Rise of the Humanzees

It's not something I focus on as much as the robot threat, but via Ronald Bailey comes Jenny Hawthorne's report for the Scotsman on the possibilities of human-chimp hybrids: "A leading scientist has warned a new species of 'humanzee,' created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting." Interestingly, I believe it was the Scotsman that also broke the story of Joseph Stalin's efforts to breed a humanzee super-soldier so they've clearly marked themselves out as your go-to source for coverage of this vital issue.

Does anyone else remember the State of the Union address when Bush called for a ban on human-animal hybrids? Did such a ban pass?

Comments

I don't think humanzees would stand a chance against an army of turtlemen. John Cornyn needs to study this.

Posted by steve duncan | April 30, 2008 12:30 PM

Does anyone else remember the State of the Union address when Bush called for a ban on human-animal hybrids?

See, even Bush is smart enough to recognize that there shouldn't be any more humanzee presidents after him.

Posted by Steve LaBonne | April 30, 2008 12:30 PM

Interestingly, I believe it was the Scotsman that also broke the story of Joseph Stalin's efforts to breed a humanzee super-soldier

Actually, I believe it was the Weekly World News that broke the news of a survivor of Stalinist human-chimpanzee crossbreeding experiments. <-- straight face!

Does anyone else remember the State of the Union address when Bush called for a ban on human-animal hybrids?

Yes. Also the anti-cloning stuff too.

Did such a ban pass?

Not unless they hid in the farm bill or something.

max
['Which wouldn't surprise me.']

Posted by max | April 30, 2008 12:31 PM

If you google human-animal hybrid you'll find that a British team just this month created an embryo that is 99.9 percent human with a cow egg shell. Also, there is a bill in Congress to ban HAHs.

More importantly, I'm guessing nobody's bought this t-shirt recently: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/01/humananimal-hybrid-t.html

Posted by g r e g | April 30, 2008 12:35 PM

I am adamantly opposed to a ban on human/animal hybrids because a human/chimp combo would either be the most badass thing on the planet or the most hilarious thing on the planet. We deserve to know!!

Posted by How Insane Is John McCain? | April 30, 2008 12:38 PM

If you google human-animal hybrid you'll find that a British team just this month created an embryo that is 99.9 percent human with a cow egg shell. Also, there is a bill in Congress to ban HAHs.

More importantly, I'm guessing nobody's bought this t-shirt recently: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/01/humananimal-hybrid-t.html

Posted by g r e g | April 30, 2008 12:38 PM

What's the big worry? We've already got a humanzee in the White House. And everything's worked out just fine ....

Posted by DCBob | April 30, 2008 12:38 PM

If you google human-animal hybrid you'll find that a British team just this month created an embryo that is 99.9 percent human with a cow egg shell. Also, there is a bill in Congress to ban HAHs.

More importantly, I'm guessing nobody's bought this t-shirt recently: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/01/humananimal-hybrid-t.html

Posted by g r e g | April 30, 2008 12:40 PM

Get your stinkin' paws off of me you damned dirty apes!

Posted by Taylor | April 30, 2008 12:40 PM

If there were humanzees, what church should they attend???

Posted by Roddy McCorley | April 30, 2008 12:42 PM

What's the big worry? We've already got a humanzee in the White House. And everything's worked out just fine ....

Posted by DCBob | April 30, 2008 12:43 PM

An Atlantic staffer should know that there was only ever one true humanzee. His name was Oliver.

Posted by Sam Rosenfeld | April 30, 2008 12:44 PM

I thought it was weird and funny when Bush said that in the SOTU, too, but you know what, the Scotsman story makes me think maybe he was right. If scientists can do it, they will: remember the geep?

Posted by live | April 30, 2008 12:44 PM

If you google human-animal hybrid you'll find that a British team just this month created an embryo that is 99.9 percent human with a cow egg shell. Also, there is a bill in Congress to ban HAHs.

More importantly, I'm guessing nobody's bought this t-shirt recently: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/01/humananimal-hybrid-t.html

Posted by g r e g | April 30, 2008 12:46 PM

Didn't Samantha Power also call Hillary a human-animal hybrid in the Scotsman? It seems to be the venue for that sort of story.

Posted by otto | April 30, 2008 12:46 PM

It's not human-animal, but there is this weird subculture of people who cross-breed animals of different species to create hybrid offspring, the most notorious of which is the liger. But there's tons of them. They even have crossed a species of dolphin with a species of minor whale, which isn't just cross-species breeding, it's cross-genera breeding.

Posted by Freddie | April 30, 2008 12:55 PM

Re ligers

Interestingly enough, male ligers are sterile but female ligers are not and can mate with either lions or tigers and produce viable litters. Also, full grown male ligers are larger then their two parents (i.e. male lion, female tiger) put together, weighing as much as 1/2 ton.

Re chimps/human interbreeding

The question as to whether chimps and humans could interbreed is apparently somewhat controversial. Stephen J. Gould thought so. However, I have seen it argued that not only do chimps and humans have different numbers of chromosomes but the chromosomes don't line up in the same order in the two species. Thus it is claimed that a viable fetus would not develop.

Posted by SLC | April 30, 2008 1:04 PM

The scotsman article was proven to be a hoax. It was an embellishment of ny times story about how this was attempted in the old soviet union but stalin was against it because he was against tampering with human genes. Stalin had these people killed during his purges.

Another point, Oliver was not a humanzee. He was a rare type of primate called a bonobo. They are smaller than chimpanzees and are considered more "hummanlike" due to the fact that they tend to walk on two legs 25% of the time. They also have close to the same number of muscles in their face as we humans and thus are more expressive than most primates. They were not discovered until the late 1920's and due to the fact that they were found in a location consisting of a population of only humans and chimpanzees, many thought they were a product of hybridization. This turned out to be untrue. They are just a very rare type of chimpanzee.

Posted by buyproduct | April 30, 2008 1:13 PM

Liger -- nice. The reason we don't see more odd animal combos is because such species don't naturally meet. There are hundreds of possibilities for hybridization (such as the lion-tiger) in captivity, that are neither that bizarre nor unfathomable.

I wonder, though, what kind of climate a liger would live in.

Posted by Choward | April 30, 2008 1:15 PM

Isn't the reason why Bush opposed human-animal hybrids that the religious right is terrified about this because their whole argument against abortion comes down to the fact that even tadpole and amoeba-like forms of embryonic and fetal life are human and therefore are entitled to life? If you had something that was half-human, it would screw up their entire simplistic worldview.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 30, 2008 1:25 PM

What Ol One Eye wants to know is, why aint they called Chumans? And fer that matter, someone enlighten me on the whole Brunch thing. Why aint it Lunchfast? Or Lunfist? Tis a crazy, incomprehensible world we lives in.

Posted by ol one eye | April 30, 2008 1:50 PM

If the government limits research in the vital area of human-animal hybrids, we're going to lose out to Pacific-rim centaurs.

Posted by The Modesto Kid | April 30, 2008 2:02 PM

More than a decade ago, John Frankenheimer had an opportunity to give this issue the public aring it so richly deserves, but he made the fatal error of casting Marlon Brando in the title role, so nobody went to see it. Now it's only a matter of time before catvoles rule the world. We will all ultimately pay for his mistake.

Posted by FearItself | April 30, 2008 2:03 PM

Ligers should be bred for their magical powers.

Posted by N. Dynamite | April 30, 2008 2:15 PM

And I for one welcome our new human-animal hybrid overlords.

(Frankly, I am surprised it took anyone this long to say it.)

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 30, 2008 2:27 PM

"I began to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. 'It's all right,' she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate. He raped the cook. As he moved rhythmically back and forth, his eyes rolled upward to the heavens."

I just always found that to be a charming anecdote.

Posted by godoggo | April 30, 2008 2:33 PM

...or, as an alternative free-association, I could have made a joke about a Headstrong-Armstrong hybrid, but probably best not.

Posted by godoggo | April 30, 2008 2:37 PM

While we're on the subject of man/chimp liasons, please to check out His Monkey Wife by John Collier

For some reason, Collier has long ago faded from view. His Monkey Wife is a fine novel and Collier's short stories are harsh and sophisticated fantasies. The John Collier Reader is the book to get, but I think you'll only find it in a library these days.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 30, 2008 3:23 PM

We already have Humanzees. They're here.

Most of them have tried repeatedly to pass the Bar in their various states, but can't. Others are political appointees at various federal bureaucracies.

There's even one or two on the teevee (Hint: Timmy likes banana), and on public vomatorium talk radio (Hint: Mikey swings violently in his chain-suspended tire in the privacy of his Marin County back yard).

They even act as figurehead presidents.

Posted by Jemand von Niemand | April 30, 2008 3:45 PM

where is Richard Steven Hack? This seems to be his bailiwick....

Posted by Ben Cronin | April 30, 2008 3:54 PM

@godoggo:
[...] his eyes rolled upward to the heavens.
Thanks. You have ruined my week.

Posted by Garrigus Carraig | April 30, 2008 4:31 PM

SLC,

It's a common feature of animal hybrids that the males (or more precisely the 'heterogametic sex' which would be females in birds and some insects) are more likely to be sterile than the females. Most likely because males are affected by deleterious recessive genes while females are not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane's_rule
It's also not uncommon for sterile hybrids to be larger. This might be an effect of not having to devote resources to reproduction. Castrated pigs, cows, chickens, etc. also grow larger. If I recall correctly there are even some ant species that benefit from producing sterile hybrids since the hybrids are larger and make more productive workers.

Posted by Hector | April 30, 2008 4:43 PM

Hi!

Do I actually need to say anything here?

Because you know I can.

Start with the fact that humans are 98.5 percent genetically identical with bonobo chimpanzees.

Face it, folks - you ARE chimpanzees. There's more genetic differentiation between humans (something like 12%, I think I read) than there is between humans and chimps, if what I've read is correct.

As it happens, the effects of that 1.5% difference are more profound than the other 98.5%, but that's another story. There's still enough similarities to make it clear that humans need to be continually reminded: you ARE primates. You are not some fucking "son of God" who is all that much better than the nearest chimp.

Do yourself a favor: When you wake up in the morning, go into the bathroom, look into the mirror and say, "Good morning, Bonzo!"

There used to be a Saturday morning kids show on TV back in the early '70's. It was called, "Lancelot Link - Secret Chimp". It was a spoof of the spy shows and movies prevalent at the time. They had all these chimps dressed up in suits, fedoras and dresses, sitting at tables, and driving little cars and motorboats. It was brilliant. The editing and the dubbed dialog was so good it always looked like the chimps knew exactly what they doing, like human actors.

That is what I see when I walk down the street: chimps in clothes who think they know what they're doing.

Watch these: you won't regret it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2AN7kBQOsw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MZeiBq3Irw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh6sSExynS4

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 30, 2008 4:45 PM

At this point in time, all I really care about is what kind of gas mileage these human-animal hybrids get. I mean, really, what good are they if they can't beat a Prius?

Posted by Ella in NM | April 30, 2008 6:00 PM

I, for one, welcome our new humanzee overlords.

Posted by Shawn | April 30, 2008 6:54 PM

Test

Posted by Balla | April 30, 2008 8:26 PM

I just realized that my 2nd comment was ungoogleably cryptic, so I'll rephrase:

An alternative free-association would have been to quote Groucho's joke about a Headstrong/Armstrong hybrid, but probably best not.

They you go.

Posted by godoggo | May 1, 2008 11:44 AM