What are the odds that Michael Jackson tried it with Bubbles?
Chimp sperm + human egg or human sperm + chimp egg, or does it make any difference? Physical size advantage would indicate a human mother, I think.
What’s the norm for mules?
Peace,
mangeorge
Yes, very good points. With the known hybrids out there* would you say that humans and chimps lie outside the range of developmental incomatibilities? Also, I think that if chimps and gorillas could not produce offspring it’d be a very good indication that humans could not either. It sure would come awefully close to answering the question w/o any of the ethical quanderies.
And it’s hard for me imagine that some bioligist somewhere hasn’t done some sureptitious experimenting late at night with a chimp ovum and human sperm.
*horse/donkey; tiger/lion; sheep/goat; camel/alpaca
IIRC the norm is horse mother. When it’s the other way around, it’s called a hiney.
And, BTW, there are a few rare instances when mules are furtile.
The sex of the parents can make a great deal of difference. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. It has the size of a horse, but looks rather more like a donkey. The reciprocal cross, male horse to female donkey, is known as a hinny, and is smaller and more horselike. Hinnies are rarely produced intentionally, since they do not have the characteristics such a strength that make mules desireable.
Also, in most other animals the convention is that you call the hybrid by a combo of the father + mother, with the father’s contribution coming first.
Liger= Lion father + tiger mother
Tigon= Tiger father + lion mother
Yet another example of how men get the credit, I guess.
I assume that the mule/hinny names predate this convention.
Ah, the obvious chauvinism on this board. Everyone assumes a guy would do a female chimp. How do we know Jane wasn’t doing Cheetah when Tarzan was out swinging from trees?
Would gestation times affect the viability of the offspring? Chimps gestate about 8-8.5 months, Bonobos about 7.5?
More seriously, how distant are tigers from lions? They can produce offspring & it’s not that uncommon for the resulting Ligers or Tigons to be fertile.
A thread where chimps evolved from MEN?
Hee hee! Stop throwing stuff! Ow!
Well, here’s a page listing quite a few types of hybrids…The “Chimera” section has an…interesting take on the subject, one that someone more knowledgeable of biology might want to do some checking on.
You know what the scary thing is about the OP, though? Someone’s tried “it” already. You can be sure of it. Over 6,000-odd years of civilization, and the 35 Billion-or-so humans who have ever lived, it has to have happened…probably not just once, either.
Pleasant dreams. =8o
Pleasant dreams yourself, bucko. Of course some freako has tried it somewhere. Just check out the newsgroups 
But in the primate world an offspring like what we’re discussing would I’m sure be killed immediately. In the human world right up to current times would probably also be killed.
Now in the current day, all bets are off. Pleasant dreams yourself!:eek:
Ok Moderators, gimme a break. It’s Friday.
What I meant to say is: Now in the current day, all bets are off. (GW Bush) Pleasant dreams yourself!
I’d just like to note ( as I think I did last time this discussion came up ) that comparing taxonomic levels across ( rather than within ) groups has minimal zero predictive value for anything. Other than species ( and folks argue that one ), taxons are purely human inventions, hiearchical charts designed to allow us to better study evolutionary processes and understand relationships within groups. There is absolutely NO set definition of genus, family, order etc. - Those designations are arbitrarily ( if systematically ) applied by a specific worker(s) for each individual taxon and there is no requirement that they represent a certain pre-set level of genetic, morphological, or ( ultimately what we’re angling for ) evolutionary distance that is equivalent across the entire kingdom Animalia ( let alone the other kingdoms ). At best what we may be moving towards is perhaps a loose consensus on how much molecular divergence taxons in certain broad groupings ( say mammals, or more specifically carnivores, or more specifically felids - with each narrowing you come closer to consensus ) represents what level of taxonomy. But conversly, the farther afield you move from the specific, the less consensus exists. Throw in morphology, behavioral systematics and other data points and the issue becomes more confused and we start getting into arguments over whether weighting of characters is called for and if so how much weight to then give each individual data point.
So the upshot is that what defines a genus among horses may bear no relationship whatsoever to what defines a genus among primates. It certainly doesn’t have much bearing on, say, what defines arachnid or fungal genera. So while it is probably safe to say that inter-phylum hybrids aren’t all that likely 
( I’d sure like to see that lion-bryozoan cross 
), cross-generic crosses needn’t be anything shocking. Genera, after all, aren’t “real” :).
Professional biologists get tripped up by this all the time. One of the objections some systematists ( I’m thinking of Jacques Gauthier in particular, hope I don’t explain his argument too poorly ) had to Stephen J. Gould’s interesting book Wonderful Life is that Gould played up the large number of phyla represented in the Burgess Shale as being this really incredible display of unmatched diversity. Except the number of phyla really has no bearing on anything - It was just a bunch of critters with odd bauplans that folks arbitrarily assigned into different phyla because they looked so weird. Phyla aren’t biologically equivalent, it’s just a human-defined, terminal within group rank. So the large number present does not necessarily equal greater diversity than a modern fauna. i.e. a modern marine fauna with say 5 phyla and 500 species is not necessarily less “diverse” in any real biological sense than an ancient fauna of 12 phyla and 500 species.
Am I starting to ramble? Did I make any sense?
- Tamerlane
That should be “minimal predictive value”, not “minimal zero predictive value”, which is a nonsense phrase rather than some arcane scientific slang :D.
I started to say zero, then decided to back down slightly on that.
- Tamerlane
Goat/sheep intermatings occur, (buck goat over ewe) producing a “geep”, but it always dies at about 3 months gestation. I’m not sure why, but I’d be willing to bet that genomic imprinting has something to do with it. Ram over doe goat does not produce an embryo AFAIK.
I’m not a geneticist, but what do other more biologically knowlegable people think about genomic imprinting as a reason for why we don’t see more hybridisation?
There might be biochemical markers outside the genome, perhaps in the outer wall of the egg cell or on the head of the sperm, that stop fertilisation taking place-
this imprinting idea is interesting- different expressions for a gene if it comes from the father or the mother. hmmm.
Another possible reason that otherwise cross-fertile species don’t breed is behavior- many of the hybrids detailed on the sites mentioned above have only happened in zoos where different species have been confined together, it seems to me, for the specific (no pun intended) purpose of producing an unnatural coupling. There seem to be some species of ducks that would e cross-fertile but avoid each other’s company.
Perhaps it really never has been attempted…
an adult chimpanzee is a wild and fierce beast, and you are welcome to try.
Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
story
I used to WORK for a gorilla-human hybrid! Dumbest SOB you ever met…hairy too! Of course, he could have been a surviving NEANDERTHAL!
The chimera concept offers an interesting alternative to inter-species hybridization. IIRC, it has been done with rats and mice.
Eberacum hit on a good point about the biochemical process between sperm and ovum that can sometimes be a barrier to interspecies mating. I’d think that this could be overcome in a laboratory setting.
I’m still amazed that no one has tried the chimp/gorilla experiment.
As for the chimp/human hybridization, if it were possible I wonder what effect that would have on religion. Would the hybrid have a soul?
That’s the next set of questions.
Soul, citizenship etc.
Before I got to those though I wanted to have some discussion of the possibility first.
I’m really intrigued by the ethical, theological, and societal implications of such a …uh… being.
“I wanted to have some discussion of the possibility first.”
I’ve been dogging this question for several years, reading everything I can to figure it out and always come up empty. Good luck!
Here’s a couple of more links on genetic Chimeras…one of which was a proposed human-mouse “hybrid,” of sorts.
Genetic Mosaics
Chimera Conflict
Truly facinating…I had no idea such a thing could even exist. You learn something new every day.