Restored Dire Wolves and a Yakubian Future

Nothing is ever truly lost.

After a week of Tariff panics, it was refreshing to see some news about the restoration of a long-extinct species. It isn’t the Wooly Mammoth yet, which is obviously the holy grail of species revival, but the timelines are pretty close. Dire Wolves, a prehistoric Canine which died out around the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, were reportedly returned to the world of the living recently, with two specimens — Romulus and Remus — serving as evidence.

However, this is quite misleading… Because these are really just normal wolves that have a select set of trait-predicting genes switched to phenotypically resemble a dire wolf:

“Dire wolves and gray wolves are more than 99 percent genetically identical, Dr. Meachen and her colleagues found. Eighty genes were dramatically distinct; some are known to influence the size of living dogs and wolves — suggesting that they were responsible for the big bodies of dire wolves.

[…]

For the dire-wolf project, the Colossal team set out to edit 20 genes, pushing the technology to its current limits.

The scientists introduced dire-wolf mutations to 15 genes. But they did not introduce the remaining five, because previous studies had shown that those five mutations cause deafness and blindness in gray wolves.

So the Colossal team found mutations to those five genes that are present in dogs and gray wolves without causing diseases. They introduced those five backup mutations into the gray wolf cells.”

I’m sure people who are into some of the race debates immediately saw an issue in this methodology. “99% similar” is actually not very similar on the scale of genes. Dire Wolves aren’t even in the same genus as Wolves proper, they split apart almost 6 million years ago. This is within the range of estimates for the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. A mere 15 genes represents only a tiny fraction of the total genetic differentiation between Grey Wolves and Dire Wolves. It probably represents only a small fraction of the phenotypic variation too.

If you were to record the full genome of these “Dire Wolves”, they’d clearly be very closely related to Grey Wolves, and not really much closer related at all to extinct Dire Wolves. The most accurate title for these mutant Wolves is not “Restored Dire Wolves”, it is “Grey Wolves we have artificially convergently evolved to Dire Wolves”.

During the Cenozoic, a family of birds known scientifically as Phorusrhacidae, but colloquially as Terror Birds, took up much of the characteristics of the Therapod Dionsaurs through convergent evolution. And of course, they were technically tied with other Birds for sharing the most recent common ancestor with Dinosaurs out of any living animal at that time. But nobody would call them “revived therapods”. Hell, nobody would call a Cassowary a “revived raptor” even though in many ways it functions as one.

So it’s kind of clickbait, in my opinion. It’s still cool, don’t get me wrong, but wake me up when we actually revive the dire wolf. It’s kind of like if you took a Chinese person and then genetically engineered their baby to have blue double-lidded eyes, blond hair, a tall nose, lower cheekbones, and paler skin. It’s not a White person proper, it’s a Chinese person that looks white. His genes would still show up as Chinese on any DNA test, genetic analysis software, or Principal Component Analysis graph. But uhh, speaking of which… You know— Koreans do love their plastic surgery… Estimates seem to range from 1/3 to 1/5 of Korean women, and a smaller but still high amount of Korean men. A lot of these are young women as well, not older women. Often times, these surgeries are double eyelid surgeries or nosejobs which seek to make the nose more narrow. These are both West Eurasian features. Fair skin is also a traditional East Asian beauty standard (it’s honestly pretty standard worldwide, actually) and I’m sure East Asians would love to have natural blondism or light-colored eyes, and large bosoms. A lot of their Anime characters seem to have these traits…

If gene editing was perfected, how many Koreans would opt to make their children look White? Or maybe, they wouldn’t go all-out White, but more like the “White with soft features” you see in a lot of Japanese games.

Melina from Elden Ring: The future of Korea?

Such a trend may or may not ever happen. I am usually pretty bearish on things like CRISPR. I believe that we could have advanced as much in biotechnology as we have in Computer Programming during the past 100 years, if it was not for ethics and safety standards.

I believe in the re-establishment of the Confucian Imperial China under the royal hand of Dr. Jiankui He and his army of Reanimen.

But, if it were to happen, it would make the preservation of pristine races quite difficult. Which, being a naturalist, bothers me greatly. In fact, it is the issue that I care most about. I have my reasons, but it’s really something deep inside me. I’ve been autistic about ethnicity since a very young age. I couldn’t bring myself to identify with historical peoples who I could not trace my lineage to. When I first got into the gamergate and anti-SJW stuff, one of the main things that bothered me was the portrayal of historical peoples with actors of incorrect races or racial phenotypes. My stance on this issue is integral to who I am. To abandon it would be to forget who I am, to forget the real me… To forget my soul. I don’t care if it’s problematic, or if it’s a doomed cause, or if these processes of racial dissolution are endemic to the history of mankind.

But luckily, restoring human races is actually much easier than restoring the dire wolf. It just requires someone… Perhaps, say, a certain African demigod with two brains pulsating in his giant head, living on the Island of Patmos… Yeah, someone like that, who has the resources and desire to do it.

Our polygenic risk scores for traits — for example, intelligence, educational attainment, height, and neuroticism — aren’t that good. But what we are good at doing with genes is predicting someone’s ancestry. It gets harder the more specific you get, but self-identified race is almost always the same as best-fit genetic cluster. We can simply take those alleles that characterize the between-group variation between a particular group of people and all other races, and select for those in people who have partial admixture from these races. Two children of the same Mestizo parents can differ by random chance in their percentage of White ancestry. This is also the case in embryos, or in individual sperm cells and egg cells. I understand some people have ethical issues with Embryonic Selection. It is understandable, it does involve the extinguishing of human life… It would be nice if there was a way to do this without that. But, it’s also worth considering that we’re living in a time where a highly unusual amount of people live past infancy in the first place, and the deleterious effects of this on the human genome are yet to be fully understood.

I think with the power of SOYence, it would take not that much generations to unscramble an egg, to reverse the effects of miscegenation.

@samcam420posting again bc last vid wasn’t 1 min long, full vids on youtube: sam-cam #fyp #pov #cam

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But you could go even further beyond. You could recreate genetically pristine Steppe Indo-Europeans, or Jomon Japanese. Maybe even Ancient North Eurasians, or West Siberian Hunter Gatherers. It makes me giddy just thinking about the possibilities. There have long been rumors of Russian general Sergei Shoigu floating the possibility of cloning ancient Scythian Warriors, perhaps to serve as an army of Russian super-soldiers. Shoigu is half-Tuvan, so maybe he feels an affinity to the Scythians as many Turks oddly do. Maybe the Turks will decide, bravely, to turn themselves into Scythians, shedding their Altaic DNA (or at least most of it — Scythians were already admixed to varying degrees) and relearning East Iranic languages in a collective effort similar to the Hebraization of Israeli Jews.

There are limits to this. We can probably never resurrect Neanderthals, because there actually isn’t enough Neanderthal DNA left in modern humans. Only 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives. If you assumed that all humans got a random 1% of Neanderthal DNA, then you would expect more to have survived. But Neanderthal DNA in humans happened in one single event, before the divergence of Eurasians, and then afterwards Neanderthal DNA was heavily selected against for many possible reasons. Even for more recent prehistoric groups, problems arise. Because there is a lot of drift that has occurred between the time of admixture and the present in these ancient, long-gone peoples, there is a lot of genetic variation that exists today that does not belong to any ancient group. Maybe it would be best to map this onto the ancient DNA, but this would change it in the process.

It sounds weird nowadays, but maybe one day when the race-denialism stuff blows over, people will come to understand it in the same way they understand the way mixture between polar bears and grizzlies threatens the existence of the Polar Bear species. Or maybe, nationalist movements that exist in the future will promote this for children. There isn’t exactly a shortage of brown White Nationalists in the modern day… And if Indians ever dropped their ethnic narcissism and admitted that White people established Vedic civilization, you may even see something all around rather jarring — the return of the Rigvedic Aryans… I don’t think this one would be a good idea though, Indians are adapted to their tropical climate. The original Aryans were not. They’d be better suited for the mountains of Afghanistan or Tajikistan, or the plains of Kazakhstan.

Despite my madman fantasies, I think gene editing can go south fast. We have seen runaway domestication and runaway natural selection happen in nature, worsening an animals fitness and its quality of life. There are currently people who would rather have a disabled, genderqueer child of a different race than a healthy, straight child of their own race. Given the power to decide the characteristics of their children, they might end up making their kids worse. Most traits also have a golden mean, surrounded by maladaptive extremes. Being short is usually bad, but being extremely tall leads to health issues. Hopefully we won’t have to worry about this, because things won’t get that bad in the first place.