(04-10-2025, 04:55 PM)F2d5thCav Wrote: Ninurta, Logan was beautiful.
Back in World War II, the Nazis tried to "bring back" the aurochs by selective breeding of large cattle. The descendants of these experiments live on, I think, in Scotland.
It is an old dream, a way of playing at being God by creating new species.
The "dire wolves" are IMO a baby step. They can't do it for real ... yet. They might succeed, some day.
Let's consider, for a moment, what they actually did. They tinkered with 20 base pairs at 20 sites on 14 genes. A wolf has around 2 1/2 billion base pairs to tinker with. If we assume that only 1/2 of 1% of the genomes of Dire wolves and gray wolves differed, then that is still 125 million base pairs that are different... but they only tinkered with TWENTY. Out of 125 million.
That's not a "de-extinction" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just the production of a GMO "designer" gray wolf.
In order to even be considered a hybrid, one would think that at least half of the differing base pairs would have to be derived from dire wolves, which would be 62.5 MILLION base pair tinkerings. And that's just for a hybrid.
20 base pairs rises to nowhere near the level of even a hybrid, much less an actual dire wolf.
They are lying to us. A generous person could only go so far as to say they are merely "hyping it up". I'm not generous. I say it's a flat out lie.
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