth to what is genetically a dire wolf, then do you have a dire wolf?

Well, the reality is that the critics are saying there’s not enough genetic material here for this to be honest. This is a replica animal. It is not a real dire wolf. In order to have a real dire wolf, you’re going to have to have a mommy dire wolf and a daddy dire wolf produce a baby dire wolf. That is not what is going on here. This is genetic material that is being manipulated in order to produce what looks like, may even sound like a dire wolf. The ambitions of this company, they are far-reaching. TIME tells us, “The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently has 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wishlist is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse,” I’m not making this up, folks, “a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long golden coat and accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.” yeah. This is TIME Magazine, and we’re really reading about the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth, and the reason is this is a big story. TIME Magazine knows this is a big story. Christians looking at this with the perspective of a Christian worldview and with those concerns, we have to know this is a big story.

It’s a commercial story. TIME Magazine wants you to know this is big business. We’re talking about multiple billions of dollars invested in this, and, of course, a lot of people are investing in this not because they have a particular commitment to the reintroduction of dire wolves, but because they see commercial applications. They see big money behind this, but money is not enough to explain the ambition here. This is also the ambition, basically, to bring back extinct species, to undo what is claimed to be the catastrophes caused, at least in some part, by human actions. I’ll just point out that when you’re talking about the dire wolf, it’s going to be really, really difficult to make an argument that human beings did something 10,000 years ago that affected the extinction of the dire wolf. So many issues to unpack here.

This is a company with a mammoth ambition, pun intended there. TIME tells us, “If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves.” 

“What they learned, restoring the mammoth, they say could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climactic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine, and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll.” I know you’re staying up late about that. “Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.”

At the worldview level. So many fascinating things for us to consider. Number one, is it natural or unnatural that some species should go extinct? Here’s where at least even some of the scientists quoted in the article point out that even though some extinction may be caused by human interaction or even some kind of climate change, et cetera, it’s a reality, nonetheless, that a vast number of animal species just go extinct because of the process of life. That is to say they don’t reproduce anymore. They disappear, and now, you’re talking about bringing these animals back. There are huge moral issues here, and, by the way, I think the moral issues are a lot larger than TIME Magazine acknowledges. We’re going to get to that.

But at least even acknowledged within the report from TIME Magazine is the fact that, what do you do with dire wolves once you bring them by this biomedical experimentation supposedly back into being? What do you say, “Hey. You’re now loose on Montana”? There is a huge problem here. There is also a matter of just basic honesty, because a lot of people in the business are coming back and saying, “That’s not a dire wolf. It is just an engineered critter that looks like a dire wolf.” Some of the scientists making comment on this are pointing out that it is just a very small amount of genetic material that might be directly traced to something to be called a dire wolf. Otherwise, a lot of this is just engineered, and the ethical questions are massive. Even from a secular perspective, the ethical questions are absolutely massive.

So let’s just say you bring back a woolly mammoth. Okay. What are you going to do with a woolly mammoth? Why did the woolly mammoth go extinct? What kind of species development, what kind of biological development has taken place since the extinction of the woolly mammoth? What are the other animals going to say when all of a sudden, they’re face-to-face with a woolly mammoth? How natural is that? Here, you have people claiming, with a commercial interest, that they are returning nature to nature in terms of bringing back the dire wolf, or the woolly mammoth, or the Tasmanian tiger, or just about anything else. But the reality is this is artificial. It’s not real.

You have an engineered animal you call dire wolf, but even some other scientists are saying that’s not really a dire wolf. It’s dire wolf-ish. But you also have a situation in which no one knows what would happen if you had, say, reproductive pairs of what are now identified as these dire wolves, and you just put them out into the wilderness. What’s that going to look like? And so in the name of nature, you’re actually changing nature by your own actions, and this company clearly has a profit motive. It’s a massive profit motive that they have in mind, but the issues here are just larger, even, than the profit motive.

Even when it comes to the big, say, flashiest project they have, which is cloning or, in a sense, bringing back a mammoth, they admit, according to the report, that it will be,  “a mammoth in name only.” One spokesperson for the company said, “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them recreate core characteristics belonging to the mammoths.” Yeah. Put them out in the wilderness. What could possibly go wrong?

By the way, the TIME Magazine report’s honest in another way, pointing to the same spokesperson as saying that, “Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi,” that is the dire wolves, “are living some kind of natural life or something approximating natural life. The company says they are lucky wolves, at least in terms of the round-the-clock care, we’re told, feeding and love.” But then, TIME says, “But those lives will also be limited.” Let’s just say they are being watched, unlike normal wolves. They’re not free like normal wolves. They don’t even know they’re not normal wolves.

There’s another issue here, which is just kind of interesting, and that is we have the three little wolves, sounds like a fairy tale here, you have the three little wolves. Of course, they’re growing up. One of them, Remus, is currently at 80 pounds. He’s expected to grow to about 150 pounds when he reaches full growth, but the TIME Magazine cover story acknowledges that wolf packs are incredibly social. They’re a lot larger than this. TIME says that the packs can, “on occasion, be as small as two members, but typically include 15 or more. What’s more, the animal’s hunting territory can range anywhere from 50 to 1,000 square miles. Against that, Colossal’s three dire wolves spending their entire lives in a 2,000-acre preserve could be awfully lonely and claustrophobic, not at all the way wild dire wolves would live their lives.” That is not to say there is anyone who can give a firsthand report of how the dire wolves lived.

I appreciate the fact that there are some in the article questioning the ethics of all of this. Stephen Latham, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, said, “I really feel that bringing back one or even five woolly mammoths is not a good idea.” He went on to say, “A single woolly mammoth is not a woolly mammoth leading to a woolly mammoth life with a woolly mammoth herd.” Yeah. I dare you to say that fast. 

But it’s true. A single woolly mammoth is not, it’s not the same thing as a woolly mammoth in a woolly mammoth community, as a part of a woolly mammoth herd. So you’re creating something that, genetically, is not exactly what you’re claiming, and not only that, it is not operating as a normal woolly mammoth.

But you know what? We don’t even know what, exactly, it would mean if you put woolly mammoths back into what you would call a natural environment where they haven’t been natural for a very long time. There are likely to be winners and losers in that equation. So you asked the question, what could go wrong? Well, I think this is where Christians as well as non-Christians understand an awful lot could go wrong here. This is like a 1960s or 70s science fiction movie. Only this isn’t science fiction, and it has to be updated, given modern genetic technologies.

Also, it has to acknowledge the massive amounts of money that are involved here. We’re talking about billions upon billions of dollars. People don’t put that kind of money into a company unless they think there’s going to be some kind of commercial application on the other end, and here’s where, as Christians, we have to step back and say, “Okay. We have to put this in the larger context of that larger project to basically eclipse all natural barriers.”

You also have an ideology, and it’s not clear that this company directly is tied to this ideology, but remind yourself this exists, and that is that humans are a blight upon the planet and that if we could just return the planet to a state of nature, all would be well. Number one, that’s a ludicrous argument. It’s kind of a part of the naturalistic romanticism that has shaped so many in the West for the last two or 300 years.

Part II

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De-Extinction and Creation Order: Should Humans Seek to Bring Animals Back From Extinction?

But you also note that it’s profoundly unbiblical, profoundly not just non-Christian, but, in a sense, anti-Christian. Because the Christian biblical worldview tells us, as is revealed in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2, that God made us as a part of creation, as the creature made in God’s image.

We’re not a threat to creation, we’re a part of creation. That’s not to say there aren’t moral dimensions to our behavior, ecological and otherwise, but it is to say that when you look at the way the world works in terms of even genetic biodiversity and all the rest, this is not merely some kind of accident. It’s not just some kind of experiment unfolding that we can decide we’re going to, all of a sudden, intervene in and experiment on our own.

By the way, there’s a pattern that’s revealed even in the science fiction literature, and sometimes, that’s very morally revelatory. Sometimes, you see a lot in terms of the kinds of fears that are represented in science fiction literature. One of those fears is science unleashed, an experiment that gets out of control, something that’s even well-intended that turns into a very bad effect, turns into a threat to human life, certainly to human dignity, turns into a threat even to other species. Where we’re talking about something like the woolly mammoth, you’re talking about something like the dire wolf, nature is not static. When you put an animal like that into it, it upsets the entire ecosystem.

It’s interesting that we have human beings who say, “We know enough that we can intervene wisely.” There are two reasons I doubt that. The first reason is I don’t believe we have that level of wisdom. The second thing is I certainly don’t trust we have that kind of wisdom that comes with a profit incentive. There’s a very interesting word that is used in this context, and that is the word “de-extinct.” And so you have people who are saying, “Look, the project here is to de-extinct species. They’re extinct now. By the use of this kind of technology, we can de-extinct them.”

Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Paleogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand’s University of Otago, told the Washington Post, “The reality is we can’t de-extinct extinct creatures, because we can’t use cloning. The DNA is just not well enough preserved.” In a phone interview, he said that this company’s pups, “are not dire wolves, but gray wolves that have had part of their genome changed to look like dire wolves.” Now, you got to love honesty when it shows up, and that’s what’s really interesting. You have this scientist say, “It looks like a dire wolf, but it’s not a dire wolf. Its genetic structure isn’t the dire wolf’s genetic structure. You can’t clone that. There’s not enough existing DNA that would be the basis for even clonal technologies, so what you have is an animal that looks like a dire wolf.”

Okay? This company has big ambitions. It is to bring back to life the woolly mammoth, the dodo, the thylacine, otherwise known as the Tasmanian tiger. Oh. What could go wrong? This is just like the script of a Looney Tunes cartoon that is actually meant seriously with hundreds of scientists, billions of dollars, and a lot of intensity, an awful lot of focus here. There’s a profit motive, yes, but I think, as Christians, we understand there’s more behind this.

In Genesis 1, we are told that two human beings, God gave dominion over the other creatures. Even as we see in Genesis Chapter 2, the exercise of authority and giving the animals their name, that was assigned to Adam. But being given dominion, which includes both a rule over but responsibility for these other creatures, we are not given the power to bring species into existence. We are not given the power to tamper with nature in this sense. God didn’t say to Adam and Eve, “Go establish a laboratory, and see what you can do.” He said, “This is what I have given the creatures for my glory. You are to name them. You are to respect them. In certain respects, you’re to use them. You are to see them as gifts.” But you look at this, and you recognize when you abandon the Christian worldview, you have very little ability to say no to anything like this. 

The TIME Magazine cover story seems to want to say no, but it can’t actually say no. Because there is no basis for an adequate moral judgment to give that answer in this secular and confused age. Well, okay, we’re going to leave that story, but as you go out in your front yard tonight, look out for a dire wolf or something even more dire.

Part III

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There’s Reality, and There’s This: Rep. Huffman’s Protest of the National Prayer Breakfast as Unconstitutional

But as we turn to something else, I want to tell you about a report that came out of the Washington Examiner just in recent weeks, and it goes back to the National Prayer Breakfast. It’s not really about the breakfast. It is about a statement that was made by California Congressman Jared Huffman. It was a 30-second video. The report here is from Conn Carroll of the Examiner. I just happened to find this again, and I thought we need to talk about this.

Carroll writes, “If you want to watch a video that perfectly captures how hopelessly out of touch the modern Democratic Party is with 99% of the nation, you couldn’t do better than the one-minute-30-second video posted on X by representative Jared Huffman earlier this month.” Listen to this, “Staring into the camera, Huffman announces he’s about to cross the street for the National Prayer Breakfast. He quickly assures viewers he’s not going to attend the event, but to protest it. Huffman then proudly displays two pins he’s wearing to promote his protest. One reads, ‘Build This wall,’ meant to symbolize the wall of separation between church and state that our founders intended for our secular republic. His second pin simply reads, ‘Entering Gilead,’ which Huffman says is a reference to a creepy dystopic theocracy, which is the slippery slope we are headed down with events like this.”

Okay. Okay. We’re used to political grandstanding, but every once in a while, it takes on a shape you just say, “Okay. We got to face this for what it is.” Conn Carroll reminds us the National Prayer Breakfast has been around since 1953. Every president since then has attended the prayer breakfast, and then Carroll simply writes, “If Clinton and Obama, who attended it, are your idea of sinking into a dystopic theocracy, you might want to have your head checked.”

Clearly, this is a member of Congress who’s extremely liberal, represents an incredibly liberal district, and is trying to make an incredibly liberal point, a secularist point, that participation in the National Prayer Breakfast, congressional sponsorship of all the same, it’s a violation of church and state. It is a grave threat to the integrity of the United States of America. It’s going to tear down what he calls the wall of separation between church and state, a statement that goes back, by the way, to Thomas Jefferson.

I saw the report, and I thought, “I just have to look at this a little bit further.” And so I went and found the document released by this congressman along with three other colleagues, and they complained about the National Prayer Breakfast. They refer to its anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy. They refer to foreign influence and back channels, undermining church/state separation, “using the power and prestige of public office to promote sectarian religious events such as the National Prayer Breakfast violates the spirit and law of this constitutional obligation.”

Well, here’s the obvious thing. Just think of the fact that every President of the United States for about a half century has been going to this event. Every single one of them is undermining the wall of separation between church and state? As some critics have pointed out, this particular member of Congress didn’t seem to voice any protests when it was a Democratic president attending the event. He also says it’s an inappropriate use of Statuary Hall, and it is an intersection with Christian nationalist events. Okay. So you have been warned. 

My point in looking at this is congressional districts really do vary. This is a member of Congress from California’s second district, and when you talk about liberal, let’s just say this gets to the heart of liberal. This is basically from the Golden Gate Bridge north to the Oregon border along the coast. Every single alarm bell should be going off. We are talking about a guy who openly identifies as secular, even when most of his democratic colleagues, who I think are actually quite secular, aren’t about to. Well, let’s just say in San Francisco lingo, they’re not aching to come out of the closet as secularists.

Now, I want to say, as a confessing Christian, as a believing Christian, I’m not greatly impressed by a lot of the events of civic or civil religion. I think an awful lot of what goes on at some of these events, I think it can be critiqued theologically as sub-biblical, sub-orthodox, and sometimes a dangerous mixture. But all our defense mechanisms ought to come out when someone says it violates the Constitution, because what we see here is a secularist agenda that, quite frankly, is just foolish. It’s also, frankly, childish when a member of Congress posts, “Hi, folks. I’m getting ready to cross the street from the National Prayer Breakfast. I’m not going to this event because I support it. I’m actually going to protest it.”

At some point, protests just get boring, but that’s just a reminder of the fact that world views are not evenly distributed across the American nation. They’re not evenly distributed across the American landscape. As we often point out, you have red states and blue states. You also, within those states, have redder communities and bluer communities, and when you get closer to a coast, you have bluer blue. When you get to the area north of San Francisco all the way to the Oregon border, let’s just say you’re talking true blue.

I think it does tell us something that there aren’t many Democrats, even members of the Democratic Party, there aren’t many political liberals who will come out and identify this way as secular. So in one sense, at least, it is a breath of fresh air to have someone admit their worldview. On the other hand, you’ll notice how hostile his worldview is to Christianity and how he grandstands even on something like the National Prayer Breakfast. I do think there’s a principle here. I think the Christian worldview helps us to understand that when you abandon Christianity, it isn’t long before you move from, say, disregarding it, disrespecting it, to basically hating it. It’s inevitable when you consider the pattern.

Part IV

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From Disregard to Disdain – Worldview Differences Turn Hostile

I do think there’s a principle here. I think the Christian worldview helps us to understand that when you abandon Christianity, it isn’t long before you move from, say, disregarding it, disrespecting it, to basically hating it. It’s inevitable when you consider the pattern.