Next We’ll Cross Cockroaches with Rattlesnakes

Today I saw an article that looked like BS, so I Googled, and yes, it’s BS. A company called Colossal is trying to bring the dire wolf back, and they claimed they had produced three pups.

What is a dire wolf? The name should be a clue. It’s a horror creature. It’s pretty much like a grey wolf, only way bigger than typical grey wolves. The average weight of the males, according to Wikipedia (which is never, ever wrong) was 150 pounds. The biggest grey wolf subspecies measures around 125. To make things even more fun, the dire wolf had bigger teeth and could bite a lot harder. They ate buffalo.

This is just what we need running around the American wilderness. Like it wasn’t stupid enough to bring regular wolves back after our ancestors had the common sense to wipe them out.

It’s not fashionable to say it, but killing off big predators is a good thing. The ecosystem does not actually need them, regardless of what the Chicken Littles say. It has survived the loss of all sorts of key species like the European lion, the cave bear, mammoths, mastodons, the carrier pigeon, and the American chestnut without even stumbling. If any species were really super important, all life would have ceased a long time ago.

Big predators aren’t necessary, but they do a lot of harm. They kill pets, livestock, and, occasionally, people (yes they do). Those things matter.

Colossal flat-out said it had produced dire wolves. Then it backtracked when actual scientists called it out.

They took some cruddy old DNA from a couple of fossils, and they worked a few bits of it into grey wolf embryos. That’s all they did. So now what we have is a huge man-made mutant which is in no way a dire wolf and which probably has almost zero genetic diversity.

I’m no geneticist, but I know what inbreeding is, and it’s bad. It can reinforce the best and worst traits in a population. Look at the royals and the House of Lords. Would you want your kid to look like that?

Inbreeding can cause viciousness and mental illness. Just what you want in an animal that can take your hand off.

Colossus claims the end goal is to restore lost species to the wild. How can you do that when you’re not actually recreating lost species? It’s like trying to palm a third-generation Dodge Challenger off as a Sixties muscle car, except the new Challenger would be full of unpredictable genetic surprises.

The dire wolf was not a big grey wolf. It was in a completely different genus. You can’t make a dire wolf from a grey wolf. It’s like trying to make a gorilla from chimp parts.

I tried to find out why the dire wolf disappeared, but no one knows. I know ancient people killed them on sight, though. They did that to all big predators, because they had more common sense than we do.

Colossal’s claim that it will release these abominations in order to restore a species is a hoax, but they could get loose and start filling female wolves with DNA that would make grey wolves bigger and more annoying. Wouldn’t that be great?

If you want to do something useful with wolf DNA, trying making them smaller, weaker, terrified of people, livestock and pets, and prone to sterility and impotence. Afflict them with homosexuality. Those would be useful modifications. Shrink their teeth. Turn them into grass-eaters. Ranchers who raise animals that are actually beneficial would thank you.

It seems as though the apocalypse is associated with an increase in creativity. People are doing weird new body modifications. Fake genders are literally so numerous it is not possible to figure them out. There must be 30 varieties of Coca-Cola. All kinds of strange things happen at businesses. It’s like they’re being run by teenagers. Instead of asking, “Is this sound business practice?”, they ask, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?”

I believe God wants us to operate in channels. I think creativity has to have bounds set, or else it becomes destructive and confusing.

Some people who say they’ve seen demons have given descriptions that remind me of body-modifiers and dinosaurs. Strange skin coloring. Long fangs. Excessive size. Asymmetry. I know it sounds strange, but sometimes I wonder if the dinosaurs were created by evil spirits. I wonder if they were some of the giants mentioned in the Bible.

Dinosaurs appear to have had characteristics that make more sense as creative adornments–the result of pride and a desire for attention–than functioning body parts. For example, no one has been able to explain the tiny arms on tyrannosaurus rex. No one really knows why some dinosaurs had dorsal sails. Scientists haven’t figured out the bizarre vertical plates on the back of the stegosaurus. Other dinosaurs have grotesque projections on their skulls that can’t be explained.

Sometimes I think evil spirits designed these things just to express themselves. They put crazy-looking appurtenances and tattoos on modern kids for the same reason. The Holy Spirit drives Christians to conform to God’s image, and by the symmetry of the supernatural, demons drive the damned to conform to their images. What else could convince a boy to have his testicles cut out and the inside of his penis scraped out and discarded?

People who say they’ve seen angels generally say they look like human beings. No spikes. No forked tongues. No feathers. No unusual colors or horns.

A guy named Shawn Weed tells a fascinating story of a death experience. You can see it on Youtube. He died, and an enormous creature somewhat like the character Darkness from the old Tom Cruise movie Legend grabbed him and carried him off.

The creature had red-and-black skin. It had long horns and the hooves of a goat. It was 13 feet tall. It was so strong, Weed might as well have been a doll made from toilet paper.

The angel that rescued him was only 9 feet tall. It looked like a human being. Still, it defeated the evil spirit easily.

Science says the dinosaurs were gone long before human beings arrived, but scientists and historians are wrong a lot. They weren’t actually here to see what happened in prehistoric times, and anyway, in a world where the supernatural trumps the natural, we don’t know what miraculous events may have gone on before recorded history. For example, we can’t say nothing happened that would make radioactive dating inaccurate.

I suspect that if the rapture doesn’t come first, we will see all kinds of genetically-engineered abominations, including engineered humans and part-humans. I have expected it for a long time. The temptation to overcome the physical limitations of existing species has been around forever, and we are not good at resisting temptation.

Whether we admit it or not, our Christian heritage is the main thing that restrains us from creating abominations. People who don’t fear God would be making part-human monsters right now if it weren’t for Christianity. Somewhere, someone is surely doing it already.

God destroys humanity when we start behaving like little gods and take too much power, and creating major alterations in species is godlike behavior.

I don’t know where Colossal is going with its twisted experiments, but I expect the worst from humanity. History tells me to.

“Colossal” means “giant.” That’s interesting.