Ethics – Family Council

We’ve Seen the Dire Wolf Movie and it Doesn’t End Well: Guest Column

May 13, 2025John StonestreetEthicsBioethics, Ethics, Medical Ethics

Recently, TIME magazine announced that the biotechnology company Colossal has resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct thousands of years ago. “This is Remus,” read the caption over a photo of a robust-looking white wolf. “He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years.” According to Colossal, this is a first step to resurrecting other long-extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth.

As it turns out, the headline is an exaggeration. Remus, his brother Romulus, and their sister Khaleesi contain no DNA from the dire wolf. Rather, they are modern gray wolves with genes tweaked by the company to mirror the DNA of the dire wolf. And they were more than likely engineered to look like the fictional giant wolves from HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

The most common comment on the TIME story was some variation of the sentiment, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well.” Most people likely had in mind Jurassic Park, in which a company uses genetic technology to bring back dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well. In fact, the seventh installment of the franchise will release this summer, each containing the same message as the 1993 original: Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

Dozens of movies reflect the dangers of genetic tinkering, human reengineering, and other forms of scientific hubris. From The Island of Dr. Moreau to Gattaca to Planet of the Apes to The Island, not to mention about half of all zombie movies ever made, we’ve been thoroughly warned about the illusion of human control over nature.

Maybe this is just the story of directors sprucing up a plot, or perhaps a surprising amount of wisdom in the arts has been overlooked or ignored by scientists and tech pioneers. A popular meme from Twitter quotes an imaginary science fiction author saying, “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale,” immediately followed by a tech company exec announcing: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” Even more, there is a strange disconnect between pop culture’s ability to anticipate the negative consequences of our scientific advances and our overall willingness to volunteer as guinea pigs.

This is as true for Artificial Intelligence as for medical technology. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to A.I. to Terminator to I, Robot, to Avengers: Age of Ultron, we’ve been warned about AI. Wall-E warned how we’d lose our humanity if we relied on technology to solve all our problems. Ready Player One warned against getting lost in virtual reality. Children of Men depicted what would happen if society stopped having enough babies. Minority Report questioned the justice of a surveillance state.

What all these movies have in common is that their warning has been ignored in the real world. People will jokingly say, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well,” but we continue to adopt every new technology that promises comfort, convenience, and control without a serious discussion about purpose or boundaries.

Even when the warnings aren’t exactly accurate or even realistic, these films often raise questions worth asking. And yet, our curiosity wanes once the credits roll. As in the Terminator movies, artificial intelligence continues to gobble up vast areas of life and human creativity without much protest. And despite all the Jurassic Park references, Colossal’s wolves will likely be the first of many bioengineering projects that prioritize profit and publicity over the welfare of animals or humans.

You won’t hear me say this often, but it’s time to pay closer attention to Hollywood. Despite the garbage that comes from the entertainment industry, there’s a willingness to question “progress” that is lacking at MIT, medical labs, and Silicon Valley.

C.S. Lewis wrote that reason is the organ of understanding, and imagination is the organ of meaning. We need both, which is why we should listen when someone asks, even in film, “What could go wrong?” Asking whether we should do something is a skill that should not be extinct.

Guest Column: Tiny Forests

Oct 2, 2023John StonestreetEthicsEthics

According to Cara Buckley with The New York Times, a growing number of “tiny forests” are appearing across urban areas in the U.S.

In addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, reducing water runoff, and providing homes for wildlife, “[T]iny forests can help lower temperatures in places where pavement, buildings and concrete surfaces absorb and retain heat from the sun.”

The concept was pioneered by Japanese ecologist Akira Miyawaki and suggests that people are the best stewards of nature. What the world needs is not some return to vast, unspoiled “wilderness” by massively reducing the human population, as so many suggest. Instead, we need more of this: creating space for people to use their ingenuity, resources, and innovation to increase creation’s fruitfulness.

Our screens and concrete jungles disconnect us from God’s creation, while bad ideas about “nature” and the environment treat humans as its biggest problem. But humans were created to care for the rest of creation. In fact, only humans can.

Human Extinction?

Feb 7, 2022John StonestreetEthicsEthics, Life, Sanctity of Human Life

*John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview*

In a recent essay, Oxford Professor Roger Crisp toyed with the idea that human extinction may not be a bad thing after all. With so much suffering on Earth, he argues, if NASA were to locate a massive asteroid hurtling towards our planet, we would be justified in letting it obliterate us. 

“I am not claiming that extinction would be good;” Crisp clarified, “only that, since it might be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date.” 

This is an Oxford philosopher of ethics, but he’s wrestling with an idea that long ago left the ivory tower.

Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute put it this way: “With our supposedly best minds suggesting that human extinction could be desirable, is it any wonder that so many of our young people seem to be despairing?” 

When God is taken out of the moral picture, reason evaporates, as does the rest of our moral logic. Someone tell Bruce Willis and the rest of his team from Armageddon, the mission is off.