Dire Wolves Revived? Bold Claim Sparks Scientific Showdown

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00:00So, yes, they have slightly genetically modified wolves, maybe, and that's probably the best that

00:21you're going to get. And those slight modifications seem to have been derived from retrieved

00:28dire wolf material. Does that make it a dire wolf? No. Does it make a slightly modified

00:35gray wolf? Yes. And that's probably about it.

00:49When you claim all these great big things and then you don't provide the associated evidence,

00:53especially in something as controversial as this, that is a massive red flag. It suggests that

00:58at best, they've over-exaggerated. At worst, they're lying through their teeth.

01:28We don't have the technology to modify entire genomes. We can modify components of genomes and we can

01:55certainly sequence genomes. But the fact that fossil evidence, unless it's only recently extinct and

02:03very essentially not been degraded for very long, this is why sort of the Jurassic Park concept is

02:09even more fantastical because we're talking about tens of millions of years between deposition of

02:17the individual and finding the fossil. So the DNA degradation would mean that if you could get a few

02:22base pairs out, you're doing well. And that's not enough to create an entire genome. Where do you

02:27put them? I mean, this is one thing that seems to be completely lost on the de-extinction people is that

02:33let's say that even you managed to bring back a sufficient number of mammoths or dire wolves to

02:39create a viable population. This is important because you need thousands of completely genetically

02:44diverse individuals in a population for having any chance of surviving into the future. The whole Adam

02:51and Eve concept that we create two and they can just go on and do their own thing. Now that's called

02:55inbreeding depression. And then things die very quickly. You know, most introductions of most species

03:02fail over 99%. Why? Because there's a few individuals that inbreed themselves out of existence.

03:09And this is the same with respect to humans. It happens in humans. It happens in mice. It happens in

03:16the smallest individuals.