The following information is disturbing, but it must be
reported. It concerns the hybridization of human beings and the great apes. A
hybrid is an organism whose parents are of two different species; a while ago I
wrote about the theory that modern humans are the product of an ancient
hybridization of apes and pigs, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-humans-related-to-pigs.html.
I don't think we've evolved from pigs because hybridization is not possible
unless the two parent species are already closely related; but humans and the
great apes are very closely related, we are all part of the Hominidae family which includes humans,
chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Humans and chimpanzees are the most
closely related, sharing a common ancestor just five million years ago called Ardipithecus. Technically it is not
implausible that hybridization between us is possible. Unlike the parents of
mules, horses and donkeys, chimps and humans are not behaviourally inclined to have
intercourse together in the wild, but could it be done in a laboratory? Yes.
The question is then, has it? How can it not have been done? If it can be,
somebody will. Seriously, what do you think will hold these people back,
ethics? Not a chance; Dr Moreau is alive and well!
"Humanzee" is a term referring to a hypothetical
human-chimp hybrid. Its name is a compound word, which is standard scientific
terminology for hybrids, with the exception of existing established terms like
"peppermint". In 1960 a chimpanzee turned up at an American training
farm. It had been caught in the Congo ,
along with many others, but this chimpanzee, named Oliver, was different. He
walked upright like a human and had far less fur on his head than he should
have. He also behaved more like a human being, learning to smile and shake
people's hands when he met them; he even learnt to smoke cigarettes. He didn't
get along very well with other chimps and preferred the company of humans. In
1976 Oliver became a media sensation, touring the world and appearing on TV
shows. At this point scientists began to wonder if Oliver might be a humanzee,
one of his parents being human and the other chimp. But in their native Africa ,
humans and chimps do not care to interact sexually any more than they do
elsewhere in the world, so how could such a hybrid be produced? In 1910 the
Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov delivered a speech to a biology
conference in Graz in which he
proposed the creation of an ape-human hybrid. His suggestion was met with
revulsion from the audience, but in 1926 the newly-appointed Soviet leader
Josef Stalin was only too happy to endorse his proposal and sent him to the
Pasteur Institute in Paris to carry
out his experiment. In 2006 The Scotsman
newspaper claimed to have discovered that Stalin had a goal of creating a race
of half-human half-ape creatures to use as slaves or as shock troops in
wartime, but the newspaper provides no source for this information, asserting
that they are just "secret documents" found in a Russian archive,
see: http://www.scotsman.com/news/world/stalin-s-half-man-half-ape-super-warriors-1-686693.
However Ivanov's experiments were real; the Soviets' motives for doing it may
have been to bolster Darwin 's
evolutionary theory and discredit the Russian Orthodox Church which was
promoting creationism. The Pasteur Institute sent him to the colony of French
Guinea, part of which covers the modern territory of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo . He artificially
inseminated female chimpanzees with human sperm, but had no success. He then
demanded to be allowed to do it the other way round and inseminate human women
with chimp sperm, but the Pasteur Institute riled at this and pulled the plug
on his experiment. However back home in the Soviet Union
he continued his work at a laboratory in the city of Sukhumi ,
not far from the Winter Olympics venue of Sochi .
The women used in the experiment were volunteers recruited by the Communist
Academy science department, I
imagine for a hefty financial incentive. However, as was often the case under
fickle and capricious nature Stalin's rule, Ivanov fell out of favour with the
regime and was exiled to Kazakhstan
where he died. His experiments with the women never took place. But had he
perhaps achieved other results that he left off his official paper? Could
Oliver have been the result of Ivanov's work, after all he appeared in the same
place? He can't be directly connected because he was only two years old in 1960
more than thirty years after Ivanov was there. Could he be a descendent of one
of Ivanov's supposed creations? Unlikely; hybrids are almost always sterile
because of their strange chromosomes. Mules are rarely able to produce young themselves
even though a horse and a donkey can easily produce a mule. So what is the
truth behind Oliver?
A modern DNA test has shown that Oliver is a complete chimp;
his strange attributes are caused by a birth deformity. The same goes for other
suggested humanzees like Danny Ramoz Gomez, a fur-covered Mexican acrobat with
exceptional strength; he is completely human and suffers from a condition
called hypertrichosis, excessive body hair. But there are rumours of other
experiments done that carry on Ivanov's work, like in China
in 1967. Before it was cut short by a riot in the Cultural Revolution the claim
is that one chimp was three months pregnant. Also the psychologist Prof. Gordon
Gallup claims that a similar experiment took place at the controversial Yerkes
primate laboratory in Orange Park , Florida
USA . This time a live
birth was obtained, but the scientists decided not to go public with their
results and "euthanized" the infant. There are major moral
considerations with this kind of research relating to politics, culture and
psychology, but also cruelty. One of the issues concerns any cloning involved.
Clones suffer from poor health and live short lives troubled by illness, but
also one must consider their psychological well-being; I did when I considered
the plans to clone the Woolly Mammoth, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/cloning-mammoth.html.
A real humanzee would be neither human nor chimpanzee, but stuck in a limbo
world in between. It would in all likelihood be rejected by both species and
live a very lonely life. However, as I said, this wouldn't concern some of the
ruthless and megalomaniacal characters put in positions of scientific power by
those in political power who want to use science as a weapon against the
population. This has long been the plot of science fiction films and books
beginning in 1897 with the novel The
Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells which probably inspired Maureen Duffy's Gor Saga in 1981 and Michael Crichton's Next in 2006, see: http://www.maureenduffy.co.uk/ and: http://www.crichton-official.com/books-next-history.html.
There have been several TV programmes and films on the subject like the BBC
adaptation of Gor Saga called First Born, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096584/;
this was not a very good programme in my view, but Chimera was far better, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7hAd8Il878.
Arthur C Clarke has written many visionary sci-fi novels in which an optimistic
future is projected and some of those involve "superchimps", usually
shortened to "simps", genetically-engineered intelligent primates
created for the sole purpose of serving humanity as slaves. This concept is
treated very dispassionately in Clarke's writings and he never considers that
there's anything dodgy about it.
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