It wouldn’t disrupt my worldview. On an ethical level, I’d have huge problems with it, but looking dispassionately at the science I’d think it was pretty neat.
This exact subject was dealt with pretty well IMO in the recent novel Lucy, about a young girl raised as the daughter of a primatologist who is revealed to be a human/bonobo hybrid, and the moral & ethical situations that come of it.
My worldview wouldn’t be disrupted, but I would be fascinated to know how the genetic modifications were made to allow such a being to be gestated successfully.
Good gods, have none of you people seen the Planet of the Apes movies? This sort of thing is all that you need to start a race of super-primates which takes over humanity!
Seriously, it wouldn’t ‘bother’ me in the sense of disrupting some kind of view that of all species humans are special and unique, but I think the ethicial problems of what to do with such a hybrid–particularly if it were capable of language and/or breeding true (although the latter is unlikely)–are enormous, but would also bring light to the need to assess how other potentially sentient speices are treated in bioethics and law.
Stranger
I doubt it is possible either for that reason. I am certain that humans and chimps have mated at some point and yet it didn’t produce anything viable.
It wasn’t a chimp but an Orangutan named Pony was recently freed from being a sex slave in a village in Borneo. They kept her shaved to give her that hot look. Sad but true.
http://theinterrobang.com/2012/06/orangutan-being-used-as-sex-slave/
According to your link, convention is to combine the first part of the species of the male with the second part of the species of the female, so a Humanzee or Manpanzee would come from a male human and female chimp and a Chumans from a male chimp and female human.
As for whether they can ever interbreed, horses and donkeys/zebras can and they have a similar or greater level of incompatibility than humans and chimps (again from your link); the number of chromosomes doesn’t have to match either (nearly twice as many in some zebras as horses). The offspring are usually sterile though, but then can sometimes interbreed, thus a new species is possible (whether this would work over more than one generation/between the offspring, especially with inbreeding, I’m not sure).
I have no qualms about creating hybrids. I think it would be cool.
Like many others, I’d be concerned about the proper treatment of the poor offspring. Even if the folks involved had good intentions and fully intended to give him or her a good life for his or her natural span, we don’t even really know just what a “good life” would entail for such a creature.
If, however, it were shown to be possible without actually having been done, that wouldn’t really surprise me at all, beyond wondering why we hadn’t already seen “natural” occurrences of it.
Wouldn’t upset my world view one bit. However, I am currently drawing blood biting my cheek so hard to avoid going for the obvious jokes. 
A fully grown female chimp in “nature” would probably kill you if you tried to have sex with it. Or, it would bite off your fingers and maybe your penis. Plus, a Humanzee born to a chimp mother probably couldn’t survive in the wild. Men certainly have sex with any number of farm animals, but trying that with a wild animal is whole 'nuther kettle of fish.
As for the other way around, there probably aren’t too many (ie, any) woman who would go out of their way to have sex with a male chimp. If some rare event resulted in a live birth somewhere (presumably in Africa), I would suspect the baby would be killed.
Did you see my sex-slave orangutan link upthread? Granted, it isn’t a chimp but as far as I know, it is real and recent. I am not saying such a thing has ever been common but it is pretty similar and it should only take a few examples to show if it is possible to produce a human-chimp hybrid or not. As far as I know, no offspring have been produced from that type of pairing and that suggests that it wouldn’t work at least not easily. They say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but I am not so sure in this case. Some men will have sex with just about anything and there have been enough socialized chimps in captivity to give ample opportunity for someone to try it.
No- I would be completely fascinated.
I don’t think that it would really change my views, since I already think that most of the distinctions that we draw between “humans” and “animals” are artificial - especially in the case of Great Apes.
I would be uncomfortable with scientists trying to create chimp-human hybrids mostly because, knowing how humans are, I would expect that it would end up being exploited or abused rather than treated humanely. Even many human beings who aren’t fully able to protect themselves (mentally disabled people, the elderly, the young, women in general etc.) are treated very badly in many parts of the world, after all, let alone a creature that is “almost human but not quite”.
I think this is incorrect. There are two metrics: cladistics, and genetic similarities. Each is an approximation (at least) to an objective measurement of similarities/differences.
All classifications are human constructs…but Everest really is objectively taller than Tamalpais.
In the complete abstract sense of world view, it would depend dramatically on how such a thing was achieved.
If it was achieved because a a lab worker got drunk one night and things got a little embarrassing and a out popped a baby: dramatic changing of my worldview.
If it was achieved because a supernatural being descended from the heavens and said “Let it be forthwith so that when a man lays with a chimp offspring shall be possible”: dramatic change in my worldview.
If it was achieved because a human and a chimp hugged and whle doing so sloughed off cells which were then consumed by a nearby snail and that snail pooped out a human-chimpanzee hybrid: dramatic change in my worldview.
If it was achieved because scientistic tore apart the DNA of a human and a chimpanzee and reassembled them in such a way that a hybrid results: not really any change to my worldview.
On the narrower sense of my worldview in terms of policy/politics: It would really depend on what the intent of the experiment was and what kind of life the result was likely to live.
Whether you classify humans and chimps to be in the same genus or not is subjective. And there isn’t any scientific body that “polices” such decisions as there is for the species level. Now, there certainly is scientific consensus to go by, but that is not objective either.
What do you SoCal folks know about Mt Tam, anyway? 
Yes.
I doubt it. Has there ever been a report of a documented sex act between a human and a chimp? I think that tells us just how common it is.
But even still, it might be that hundreds of embryos need to be created before one is viable. It may be possible, but not easy, with only some small percent of embryos surviving. It may work only with chimp sperm and human ova. We just don’t know enough to say one way or the other.
But as I said in the GQ thread, are you aware of any large mammal species that are more closely related than humans and chimps are that are known not be inter-fertile? We are constantly seeing how distantly related species, like camels and llamas, can interbreed.
Yeah… But once two species are said to be in the same genus, there are some pretty good ways to determine if a third species ought to be included. If it’s “between” the other two either cladistically or in genetic differences, it’d seem to be a slam dunk. Um… Wouldn’t it?
(Fervent confession that biosciences are my weakest field. Ask me about orbital mechanics…)
I almost said “Cuyamaca.” (And, hey, my sister has climbed Tam several times. I, um, er, ah, keep meaning to, y’know, one of these days…)
(P.S. send more water… 
)
Nim Chimpsky wasn’t the only chimp raised in a human family, nor the first. There was Washoe first. They tried to teach her to talk, and that was how it was learned that chimps can’t learn to talk. Other researchers moved to sign language (in various forms) after that.
(ETA: Reviewing that Wiki page, it says that Washoe was the first to be taught ASL; there were others before that failed to learn to speak.)
Careful! Multiple users over in the other thread have already gotten mod warnings doing this! :eek:
I would be bothered by one thing. What if the hybrid is viable, but has horrible, hellish birth defects? Do you euthanize?