Smarter Faster: The strange history of “resurrection biology”
Dreams of bringing back lost species didn’t start in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
with Stephen Johnson • Thu 22 May, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
In the late 17th century, the English scientist Robert Plot inspected a shockingly huge chunk of bone, too big to have come from a human or animal. So, where did it come from? Scientists didn’t know about dinosaurs at the time, so Plot couldn’t have known that he was looking at the femur of a Megalosaurus. His best guess? The thighbone of an ancient human giant.
Scientists would discover dinosaurs a century later. It was a twofold revelation: We learned not only that huge reptilian monsters once ruled Earth, but also that it was possible for entire species to vanish forever. Before the 1800s, extinction wasn’t a concept.
This week, historian Thomas Moynihan tells the story of how we learned about species extinction — and how fantasies of resurrecting lost species began as soon as we learned they could disappear.
Read on,
Stephen
THE BIG COMEBACK
The strange history of de-extinction began long before the science
In April, the U.S.-based company Colossal Bioscience announced the “world’s first de-extincted animal” — the dire wolf, which vanished some 13,000 years ago. The real story isn’t quite Jurassic Park, but it’s still pretty cool: Colossal essentially used gene editing to produce grey wolf pups with genetic traits resembling the extinct dire wolf. Who knows whether “de-extinction” will ever be possible, but one thing is for sure: Dreams of resurrecting lost species didn’t start in Silicon Valley or Hollywood, as Thomas Moynihan explains in this piece.
Fast Stats
4 — The conditions of “intelligent failure” as outlined by Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School.
10 — The number of space pictures whose appearance will deceive you, according to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel.
4 — The key challenges (or opportunities) that brands face over the next five years, according to marketing guru David Aaker.
3 — The questions you should ask when considering any theory of consciousness.
THE BIG SHIFT
“Mystery humbles you”: Scott Derrickson on why skepticism and faith aren’t enemies
I’m no film snob, but I wouldn’t describe Marvel movies as spiritually transformational. After Scott Derrickson directed 2016’s Doctor Strange, however, he’d come to describe the experience as a “spiritual pivot” for him. “I dove into Eastern philosophy — Buddhism, Hinduism — and came out of it more of a mystic than anything else,” he tells Big Think 13.8 columnist and physicist Adam Frank. In their conversation, the physicist and the filmmaker talk about faith and skepticism, exploring how the two aren’t natural enemies but rather complementary languages for making sense of a mysterious world.
MINI PHILOSOPHY
“Cosmic realism”: The secret ingredient to great books
By Jonny Thomson
What is love?
Love is not an abstract noun, ungraspable and infinite. It’s something you get at 7:13 a.m. on a forgettable midweek day. Love is only watching the next episode when they’re home. It’s toothbrushes standing side by side. Love is the swelling of confidence when they walk into the room, and the telepathic look across a dinner-party table. It’s deciphering their handwriting for someone else, and it’s saying “Oh, they won’t like that” to a stranger. It’s a thousand compromises over a thousand days, and when coming in second feels like winning.
Love is not defined, but a mosaic of tiny, everyday actions that form a tableau. It is seen from God’s eye: a collage known only to the cosmos.
This idea — where huge, indigestible concepts are approached through small, mundane actions — is known as cosmic realism, and it’s what the Booker Prize-winning author Paul Lynch told me he thinks makes the greatest books in history so great.
Subscribe to Mini Philosophy on Substack for even more from Jonny Thomson.
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Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.
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