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From: dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu (David Mark)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Human/Chimp Hybrids?
Message-ID: <38212@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 29 Sep 90 01:02:13 GMT
References: <3478@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1028@massey.ac.nz> <5042@hsv3.UUCP>
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In article <5042@hsv3.UUCP> mvp@hsv3.UUCP (Mike Van Pelt) writes:
>It seems to me that some of the more abstract questions involved could
>be examined, without treading into the thorny moral and ethical
>problems, by trying {chimp,gorilla,orangutan,gibbon; pick two}
>crosses.  Has this been tried?  If so, it probably wasn't sucessful.
>Any data?

Such data, if they exist, would not be definitive.  I recall (I hope
correctly) that recent biochemical work suggests that the Homo sapiens
is the closest living relative of the chimps (Pan), and that human-chimp
are genetically the closest pair among great apes of different
genera.  So even if it were the case that probablilty
of successful hybridization were a monotonic function of genetic distance
(and I bet it is more complicated than that!), a lack of successful inter-
generic hybrids among other pairs of great apes would not really indicate
that human-chimp hybrids are unlikely.  However, successful hybridization 
between any other pair would suggest (but not prove) that the viability of 
chimp-human would be reasonably likely.

David Mark
dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu