cab67
cab67's JournalThe taxonomist's lament, pt 2 - when names are just really bad.
So yesterday, I discussed the problems that can happen when scientific names for living things are offensive. This was prompted by a discussion I’m having with colleagues about older names that might apply to a recently-recognized species. I then discussed the most common kind of offensiveness in biological nomenclature – patronyms honoring people who, in hindsight, should not be honored.
Sometimes, names are offensive not because they honor someone bad, but because they’re just flat-out offensive in and of themselves. Fortunately, these are few in number. But those that are offensive can be really offensive.
The best example I know is the scientific name of the red-shafted flicker, a kind of woodpecker found in western North America. It was treated as Colaptes cafer for a long time, but it’s usually considered to be a subspecies of northern flicker (Colaptes aurata cafer) these days. The yellow-shafted flicker we see east of the Rockies is Colaptes aurata aurata.
The name cafer was imparted by a German naturalist, Johann Gmelin, in the 1780’s, and it arose from a mistake I’ve never been able to understand. Gmelin thought the specimen he saw came not from western North America, but from southern Africa, where some indigenous groups were called “kaffirs.” This word is considered to be an ethnic slur in South Africa and surrounding countries – maybe not as bad as the n-word, but bad enough to get you in trouble if you use it in that region.
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Another reason names can be offensive is if they insult one person in particular. Using nomenclature to insult people is considered highly unethical, but it sometimes happens.
Usually, it happens by mistake. There was no offense intended, even if it occurred. My favorite is a moth named after someone named Dyer. They just put an -ia after his name.
That said, most of us can think of people we’d like to insult with nomenclature. A close friend knows of a word in ancient Greek for a person who has sex with goats; he won’t share that word, as he’s reserving it for his own use.
Some friends and I once discussed doing this about 25 years ago. An entomologist discovered that the name Syntarsus had been applied to both a small theropod dinosaur and a beetle. The beetle was named first, and so the dinosaur would have to be renamed. Ordinarily, professional etiquette would require one to notify the original author of a name of the synonymy. That person could then correct the situation. This particular entomologist claimed he was told the paleontologist who named the dinosaur Syntarsus was dead, and so he published his own replacement name – Megapnosaurus – in an obscure entomological journal that very few libraries get.
The entomologist was trying to be whimsical – Megapnosaurus literally means “big dead reptile.” But many paleontologists thought this was in poor taste; the dinosaur formerly called Syntarsus was rather small. But more to the point, the original namer of the dinosaur was very much alive, was aware of the synonymy, was working to correct the problem, and felt deeply insulted.
The entomologist claims he was told the paleontologist was dead, but the paleontologist was editor of a major paleontological journal at the time and had a page on his department’s web site. He wasn’t hard to find. Still, I take him at his word – that he was acting in good faith and not trying to upset anyone.
What the entomologist did wasn’t wrong, at least from the standpoint of biological nomenclature. He encountered a case of synonymy and replaced the junior synonym with a different name. But to a lot of us in my field, it was rude. So we started talking about finding a fossil horse somewhere that was only known from the hips and maybe hindlimbs and some vertebrae. We’d name it after him, forever linking his name with a horse’s ass.
This wasn’t a serious conversation – none of us was actually going to do this. But that’s how angry we were.
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So – what can we do about offensive taxon names?
If it’s a common name, we can change it easily enough. This was done for what we now call the long-tailed duck, which used to bear a name that would most politely be interpreted as “elderly Native American woman.”
But scientific names are another matter.
In 2018, someone submitted a proposal to the North American Checklist Committee (NACC) of the American Ornithological Society (AOS) to re-name the red-shafted flicker. The NACC maintains the standard checklist professional ornithologists are expected to use, and it’s also used by nearly all field guides, museum catalogs, and textbooks. But while the list indicates what the NACC regards to be valid species, subspecies, and regional variants, and while it can suggest the most appropriate genus name for a species, it does not – and cannot – govern the scientific names themselves.
To change the name, one would have to submit a proposal to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. And they almost never change names for this reason.
Their rationale? It runs against the primary reasons we use biological nomenclature – stability and communication. The names are meant to allow communication among different communities, even if different people speak different languages. And we want the names to be as stable as possible, so that names are used consistently in the scientific literature in the long term. Change names, and searching for older papers on the animal you’re studying becomes more difficult. Change names, and different people might be using different names for the same animal, at least for a time.
I don’t know if a proposal to rename the red-shafted flicker has been put before the Commission, but in the past, such proposals have been rejected. And when asked for an explanation, the Commission will point to stability and communication, but they’ll also add further rationalizations – that some of these words weren’t offensive when they were first used, or that they might be offensive to someone who speaks English, but not to someone who speaks some other language. Why should we fix modern sensibilities on older names?
This came up in the Boverisuchus vs Weigeltosuchus controversy I discussed yesterday. One of the reviewers said we shouldn’t let “modern sensibilities” cloud our judgment. But being a Nazi has been a bad thing globally for 80 years, and beyond Germany for 15 or 20 years before that. Saying “Nazis are bad” isn’t a new form of sensibility; it’s been nearly universally understood that Nazis weren’t good guys for the better part of a century. (Yes, the current administration seems to be following the Nazi playbook. But very few people would voluntarily describe themselves as Nazis.)
In my opinion, the Commission is often too conservative in their approach. (Small-c conservative, meaning reluctant to change.) There are different levels of offensiveness, and stability really is important. I don’t know where the line between “offensive, but we’re stuck with it” and “so offensive that we must set stability aside” is, but as John Oliver once said, it’s fucking somewhere. A name based on a racial slur is surely on the “so offensive” side of that line.
Nevertheless, I’m skeptical the Commission will change it. Like I said, its members sometimes lose sight of broader issues because of their laser-like attention to stability.
At any rate – names like this are, fortunately, rare.
That’s all for now. Next time, I’ll bring up the relatively new phenomenon of taxonomic vandalism. And it really is an interesting thing to discuss.
The taxonomists lament, pt. 1 - patronyms.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been part of a discussion concerning the diversity and nomenclature of a group of modern crocodiles. I won’t go deep into the specifics, except to say that what we thought was one species at the turn of the millennium may actually be three species based on new data.
The number of species, and their relationships to each other, are clear from what we now know. But what isn’t clear is the species name we should use for one of them. Although it’s a “new” species insofar as it’s only recently been recognized as a distinct species, 18th and 19th century naturalists and travelers would often establish new “species” based on what they collected, saw, or sometimes just heard about. And based on the rules of nomenclature, we’re supposed to determine whether any of these older names applies to the new species before coming up with a new name. It’s called the principle of priority – if multiple species names refer to the same species, we’re supposed to go with the first to be published.
The thing is, it’s not always clear whether a name first published in 1800 actually refers to the species we’re working with. Modern protocols weren’t in place. Was it collected in its habitat, or acquired through trade (meaning it could have come from far away)? Does this original specimen still exist in a museum collection – and if so, would we recognize it? Was it illustrated at the time? How accurate are the illustrations? Was the author even looking at just one species? (At least one modern crocodile species was named based on specimens from Egypt and Brazil.) Did the author actually see any of this, or was he reporting what someone else told him? Did subsequent authors using the same name refer to the same kind of animal?
This can take a while to sort out. Most people find it about as exciting as watching dead flies dangling from a spider web, but a few of us find it illuminating – even exciting at times. It forces us to confront how science was done in the past – and I do mean “confront.”
Anyway – one of the species names that might apply is niger.
In English, this would be pronounced with a soft “g,” as for the countries of Nigeria and Niger. But during a video conference, one of my European colleagues – not a native English speaker – used a hard “g,” as a proper interpretation of the Latin would actually require.
I explained to him that such a pronunciation would get him in very deep trouble in the English-speaking world, even if what he was saying was herpetological and had zip to do with race.
It also evoked a memory. Several years ago, I was contacted by the dean’s office. A student had complained that I’d used a racial epithet in class. I was confused – I would NEVER do this. So I asked if I could meet with this student at the dean’s office. If I’d said or done anything inappropriate, I wanted to know so I wouldn’t do it again. And if I hadn’t, I wanted to know why someone thought I did.
Turns out, what the student saw was a slide that showed several living and extinct alligatorids, including the black caiman – Melanosuchus niger.
I explained to the dean and student that I wasn’t referring to human race at all. I was referring to a large South American crocodylian. The name niger is derived from a Latin root meaning dark or black – and this particular kind of caiman is, indeed, dark brown or black in color. It was coined by German naturalist Johann von Spix in 1825.
I wasn’t using the racial epithet with two g’s. The words share a Latin root, but are otherwise completely unrelated.
The student and dean both accepted my explanation, and I told the student that they hadn’t really done anything wrong – “niger” does look like the n-word, especially if you’re not familiar with it and it’s only shown briefly. And had I used the n-word, a complaint should have been lodged.
But this raised in my mind an issue with which many of us systematists have wrestled in recent years – what to do about scientific names that might be offensive? This, in turn, inspired me to bore all of you with my thoughts.
At present, there are four separate areas of controversy. I have stronger opinions about some than about others.
I’ll discuss these in three separate posts. Two of them have the same cause – patronymy - but (as shown below) can’t be treated the same way. There are also the problems of truly offensive scientific names and what can only be described as taxonomic vandalism, but I’ll cover those later.
PATRONYMS
“Patronyms” are taxa named after people. In formal nomenclature, a patronomic species of crocodile (Crocodylus) would look like Crocodylus johndoei (if named after a man), Crocodylus doeorum (if named after a family or a group bearing the name), or Crocodylus janedoeae (if named after a woman). If it’s a genus of crocodile, it might look like Doesuchus, Doechampsus, or Doeia. (None of these names is real.) In common nomenclature, these take the form of possessive adjectives –Doe’s darter, Doe’s mountain laurel, Doe’s beardless tyrannulet, Doe’s trapdoor spider, and so on.
These are controversial in part because some of these people, in retrospect, weren’t very nice. There are species named after brutal colonialists (e.g. many African species named after Cecil Rhodes or Henry Morton Stanley) or people who were just plain evil (e.g. the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri and butterfly Hypoptera mussolinii).
Usually, these names weren’t established to honor the worst aspects of these people – or at least, not aspects of these people that would have been seen as evil at the time. The imperial efforts of Rhodes and Stanley were celebrated in the UK and elsewhere before we realized the true cost of colonialism, and A. hitleri was named by an Austrian entomologist after the Anschluss and shortly before the Second World War - someone who evidently admired the German chancellor. No one would name something after any of these gentlemen these days.
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What can we do?
In the case of formal scientific names, nothing. The rules of nomenclature just don’t allow for this. There are actually published rules for biological nomenclature we're supposed to use - the ICZN (International Code of Zoological Nomenclature) for animals, ICBN (International Code of Botanical Nomenclature) for plants, and so on. And above the genus level, PhyloCode has emerged as an alternative to the ICZN and ICBN. (I'm not entirely happy with PhyloCode, but I'm a full-throated supporter of the phylogenetic nomenclature it governs and more than happy to use it in place of the ICZN for clade names - though for genera and species, the ICZN is still the code.) More in the discussion if anyone's a glutton for punishment). These codes are governed by bodies ("commissions" ) that rule on nomenclatural disputes. The codes read more like legal documents than biological treatises. They're also available online if you have any inclination to read them - and who doesn't?
There are all kinds of reasons names can be dropped, but the person it’s named after was a genocidal prick isn’t one of them. So the debate in this case focuses on whether the rules themselves should be changed, and there’s very little chance of that happening any time soon. I’ll say more about this later, and discuss it further in later posts.
Common names are more easily changed, because there are no formal rules governing them. About five years ago, the American Birding Association renamed the McCown’s longspur It was named for the Army officer who collected the original specimen, but this particular Army officer switched from the US Army to the CS army during the Civil War. In the wake of the 2020 protests and the infamous Central Park birder confrontation, in which a white woman confronted a Black man who was birding – after all, a Black man walking around Central Park with a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and who keeps looking at birds, must be up to no good – the decision was made to rename the bird. It’s now the thick-billed longspur.
I’m all in favor of doing this for common names – but I would prefer that it be done carefully and with serious consideration. Nomenclature exists to facilitate communication, and any time a name changes, there’s the danger of confusion.
It's basically a cost-benefit analysis. Renaming anything - a bird, a person, a location - comes at the cost of having to remember more things. This, in turn, can lead to confusion when different people are using different names for the same person, place, or thing. If the benefit outweighs the cost, we accept the cost. But it's not always easy to know whether the benefits will even happen, much less justify the cost.
The American Birding Association famously made the decision a couple of years ago to rename every North American bird currently bearing a patronym. The hope is that this will create a more inviting environment for people of color who might want to take up birding. This was part of the rationale behind renaming the McCown’s longspur. None of these North American birds, to my knowledge, honors a person of color, and the ABA argues that renaming these birds will help create a more welcoming environment within the birding community.
The benefits could be huge, but there are costs. To begin with, I haven’t seen any evidence that this will actually have the intended effect. This will mean a lot of work for a lot of people, most of whom would not like seeing centuries of nomenclatural stability up-ended without benefit. Granted, I haven’t seen evidence it won’t work, either – but that’s because it hasn’t been tried before. It’s a gamble, and I have no idea how it will work out. Are there other things we could be doing? Like not assuming a Black birder is a peeping tom, and speaking up loudly in defense of those who encounter racism? Or outreach to diverse communities, showing how much bird diversity can be found even in their own neighborhoods? I don’t know, but I’d feel a whole lot better about this if I did.
It’s not just a handful of names. There are more than 150 birds in the ABA area (US and Canada) whose common names are patronyms. Renaming all of them will cause chaos. And if this is also done for butterflies, dragonflies, reptiles and amphibians, beetles, mollusks, wildflowers, and fishes – groups of interest to their own communities of hobbyists and sportsmen – confusion will only grow. I don’t know how long this chaos would last, but there would definitely be a lot of confusion at the outset.
And there would be material costs; we’d have to rewrite all of our field guides and textbooks, and parks would have to re-do all of the checklists they provide to visitors. Museums would have to change signage in their exhibits, and as someone who's worked in museums, I can assure you - this is NOT cheap. Maybe this will be worth it, or maybe it won’t – but either way, it’ll be a massive pain in the tush.
Are all patronyms bad? Lucy’s warbler is named after Lucy Hunter Baird, who was the daughter of an ornithologist; so far as anyone can tell, she didn’t do anything wrong. (Neither did her father, though as a scientist at the Smithsonian during the 19th century, he would have been surrounded by the same people who robbed Native American gravesites and treated non-white people as lesser forms of primate. Guilt by association, I suppose.). Lots of things are named after Barack Obama, including a fossil lizard (Obamadon gracilis) and a modern puffbird ( Nystalus obamai). So sometimes, the honorific is actually deserved.
There are gray areas. There are lots of animals, especially birds, named after John James Audubon – Audubon’s warbler, Audubon’s oriole, Audubon’s shearwater, and so on – but though he played a central role in the early growth of American environmentalism and ornithology, he was also a slaveholder. When it comes to Confederate veterans, are we talking about a high-ranking officer who was a rich plantation owner (and slaveholder) before the war and who fought against Reconstruction in its aftermath? Or was he a poor, illiterate dirt farmer who got conscripted and barely made it home alive? I don’t necessarily see these as equivalent.
And sometimes, a species is named after someone that’s evil, but for good reasons. There are two species named after the decerebrate facultative biped in the White House – a moth (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi) and, though it’s not official yet, a caecilian (a type of limbless amphibian – Dermophis donaldtrumpi - which I won't italicize). The moth makes sense – its head is covered in orange-white scales resembling the hairy organism living on the president’s head. The caecilian name was proposed – though at present, it’s not been formally established – as the result of an auction held by a conservation group. This looked like a serious blunder on their part until the auction’s winner explained that, like Old Colostomy, this caecilian – a burrowing animal – keeps its head buried in the sand.
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That said, some patronyms really can be problematic – and I’ve been involved in at least one such situation.
In 2013, I revised the extinct hoofed crocodiles. I determined that the name used for most of those in North America and Europe (Pristichampsus) had to be set aside. The next available names, published in the same 1938 monograph, were Boverisuchus and Weigeltosuchus. Following standard procedures, I determined that Boverisuchus was the correct one. But a few years later, some colleagues informed me of a mistake I’d made in that revision. There were several possible solutions, and they graciously asked if I’d co-author the paper addressing the mistake with them.
The problem? They were also arguing that we should go with Weigeltosuchus and not Boverisuchus. And if I was part of that, I’d never be able to show my face in front of my wife’s family again. Or my wife. Or anyone in my department. Or most of my friends. In fact, I’d have a very hard time looking at myself in the mirror.
Johannes Weigelt made some very strong contributions to paleontology. Most notably, he invented the field of taphonomy – the study of what happens to organic remains between death and burial. But he was also a Nazi. I don’t just mean joined-the-party-so-I-could-keep-my-job Nazi, either – he was a true believer. He actively worked to get Jewish professors and students kicked out of his university. He wanted to remodel his institution on National Socialist principles. He consulted for a mining company known at the time to be using concentration-camp forced labor. There’s even a picture of him with Hermann Goering.
My wife and her family are Jewish. So there was no way I could coauthor such a paper, even if I was an emotionless scumbag who agreed with their reasoning – which, I'd like to think, I'm not.
In the end, we concluded that the problem could be fixed by publishing a note correcting the mistake I made, and that Boverisuchus was the correct name to use. But I encountered a basic fact that makes dealing with these problems difficult - the unwillingness of many systematists to change offensive names.
The first version we submitted included some text written by me arguing that when multiple names might be available for one species, we should include ethical considerations in making our decision. I acknowledged the gray-area problem, but argued that enthusiastic support of the Nazi Party took the issue far from the gray-not gray boundary. And the reviewers – both from Europe, though neither from Germany – argued that such considerations are unwarranted, and even inappropriate. So what if Weigelt was a National Socialist? The name is just a label, after all, and we shouldn’t let modern sensibilities get in the way of nomenclatural stability. Rules are rules.
The fact that the global crocodyliform systematics community isn’t large enough to fill the average Chili's, meaning the level of confusion would be minimal, didn’t seem to make an impression. Neither did the fact that “being a Nazi is bad” isn’t just a “modern sensibility” – this was taught to me when Nixon was president and astronauts still flew to the moon. Nor, for that matter, did the fact that we were deciding among multiple possible names and not setting aside the name clearly favored by the rules. As far as these people were concerned, adherence to the code – something I acknowledge is important – shouldn’t just be the top priority; it should be the only priority.
And that’s why it’s easy enough to change common names, but not scientific names. Many of my colleagues take a very legalistic approach to the subject.
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I’ll pick up with this tomorrow, when I discuss names that are offensive in and of themselves. There are species whose names are racial epithets, for example. These create an even deeper level of concern for people like me. More on that tomorrow.
an email I just sent to a MAGA cousin of mine.
Nothing has happened to her yet, but she's panicking and asking for help. She's perpetually underemployed, has a history of making very poor decisions about her own finances, and has some health issues.
Added on edit: some have criticized my attitude, suggesting I should be more willing to help. Ordinarily, I'd agree with that point completely - but I left some context out to focus on a point relevant to DU. I've helped this person many times. So have others. Our help is likely to be wasted (as I said, she makes poor money decisions), and she's always happy to explain why all of us are foolish for being Democrats. This reflects my arrival at the "no more" point in my life as much as anything else.
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Dear Cousin,
I got your text earlier today asking us to put some money away in case you need it for your medical expenses. You’re concerned that Medicaid is about to be slashed and you might lose your coverage.
I’m responding by email because I want to say more than just “no.”
(This is where I included a paragraph detailing previous efforts to help, all of which came to nothing, and the behavior she's shown to me, and to other relatives, throughout our adult lives. I didn't include it here.)
You voted for Trump. You voted for every Republican on the ballot in your state. You brought this on yourself, and I'm not inclined to intervene.
Most likely, you knew they said they'd do this, but didn’t think they meant it. This means you lied yourself into making the biggest mistake any citizen of this country could have made in the modern era. They told you what they would do, but you voted for them anyway.
That, or you didn’t know they wanted to do this. Trump kept telling people Medicaid would be safe. In that case, you didn’t do enough research before casting a ballot. That’s even worse; it means you’re moving through life willingly ignorant of things that matter to you and expecting everyone else to clean up the mess you’ve helped create. That Trump cannot be trusted to tell the truth is now an objective fact and not a mere opinion, and pretty much every other Republican in Congress expressed a bloodthirst to kill the whole program. That includes the ones who are pretending they oppose it, now that it's in that abomination of a bill and they can read the polls.
I suppose there's a third possibility - that you knew this would happen, but assumed the rest of us would cover your losses because your desire to abduct immigrants, do whatever Netanyahu tells us, and raise tariffs that other countries - and not US consumers - would obviously pay outweighed any actual consequences you would personally face, and that because we're all a bunch of do-gooder libtards, we would be too soft-hearted to say "no." I always tell my grad students to check their assumptions BEFORE doing something that can't be reversed.
Sorry, but I can’t help you this time. I’m a lot closer to 60 than I care to think. I also have a young daughter, and my wife – though in good health – has encountered some medical problems. As have I. I have to put my immediate family first as a parent and spouse does, especially as costs rise while our salaries do not.
And even if I could, I wouldn't. Yeah, I’m one of those progressives who thinks we should help one another. But you know what? I’m also a realist and a pragmatist. I don’t have the resources to support you, given where I think the economy is going and what the White House is doing to the federal scientific organizations on which I’ve relied for my work. We’re saving for our daughter’s future and our own retirement, along with the unexpected expenses that arise from time to time. There is no hypocrisy in wanting to help people and expecting others to face the consequences of their actions.
You voted for the people who did this. This is what you wanted. I will not take away that which you asked for.
Sorry.
Oh - and did you ever get your kid immunized? Might be a smart thing to do; a vaccine is a whole lot cheaper than being treated for a serious illness, not to mention the work days you'll miss caring for your convalescing kid.
something I just posted on Facebook regarding the Trump-Merz press conference -
If you voted for Trump, I'd like you to do two things:
1. Watch the press conference he held with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. It's on Youtube.
2. Defend Trump's behavior.
I'm not asking you to defend any of the positions Trump expressed - though he did lie about stopping Nordstream 2. I'm asking you to defend the way he carried himself in front of the leader of one of our closest allies.
There were two heads of state in that press conference. One of them acted like a dignified and intelligent diplomat. The other was Donald Trump.
I'm serious about this. He rambled. He veered from subject to subject like a slowly meandering stream, and much of what he talked about had nothing to do with US relations with Germany, Europe, or NATO. He talked about himself - a lot. And he rarely gave Chancellor Merz the opportunity to say anything.
Chancellor Merz is a guest in our country, and the leader of an economic and scientific power, and he was treated like a tourist looking for a photo op. His treatment was disrespectful and condescending. It revealed Trump to be someone lacking class, grace, courtesy, a working understanding of global geopolitics, literacy, and the ability to speak in coherent sentences.
Watch that press conference, and tell me with a straight face that this is how a world leader should act.
(I will also tell you this - any response that points to Biden's age will be deleted as irrelevant. Biden is not the president right now. Biden was not on the ballot in November. And however much Biden's age was showing toward the end of his term, he never - ever - embarrassed the country in front of a foreign head of state like this. So focus on Trump and Trump alone.)
If you actually think this is how you want your country represented on the world stage, you need to do some self-reflection.
What a contrast.....
Given that it's the 80th anniversary of VE Day, I took the time to listen to Churchill's and Truman's radio addresses announcing the surrender of Germany.
I was struck by several things listening to Truman -
This was a time when the President of the United States spoke of the sacrifice of others.
When he acknowledged the value of allies.
When he honored his predecessors.
When he didn't just keep referring to his own greatness.
When he agreed that we're all in this together.
When he called out tyranny and fascism as enemies.
And when he spoke coherent English.
May we all rise to the level of those who defeated Nazi Germany and the America, however imperfect, that existed then.
(not) fun with AI.
I started drafting a figure for a manuscript I'm writing for peer review. It describes some fossils from East Africa that belong to a particular branch of the crocodile family tree.
The figure includes a map showing where each of the specimens is from. The primary source for one of these sites doesn't itself have a map, but it provided the longitude and latitude coordinates.
My first approach was to load the coordinates into Google. I did this on the assumption that it would put the coordinates on maps.google.
Actually, the first result to come up was an AI-generated answer, and it was way off. So I tried again. And again.
For the first 9 tries, the answer was always different. The results included:
- Turkey
- Saudi Arabia
- Eritrea
- near Lake Abbay between Ethiopia and Djibouti
- the middle of the Gulf of Aden
- northern Senegal near its border with Mauritania
- the middle of the Gulf of Oman
- Benin
- near N'Damena, Chad.
After the location near N'Damena came up, the bot seemed to have made its mind up - every attempt made after that gave that result.
The site is in Kenya.
The dire wolf is still extinct.
There have been headlines – and even the cover of Time Magazine – touting the alleged “de-extinction” of the dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, based on genetic engineering.
Please let me explain why this is bullshit, and why the headlines should be (mostly) disregarded.
Full disclosure – I’m a professional vertebrate paleontologist who also uses DNA (including DNA from fossils). I don’t work on mammals; rather, I work on animals that eat mammals. And I use the DNA to reconstruct evolutionary relationships - not for resurrection. Still, I have a decent idea what did (and did not) happen in this case.
The dire wolf (which used to be recognized as Canis dirus until analyses of ancient DNA showed it to be more closely related to other canids) is known from Pleistocene (“Ice Age”) deposits across North and South America. It was long viewed as basically a much larger relative of the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus), but it’s not actually a member of Canis, and the largest subspecies of C. lupus are about the same size as A. dirus. Still, it would probably have looked more or less like a wolf - a big dog, at any rate - and would have been an impressive predator.
It's best sampled, I think, from the La Brea Tar pits. There’s an entire wall at the George Page Museum in Los Angeles (which is one of the best paleo museums in North America) dedicated to dire wolf skulls. Animals would be stuck in the tar, drawing predators and scavengers that, in turn, would also get stuck in the tar. (The image many have of deep pits of tar is mythical; in most cases, it would be a thin, but extremely sticky, film of tar at the surface, or maybe on the bottom of a shallow lake. Animals stuck in the tar would actually remain mostly exposed at the surface while they were scavenged; they wouldn’t “sink into the tar.” But I digress.)
Anyway – several companies are trying to “resurrect” recently extinct animals. This is very controversial among scientists; many of us (myself included) think the enormous amount of money being spent to bring some of these animals back (which is extremely unlikely to happen, though I’d love to be proved wrong) would be better used to conserve existing habitat and preventing future extinctions. I have some other issues that I’ll raise later.
One of these companies, Colossal Biosciences, is claiming they’ve done this with the dire wolf.
Except they haven’t. Not even close.
What they did, from a straightforwardly scientific point of view, is actually very cool. They edited some gray wolf genes. 20 edits for 14 genes. Yes, it’s an accomplishment – but the cubs are not dire wolves. They’re gray wolves with a bit of genetic tinkering.
I know GMOs are a sensitive topic here. I will neither defend nor decry them, and the debate is irrelevant to my point, which is that when genes from different organisms are spliced into something like maize or tomatoes, the resulting plants are still maize and tomatoes. They just have some tinkered genes. (Again – whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is completely beside the point here.) This is pretty much identical to what’s been done here; they’ve bred gray wolves with some tinkered genes.
Although the people at Colossal Biosciences have accomplished something of note, they haven’t resurrected anything.
Is it a species?
In response to published criticism of their claims, Colossal issued a statement arguing that we shouldn’t (or don’t) use genetic criteria to recognize species, and that we should use phenotype. This opens that great oaken door to the Pandora’s Box that is species concepts, but it’s also completely wrong.
In high school biology, we learn that species are populations of interbreeding individuals that produce fertile offspring, but can’t do so with individuals from other populations. This is known as the Biological Species Concept (BSC), and the dirty secret is that very few biologists actually use it. I, for one, usually can’t – fossils, being dead, generally don’t mate. There are asexual species, and for some groups (including mine – crocodiles and alligators) – hybridization between what would generally be considered distinct species is very common. Following the strictest application of the BSC possible, the 12 or 13 recognized species of Crocodylus would become one.
So what’s a species?
Here’s a problem I’ve encountered. Maybe you have, too. I sometimes encounter groups of biologists, and they’re all alive. What do I do about that? The ancient Greeks used hemlock, but there are way too many biologists for that nowadays. So I lock them all in a room and say, “no one gets out until you agree on what a species is.” They will all die.
That said, the myriad concepts out there boil down to three. The BSC is one of them, but there’s also the Evolutionary Species Concept (ESC), in which a species is a lineage of populations evolving over time; and the Phylogenetic Species Concept (PSC), in which a species is basically the smallest unit of biodiversity circumscribed by unique combinations of morphological and genetic features.
These aren’t mutually exclusive of each other. In effect, the ESC is what a species actually is; the BSC explains how species come into being for sexually-reproducing organisms; and the PSC explains how we know we have a species. The ESC defines the conceptual species that we hope our operational (or inferred) species, which are smallest diagnosable units, approximate as closely as possible. And reproductive isolation is the best possible evidence that a smallest diagnosable unit is a species.
What Colossal described is kind of like the PSC, but the PSC as used by actual biologists would still (in concept, at least) represent evolutionary units. These cubs don’t fit that definition. So the statement they released is nonsensical and should be ignored.
Again, what Colossal Bioscience did is impressive. But they haven’t resurrected anything.
This also brings up a broader discussion – what, exactly, is “resurrection?”
The purest form would involve the re-creation of an organism from the complete genome of another. This is cloning. And for extinct animals, it’s very unlikely to happen. We have DNA from a comparatively small number of fossils, and it’s usually degraded, so we usually don’t have the complete genome.
We obviously have complete genomes for many recently extinct species (Tasmanian wolf, great auk, dodo, etc.), and we do have complete genomes from some fossils, but unless it’s in an intact cell nucleus, it won’t do much for cloning.
And we would want this in the nucleus of an ovum or stem cell.
There’s the issue of surrogacy. Woolly and Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus primogenius and M. columbi, respectively) were much larger than their closest living relative (Asian elephant, Elephas maximus), and their calves would have been larger; would a female Asian elephant be able to carry a mammoth calf to term? And would her body recognize it as a foreign entity with different DNA and reject it? Colossal Bioscience itself ran into this problem, which is why they switched from mammoths and dodos to the dire wolf - although without a close living relative, this is still a big problem for dire wolves.
(There have been claims in the media that the dire wolf and gray wolf are each other's closest relatives. They are not.)
This is why I think efforts to clone the Tasmanian wolf are doomed; their closest living relatives are no more than half the size of an adult thylacine. It's also why I think if we're going to clone a mammoth, we should try for one of the miniature species that lived on islands in the Mediterranean or off the coast of California. (I want those resurrected because I think they'd make awesome pets.)
The closest we've come to actually cloning something extinct was with the Pyrenean ibex, which is considered a subspecies of the Iberian ibex (Capra pyrenaica). The last known individual died in 2000. A cloned individual was born in 2003, but it only lived for a few hours. (This makes the Pyrenean ibex the only extinct species to be cloned and the only species to have gone extinct twice.)
This is also the reason we'll never resurrect Tyrannosaurus rex. The oldest DNA we have is around 2 million years in age, and it's degraded. DNA just doesn't last that long.
Assuming we can’t actually clone extinct animals, we could genetically engineer them, which is what Colossal Bioscience is trying to do here. Or we could selectively breed modern animals to look like their extinct relatives. I wouldn’t try this with a mammoth – generation times are way too long – but we could, in practice do so.
But are these true de-extinction? Or have we created something new that might resemble something extinct?
Then there’s the cost. A lot of money is being thrown at the problem. Meanwhile, land use and climate change are increasing the risk of further extinctions that could be prevented.
And what do we do with these animals? Put them in a zoo? “Re-wilding” is nonsense – I’d be happy to explain why in the comments – so releasing them into the wild is not an option. How do we maintain them, given that the environments they lived in may no longer exist?
There's also a deep ethical concern if someone tries to resurrect Australopithecus, Paranthropus, or an earlier species of Homo. What rights would these individuals have? Would they be considered human in the eyes of the law? Would they be treated with the same dignity as modern humans? And where would they live? This, I think, should be flat-out forbidden.
It hurts me to say these things, because it would be totally cool to see a real dire wolf.
Anyway, my thoughts on it. The dire wolf is still extinct, and I suspect it’s going to stay that way.
He is not an American Original
This shouldn't be an issue to consider, but I consider it anyway -
In the future, biographies will be written about Twinklesphincter. They will probably also make a movie based on one of them.
My fear is that he'll be portrayed as an American Original. This is sometimes done when biopics are made of Americans who did great things in spite of being deeply flawed humans in some way. Think Theodore Roosevelt, LBJ, PT Barnum, or George S. Patton. Sometimes, the flaws are only hinted at; other times, the figure is credited for having accomplished great things both in spite of and because of these flaws. People like that could only be great in America! Only in America could people like this find their true potential for greatness! Only in America could someone so flawed and unimportant step up to the call of history! They were American Originals!
There was a miniseries about George Washington when I was in high school back in the early 1980's. There was a scene I remember very clearly - Washington stepped out of Mount Vernon to find one of his footmen - an enslaved Black man - weeping. He asked someone what was going on and was told that his wife and children had just been sold. Washington was shown them being loaded onto a wagon.
He immediately dashed off for the wagon. His tricorn hat flew off. "Stop! Stop!" he yelled. When he got to the wagon, he shouted to the white man standing there that "we don't break up families! Ever!"
He then ran back to where he was and told the first person he spoke to the same thing - we don't break up families!
I have no idea if this actually happened, but it had the desired effect - at least one naive viewer (me) thought, "OK, he was a slaveholder - but, like, he wasn't a mean one." Whoever produced the biopic didn't want to ignore the basic flaw in Washington's biography - that he owned human beings as slaves - but wanted to put a smiley face on it by depicting him as a "nice" one.
As a more mature person, I now understand what was done. Washington was the Father of our Country, but the kind of hagiography that might have been made before 1960 was no longer acceptable. The civil rights movement had happened, and it was no longer OK to pretend many the founding fathers, who came up with an ingenious (if flawed) constitution and led the US to independence, owned slaves - something that, by then, was seen as inherently evil. So slavery was acknowledged, even if only with a wink and nod.
(As George Carlin once put it, there's a fundamental hypocrisy in the history of the United States - the country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.)
We cannot let this be done with Rusty McCombover.
To begin with, he's not an original. There have been scam artists and hucksters throughout history. There have always been people who know how to appeal to basic instincts with simplified and deceptive language. He happens to be very successful at these, but there's nothing fundamentally original about him in this regard.
And this isn't the same kind of great-thing, flawed-man situation. He hasn't done great things, unless you count convincing a whole lot of people that he should be President of the United States as somehow great. (Impressive, maybe - but not in any positive way.) When he speaks, he only utters flawed words. He lies. He pretends to understand things he doesn't. He's a failed businessman who seems to think he's a great success, and he seems to think the world owes him something. And he's doing what he is because he wants to get back at people he thinks attacked him. He's a selfish, bigoted, spiteful small man with a big megaphone, and nothing more.
If there's a biopic, it can't be allowed to depict him as the great-but-flawed American Original. It has to show things honestly, and that means a film of little more than flaws.
I realize this isn't a big issue, and I'm not actually dwelling on it, but it crosses my mind from time to time.
I also hope that the Turd Who Walks as a Man Does' replacement puts the portraits of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the Oval Office, where they can be seen every time he speaks to the nation from there.
Know what the US news media should do?
I'm sure Fox "News" won't go along, but so long as the White House bans certain media outlets, all news media should refer only to "the President." They should not use the name of the diaper load currently occupying that office.
In fact, no one in the administration should be named. They should just become "White House officials," "secretaries of [insert name of department]," and whatnot.
No names. And especially not the president's.
I can guarantee the exclusion policies would be reversed in short order.
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