Wolf Like Me
The Rebirth of the Dire Wolf
Charge me your day rate
I'll turn you out in kind
When the moon is round and full
Gonna teach you tricks that'll blow your
Mongrel mind
The hottest news this week outside of the tariff meltdown is the reveal from Colossal Biosciences that they have de-extincted the Dire Wolf, a species of wolf that hasn’t howled at the moon in over 145,000 months.
The coolness factor of this breakthrough is off the charts. And it’s intentional. Colossal understands not just how to revive the genes of long extinct critters but also the power of a good story. They could have focused efforts on bringing back the uninspiring dodo bird, but instead concentrated their fire on the more majestic wolf.
Wolves, unlike dodo birds, have a long captivated the imagination and are well-represented in myth, fables, folklore, books, music, and movies, from Greek mythology to Little Red Riding Hood to this gem from Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film I’ve watched on repeat with my son over the years.
Wolves, and the legends they conjure, hold an intoxicating connection to the ideas of wild spirit, instinct, survival, and toughness, and symbolize an archetype of rugged individuality and fearlessness. Nobody ever took a dodo bird as a spirit animal.
There are three Dire Wolves currently, two young males named Romulus and Remus, and a female, Khalessi. (I secretly hold a small resentment at the wolves for not waiting one more day to be born, as we would have shared a birthday.)
Romulus and Remus? They are the mythological founders of ancient Rome who suckled at the teat of a female wolf and thus were spared from certain death as babies. Colossal piggy-backed on the apparent fascination that men have with, and spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, the Roman Empire. Being enamored with the Republic, I won’t quibble with the distinction, but I suspect many a fan of Julius Caesar was wrapped into the study, though the empire didn’t start until after his death.
Khaleesi is the younger sister of Romulus and Remus. She was named after the mother of dragons character in Game of Thrones, though it was another character, John Snow, who introduced the masses to Dire Wolves.
While Khalessi unleashed her castrated hordes of incels and dragon energy to destroy towns, villages, populations even, she wasn’t present in the dire wolf saga. In the final analysis, she was just a run-of-the-mill, nasty, evil, psychopathic, girl boss who wanted to genocide the world in pursuit of power. Not a great legacy for the strapping young cub.
Colossal missed a golden opportunity here. They should have kept with the Roman theme. Cleopatra would have been my choice – a beautiful, powerful woman admired by the world in the macro and seduced by both Julius and Augustus Caesar in the micro. They could have cemented a seamless connection between Rome and the little pups, and created a lasting bond with hordes of Roman Empire fanatics and the women who love them. Sigh.
Let’s get more of the quibbling out of the way. The dire wolves are not in fact, dire wolves of the ancient world, but grey wolves whose genetic code was modified using dire wolf genomes, to create a kind of analog to the dire wolf. Close enough for me - why let trifling facts get in the way of a great story?
Besides the fascination with the primal connection to wolves, my favorite thing about Colossal and their research is that, as far as I can see, was done privately. With no government money. Free market science and research. Give the people what they want.
Not saying that government funding of science doesn’t have its place, but their track record is not one of benevolence and aspirational human achievement. It’s quite a mixed bag. For every man they landed on the moon, we have the most sinister impulses of man become unleashed on the world. The atomic bomb, MKUltra, the Covid psyop, scientific achievements all, but also the progenitors of untold misery, death, and destruction.
Divorced from profit motive, government scientists turn their gaze toward the heavens, not in a pie in the sky dreamscape, but toward the insane notion of supplanting God, allowing the fevered dreams of reckless megalomaniacs to replace the natural order.
Sure, we got Tang, and electric vehicles, but is that really worth the trade-off?
For every gruesome mishap in private science and research like the Titan implosion, you have true innovation. Charles Darwin contemporary, and some say the true originator of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace said,
“Experience shows that public competition ensures a greater supply of the materials and a greater demand for the products of science, and is thus a greater stimulus to true and healthy progress.”
Before WWII public funding of scientific research was as rare as a Dr. Fauci truth, and after the government picked up financing in earnest, researchers got drunk on taxpayer funds and learned to play along to keep the financial spigots open.
Beyond threatening mankind’s existence, the big research mills are victims of groupthink and political influence. Again, look at the Covid response of the NIH and the CDC. They purposely, intentionally, and quite boldly lied to the world about their findings, the danger of Covid, the efficacy of vaccines. Millions suffered economic, physical and mental health declines, and even death, because of their lies.
They gaslit the public into not trusting themselves and succeeded to a large degree. When the truth started leaking out, they doubled down on their lies.
They’ve been researching cancer, Alzheimer’s, mental health, and much more, for decades. They routinely ignore or attack alternative healing strategies because they don’t fall under strict protocols of understanding - they suffer from a lack of imagination. They don’t understand the human body as interrelated systems; biological, spiritual, mental, emotional, magical, and where one system is dysregulated, it will affect all the other systems.
Boring, doctrinaire research will never inspire. It’s time to let the free market shine.
Surely there are more adventurous researchers who would thrive under less stringent rules. Let’s look at bringing back the dinosaurs. Even though DNA can only exist for about a million years, and it’s been sixty some million since those crazy reptiles roamed the earth, let’s give scientists a chance to resurrect the impossible. Let’s revive the T-Rex, the stegosaurus, triceratops. Hell, bring them all the back. They got a bum deal last time around - I mean, wiped out by an asteroid? That’s some tough luck. They deserve another chance to make or break on their own merits.
You could say an asteroid was part of God’s plan, and I wouldn’t argue the point. But surely that’s preferable to being wiped out by a nuclear winter at the hands of some government bureaucrats?
https://youtu.be/xZl-ssLKyPE?si=RxVBlSecMKhmPPf2
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Dan Fleuette is a photographer, author, and filmmaker best known for his body of work with Steve Bannon and WarRoom. His national best-seller Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws: A Pictorial History of WarRoom can be found on doitfluet.com
No AI machines were harmed in this writeup.