Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!"
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de...
That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.
1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-homeless species like the Axolotl,
2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up owl hunting permits to protect the western US's shittier owls from encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and
3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase biodiversity.
If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead.
Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific ones!
TBH, the Red Mars books' discussion around when and why to preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me on this issue...
I haven't read Red Mars but these are both very different from an abiotic landscape. You can easily go back to an abiotic landscape on Mars because that's the default. It doesn't take delicacy. And, an abiotic landscape is extremely simple compared to an ecosystem. We can easily predict what will happen if we go back to one.
The 'we' here is the issue. Who is we? The human race do not share complex holistic goals, organisational frameworks, or even aesthetic preferences. It's a miracle cooperation exists at all at transnational scale. The hope that it could serve functional purposes - rather than alternately facilitating the enrichment of the very few, and constraining the worst excesses of that wealth transfer - seems to beg the question, how?
'We' don't truly care about anything, there is no we once the net gets that wide. Don't get me started on 'should', a word that shakes its head in impotence.
I'm from NZ, and we had that event in our recent history. The islands had numerous species of giant birds, but these were wiped out quickly by the first humans who came here, just a few centuries ago. Same everywhere. We've been driving species to extinction for a long time.
gives the 40 million (35+5). It gives by name a bunch of genes unique to humans, though doesn't count them. 300 is just an estimate, I couldn't find a specific reference to that number, thought it's widely to believed to be in the hundreds (and not, say, the millions).
Also https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...
> At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimpanzees and humans.
There are about 20,000 known protein-coding genes in the human genome [1], so that alone refutes the notion that there are only about 700 differences unique to humans. Besides novel unique and changes in the protein sequences themselves, changes in gene regulation is another obvious source of differences.
See this for a more thorough, and up to date, review
https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...
What they've created here are not actually dire wolves but a couple of timber wolves with about a dozen edits to 12 million gene pairs and the result is creatures that have phenotypic similarities to dire wolves but not their complete genetic signature.
There's nothing wrong with building cool proof-of-concept tech as a prestige project that might actually lead to real solutions some day, but Collosal's dire wolf lookalike and mammoth lookalike and whatever else lookalike aren't a serious solution to a problem nor a direct path towards a solution, so they get valid criticism for pretending that they are.
"nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I see no reason to push back against a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If you're claiming that their attempts yet a solution, then your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the entire problem on the first go. If you're claiming that their attempts aren't even going in the right direction, and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet been raised here - enough to say that they should definitely give up now.
In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like to see them keep trying.
Are they, though? This isn't a dire wolf, it's a wolf with a few genes tweaked to make it look more like a dire wolf. I see no evidence that they have any intention of pursuing the far more arduous task of actually preserving an endangered species or restoring one with all of its actual DNA, and I don't see a compelling reason to believe that introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing.
The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact.
I personally don't care if they "really" restore an extinct animal or not (perfect clone vs. hairy elephants). Their creations are cool proofs of concept for the genetic engineering tooling that they're creating and captures public/investor imagination much more than more mundane (but monetizable) aspects of the work, like working with massive amounts of data, gene editing tools, etc.
In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have any sort of positive impact.
And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling & technology that they can spin off and sell for more mundane purposes.
Over what timescale? They don't seriously engage with this idea at all. It's total lip-service.
(Never mind, that they never conserved anything)
As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot device to make sure our characters were trapped on the island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and drive away.
At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.
If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a large chunk of the planet.
If Disneyland claimed to be helping fix world problems like biodiversity loss and climate change, that would be worth criticizing as well.
At worst, it'll be a very crowded zoo
I'd assume that translates to relatively costly ticket prices, right?
Ofc, I'm assuming Homo Economicus run this zoo, that might not be accurate irl
Perhaps they could have a coupon day?
Maybe in theory, but propping up an entire ecosystem in collapse is well beyond Colossal's reach and incentives. This money and research would be better spent preventing the ecosystems from collapsing in the first place.
If we fix climate change, I could see an argument for investing in restoring the ecosystems that were destroyed. But 'de-extincting' a species without addressing the root causes of that extinction is idiocy.
Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.
Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing populations isn't the worst thing in the world. Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows from this R&D.
Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.