Things with large brains, like mammalian carnivores, rely critically on information transmitted over generational time via the social milieu. Genes are nice, but they are not enough…

According to reports, a team of South Korean Scientists have cloned a rare and endangered species of wolf, creating two females.

South Korean researchers say they cloned wolf from PhysOrg.com
South Korean scientists who created the world’s first cloned dog said Monday they have cloned two females of an endangered species of wolf.

The research team is headed by Drs. Lee Byung-Chun and Shin Nam-Shik, of Seoul National University. Interestingly, one of the authors on the paper reporting this work is the infamous Dr. Hwang, who is currently on trial for faking work on cloning human embryonic stem cells. The research team felt it was necessary to include Hwang as a co-author because of his role in the present work.

Obviously, Hwang’s involvement raises concerns, as well it should, that the current research is valid, and it should be looked at closely. But it may also be brave, or perhaps foolish, for the researchers to include Hwang as an author. It may well have been easier, politically, to leave him off, but if he has played a role, he should be included. Leaving him off the paper would really be a case of double-dishonesty. Leaving someone’s name off a paper where they made a contribution is unethical, and in this case, disavowing the involvement of a scientist on trial for fraud (if he was in fact involved) might be especially unethical.

The nature of social rules, the social nature of politics, can be very complicated, and success and failure can depend on one’s ability to navigate this difficult landscape. Which brings us to the deeper point of this post.

The scientists note that wolves are especially hard to breed. One might wonder why this is true? Don’t you just get a male and a female and, well, they breed, then you have puppies, puppies, and more puppies? Shouldn’t the facilities (zoos and such) with wolves be overrun by the critters eventually? It turns out that this is not the case at all, and there is an interesting evolutionary story here.

Wolves are social carnivores, and it is normal for there to be multiple sexually mature males and multiple sexually mature females in one group. Raising the offspring requires a great deal of investment. They need to be protected and fed. Their “natural enemy” list includes wolves from other groups as well as other carnivores, so they are quite vulnerable. Wolves need to learn a lot to be good at hunting, and since the social group is thus important, they also need to learn a lot to act properly in the typical social group … a kind of ratchet effect requiring even more learning time, and thus more investment by adults.

…. therefore ….. (take a breath)

Even though there are multiple sexually mature males and females in the group, breeding has to be limited in order to get a good ratio of adults to offspring … sort of the ultimate, canid, home schooling scenario. For this reason, sexual activity and actual fertility are repressed. Only one female breeds, and typically, she mates with only one male (or at least, not all of the potential males mate with her).

This involves complexity in the mating system. The “built-in” wolf sexual drive is mediated by other “built-in” social drives that probably interact in a complex way with the social environment. Wolves probably have more complex Freudian mechanisms than humans do, because all humans have to do is pair off (more or less). Wolves have to hang around in tight social groups while a very small subset of individuals have seasonal sex and everybody else pretends nothing is going on…. talk about “Primal Scene…”

So, for this reason, it does not seem at all unlikely that your typical male and female adult wolf put together in a zoo are going to have a hard time getting it on. Sadly, most zoo animals were not raised in anything close to their natural social environment. Any chance of normal social learning is eliminated by the conditions of zoo life, and often, this loss of critical information in normal development is exasperated by truly crazy ideas of many zoo managers about what a “normal” social life is like.

I once knew a bonobo who was raised by it’s dad, in isolation. Mom was a good breeder, so she was used to pump out more and more bonobos, each offspring paired with an available adult. Holy crap! Anyone who knows anything about primate behavior would know that this would not work. This is like taking new born humans and distributing them among the next available psychopath in the nearest Federal Maximum Security facility. That particular bonobo (who shall remain nameless) was so psychologically disturbed that the zoo planned on euthanizing him, until a psychiatrist stepped in and put him on high doses of psychotherapeutics.

For a long time the wolves at one zoo I regularly visited were unable to breed. They would go through a number of the usual social rituals, but not all of them, and they would both appear to be very excited about the possibility of breeding, but they would just never get it right. It turns out that these two individuals had simply never seen other wolves mate. They had no clue as to what to do. They were eager, willing, hormonally ready, but incapable, because evolution shapes normal behavior in large-brained social organisms with the expectation of information transmission through more than one source … the social environment itself is as critical as the genome.