A company has just brought back the dire wolf from extinction using DNA from fossils. Some claim they are not really dire wolves since the just changed a few genes from their gray wolf parents. But don’t WE have crap DNA from our evolution? Including bacteria that have invaded up? Don’t we match 99% of our DNA with chimps? And nobody questions that we are human.
So how much DNA has to be unique to be another species? Or more specific to this thread, how much of a wolf’s DNA needs to be dire wolf DNA for it to be a full dire wolf?
Other scientists disagree with this view, however. “This is a designer dog. This is a genetically modified gray wolf,” says Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, who has worked with Shapiro in the past but was not involved in this project. “I have more than 14 Neandertal genes in me, and we wouldn’t call me a Neandertal.”
The pups “don’t have any traits that would allow us to understand the dire wolf any better than we did yesterday,” Gill says, adding that understanding ice age organisms isn’t just a matter of knowing what they looked like or what they ate—but also about knowing what they did in those ancient ecosystems. “Some of those things are coded genetically; some of those are cultural” and passed down from generation to generation.
At best, this would be an “incremental step” toward de-extinction, she says.
For that matter, Scientific American ran an article a few years back about how dire wolves aren’t wolves at all, and their common ancestor with wolves is about as far back as man’s common ancestor with modern apes.
They created a hybrid, arguably a new species, with dire wolf traits. That is not insignificant, but it’s not “de-extincting” a species.
This video explains it better than I can. At least better than I can in a paragraph or two.
Swapping out 20 genes will make gray wolves more like dire wolves, but it won’t make them dire wolves.
Keep in mind that there is only about 0.1% difference between a chihuahua and a gray wolf but those few genes make a huge difference. So these modified wolves may be more like dire wolves than their parents, but saying they’re dire wolves is like saying a chihuahua is a gray wolf.
There are people walking around today with about 3% Neanderthal genes, but we don’t call them Neanderthals, we call them H. sapiens.
Is it possible to say that X% of dire wolf genes are distinct from grey wolf genes?
And talking about 3% neanderthal and 98.8% of chimp and human genes the same and 20 dire genes, &c., what percentage of our genes make us human as opposed to not-human.
Straits are narrow passages of water between two landmasses, connecting two larger bodies of water on either end. Dire Straits are particularly dangerous (to shipping, presumably) straits.
Straights are people attracted to members of the opposite gender. I’m not sure what Dire Straights are and I’m not sure I want to find out.
The scientific name is Aenocyon dirus, or “Terrible Dog” in Latin. Dirus > Dire.
Whatever amount of genetic similarity they may have to the dire wolf, they won’t have the behaviors, which they would have learned from growing up in the pack. And if they’re isolated (which I understand to be the case), they won’t have the opportunity to learn grey wolf behaviors, either. Instinct can only take them so far.
The Dire wolf wasnt some huge animal however. It’s size overlaps with the grey or Yukon wolf. Some get a bit bigger- wikipedia- The dire wolf was about the same size as the largest modern forms of gray wolf (Canis lupus): the Yukon wolf and the northwestern wolf. A. d. guildayi weighed on average 60 kilograms (132 lb) and A. d. dirus was on average 68 kg (150 lb).
Unless you were a wolf expert, you’d just think it was a wolf. Or a malamute even.