Horses and donkeys mate.
And, genetically, the line dividing one species from another isn’t always as clear-cut as biology books and nice tree diagrams might make you think.
And, as for the creationists, this interbreeding is supposed to have happend 2-6 million years ago, which the earth is clearly not old enough to support.
I saw it being discussed on a creationist website; the reaction from the [del]IDists[/del] creationists was typically 'bah! it’s all speculation! you can’t proOOOove anything!"
I’d never thought about it, but I suppose this isn’t surprising news. As to the “creationist firestorm” question- it depends. Do you think any of them read the science section of the newspaper? 
Well, at some point you have to get a bifurcation of species. Check this out:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/l_052_05.html
Consider the philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of the…
Banana! Banana! Banana!
It’s an instance of intelligent design, or intelligent chimp pimping anyway.
God: J. Fred Muggs, meet Eve. Eve, meet J. Fred.
(No, not our Eve .
Oh, all the time - it beats doing actual research and actual science; much easier to sit in the peanut gallery and criticise (without even trying to comprehend).
In fact, if you find yourself in a debate with a creationist about how this or that piece of scientific research is total evil atheist anti-God humanist rubbish etc, why not ever so politely ask to be referred to any piece of original scientific research carried out by a creationist. Despite calling themselves ‘Creation Scientists’ they don’t do any actual research, they just sit waiting for the real scientists to do the real work, then they write a vapid critique of it.
As do lions and tigers.
[Figaro’s** post is valid, however. I believe the modern horse and donkey go back much further in time than modern humans. I don’t know about modern chimpanzees.
Actually, I guess the DNA match isn’t as important as the chromosome match. Doesn’t each parent’s sex cell contribute half the chromosome for the descendant? So I guess the chromosome count in chimpanzee and human sex cells would need to be equal, for starters.
Somewhere along the line, two chimp chromosomes fused creating chromosome 2 in humans. That’s why we can’t successfully mate now. I’m pretty sure that all the other great apes have the same chromosomal numbers as chimps although I can’t find it in my text.
The ones who we might have interbreed with fairly recently were the Neandertals.
It turns out that equal numbers of chromosomes aren’t necessary for the generation of hybrid forms after all. This site lists several relatives of the horse that can produce hybrits with other horses having a different number of chromosomes.
I just wanted to add that differing chromosomal numbers does not necessarily mean that a species can not produce viable offspring together. There are wild horses with 66 chromsomes that can successfully breed with modern horses which have 64 chromosomes, however, these animals were thought to have diverged a mere 250,000 years ago. (cite)
4 million years ago, we were in the genus Australopithecus and 6 million years ago, we were Orrorin or Ardipithcus, hardly what we call “human.”
Once you go monkey,
nothing else seems as funky
Unfortunately, this point will be lost.
This will allow creationists to run with the story in two ways: (a) The idea of humans humping chimps is so patently absurd that it highlights the folly of evolution; and (b) It’s easy for scientists to believe that people would get it on with apes, because scientists eschew Godly morality so they assume that everybody else does, too.
We’ve had quite a few threads on this in GQ. The consensus, I think, has been that while a fertile hybrid might rather unlikely due to the different chromosome numbers, nothing definitely rules it out. Sterile hybrids can be produced between species that are much more distantly related than humans and chimps, so that certainly can’t be ruled out. There is just no way to tell, on the basis of present knowledge, without making the experiment.
And to clarify something, the Biological Species Concept does not require that two species be intersterile to be considered separate, only that they do not regularly produce hybrids in the wild. Wolves and coyotes, and in fact all members of the genus Canis, produce fertile hybrids in captivity, but are considered perfectly good species under the BSC.
In fact, something like the separation and re-merger of lineages postulated in the human-chimp split may have happened between different populations of gray wolves and red wolves in North America over the past few thousand years.
And such an experiment is ruled out. Such a hybrid might very well be rejected by both chimpanzees and humans leaving us with a really sticky dilemma.
Yeah. The “species” idea seems to be OK in popular, lay terminology, but not really useful scientifically and it falls flat on its face in the simplest life forms. Is there something better available or on tap?
I plead the lateness of the hour for AdSense’s ability to make me giggle:
Of course Eve wouldn’t, chimps have no fashion sense.
