GENETICISTS studying human and chimpanzee DNA have concluded that a few million years ago, pre-humans and pre-chimps produced hybrids between the two species. And in the American evolutionary wars, this is good news.
Of course, the very idea of ancestral human beings and chimpanzees "exchanging genes" makes people squirm, because (let's face it) this means sexual intercourse between our ancient human and animal ancestors. It is hard enough to contemplate our parents copulating; to think of our very great-grandparents not only descended from "monkeys" but having sex with them is difficult to conceive. But conceive is what they evidently did.
There is, however, an even greater source of discomfort at work here; not simple squeamishness about sex but a deeper repugnance that goes to the heart of why so many Americans continue to be so resistant to the theory of evolution. And this is why I not only welcome the news that humans and chimpanzees commingled genes in the past, I also look forward to the possibility that, thanks to advances in reproductive technology, there will be hybrids, or some other mixed human-animal genetic composite, in our future.
This may seem perverse, because even the most liberal ethicists shy away from advocating the breeding or genetic engineering of half-person/half-animal. Why, then, am I rooting for their creation?
Because in these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism, with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed. And this is precisely the message that chimeras, hybrids or mixed-species clones would drive home.
The latest tactic of creationists in the United States has been to accept "microevolutionary" events, such as drug resistance in bacteria, but to draw the line at the emergence of human beings from other, "lower" life forms, cloaking their religious agenda in a miasma of pseudoscience. It is a line that exists only in the minds of those who proclaim that the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.
Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism -- as our ancient human and chimp ancestors appear to have done long ago -- it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.
