What makes a human human?

[Bubbles]

Richard Dawkins

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jan/02/richard-dawkins-chimpanzee-hybrid

[Bubbles]

My objection to it ( creating a cross that went full term ) would be that what sort of life could it expect?

Human beings often want to settle down and find someone to have a family with.
It would be human enough to me to have to consider its rights.
The cross, IMO might just want to be like everyone else, and I'm not sure human beings respect other human beings yet to accept the responsibility of having the result of the experiment living a fulfilled life.

We are too judgemental IMO. We can't even respect the rights of other humans  we dehumanise other humans, let alone something which is a cross.

I could go with finding out when it involves a few cells, but if you created such a creature how could you meet its needs?

It would be a very lonely life, they might feel they had been cursed in as much as the elephant man was unable to live a normal family life.

To put another person in that position would be immoral I think.

I don't think we humans are that accepting.

I get upset that Nim the chimpanzee was taught to communicate by sign language but was just shove back in his cage as just another animal.

I think once we start something, we have responsibility to that creature.

It's not disposable.

[jeremyp]

They are both cats 

Cats in this sense is not a species, it is a family which is two levels above species.

[jeremyp]

If it was just a matter of finding out if the sperm fertilised the egg, in a test tube and then it was destroyed.

Is that immoral?

I'm not sure it is, because it's just a couple of cells.

The mother would have to carry the baby to term to be sure it is viable and we would probably have to wait for it to hit puberty before we find out if it is sterile.

For comparison, horses and donkeys diverged about4 - 5 mya which is only a bit more recently than humans and chimpanzees.

[Bubbles]

http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/8967/could-humans-and-chimpanzees-hybridize

( from link)

The concept of a human/chimp hybrid is called a humanzee. No humanzees have ever been recorded despite the fact that sexual intercourse between humans and chimps has been recorded on several occasions. This suggests that male-human/female-chimpanzee is not capable of producing viable offspring, at the very least.

 

[Red Giant]

Broadly I think I agree. I can't think of a single directly useful, practical benefit of knowing if humans and chimps can interbreed in any way whatsoever.

It could help to figure out which gene does what.  But really you'd need 2nd generation crosses.  Oo-er.

[Red Giant]

Wouldn't a circle species with humanity at one end be kind of strange, though? We can interbreed with Neanderthals, which can themselves interbreed with something a little more remote, and they with something a little more remote until you get all the way back around the planet to us and realise there's a chain that leads to the chimps in the trees... Kind of puts the idea of interbreeding as a means for defining species into perspective.

About 50,000 years ago apparently there were still Neanderthals in Europe or the Middle East and still H erectus in the Far East.  And presumably some Flores hobbits somewhere.  And maybe the odd Yeti.