Leading Darwinist Advocates Breeding Humans with Chimps

New Attempts to Interbreed Humans and Chimps to Prove Evolution

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

A new movement headed by Professor David Barash to prove evolution by breeding humans with our claimed closest relative, the chimpanzee has gained credence. A core teaching of Neo-Darwinism is that humans are simply another animal produced by evolution. Researchers have produced many hybrids, even between two animals once classified as different species. Some of the thousands of examples include tigons (the offspring of a male tiger bred with a female lion), ligers (the offspring of a male lion bred with a female tiger), jagulep (a jaguar bred with a leopard), and a leopon (a leopard bred with a lion). As far as known, all of the big cats can successfully interbreed.

Professor Barash concluded from this observation that it is “by no means impossible or even unlikely that a hybrid or a chimera combining a human being and a chimpanzee could be produced in a laboratory. After all, human and chimp (or bonobo) share, by most estimates, roughly 99 percent of their nuclear DNA.”[1] He added that the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR, an acronym for the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat system, is regularly used to deliberately modify the genome of many life-forms. This tool provides scientists with the ability of adding and deleting targeted genes from a genome.

Consequently, Barash added, “it is not unreasonable to foresee the possibility—eventually, perhaps, the likelihood—of producing ‘humanzees’ or ‘chimp-humans.’ Such an individual would … be neither human nor chimp: rather, something in between.”[2]  Some evolutionists believe after humans and chimps separated from our common ancestor and became separate species we were still able to interbreed.[3] Consequently, since we used to interbreed, to do so today would not be unexpected.

Barash’s Goal

Barash believes that breeding chimps and humans “would be a terrific idea” for many reasons including to quell what he calls the most harmful “theologically-driven myth of all times: that human beings are discontinuous from the rest of the natural world, … specially created and endowed with souls, whereas ‘they’—all other creatures—were not.” Producing ‘chimp-humans” hybrids would be, Barash argues, the ultimate proof of evolution. Interbreeding humans and chimps would also “drive a stake into the heart of that destructive disinformation campaign of discontinuity, of human hegemony over all other living things.”¹ It would also demolish the view that, as Genesis teaches, humans are to have dominion over the animals:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.[4]

The chimp-human goal is important to Darwinists because it “is almost impossible to imagine how the most die-hard advocate of humans having a discontinuously unique biological status could continue to maintain this position if confronted with a real, functioning, human-chimp combination.”¹ Barash concluded, that “faced with individuals who are clearly intermediate between human and ape, it will become painfully obvious that a rigid distinction between the two is no longer tenable.”¹ Human evolution from some ape would finally be proven beyond question.

Critique of Barash’s Genetics

A major mistake Barash makes is his erroneous claim that “human and chimp (or bonobo) share, by most estimates, roughly 99 percent of their nuclear DNA.” Even a 12-year-old study that sampled protein coding genes found “humans and chimpanzees differ by at least 6% (1,418 of 22,000 genes), which stands in stark contrast to the oft-cited 1.5% difference between orthologous nucleotide sequences.”[5] As more comparisons were completed using more complete genomes, the similarity was reduced. The latest research found it is closer to 86 to 89%.[6] Given a 14% difference of 3 billion base pairs, that would yield a whopping 42 million base-pair difference.

Professor Barash advocates this approach because he assumes its success will encourage humans to treat animals better because the great divide now existing between humans and all lower forms of life will be reduced. In fact, it will likely have the opposite effect. If humans are just another animal, a different kind of primate, it will likely influence humans to de-humanize other humans. After all, humans are just animals as are also the apes. This is exactly how Nazi Germany justified mistreating certain people, including Slavs, Jews, and Roma, that led to the Holocaust.[7]

David P. Barash is not a fringe scientist, but a leading researcher and science popularizer. As a Professor of Psychology emeritus at the University of Washington, he has written, edited or co-authored 40 books, and over 230 scholarly articles, mostly on Darwin and Darwinism. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Ivanov study is told in more detail in ch. 14 of this book by Dr. Bergman

Efforts to Breed Humans and Chimps in the Past

Nor is this the first time human-ape breeding experiments have been attempted.[8] The first scientific attempt was in the mid-1920s at a laboratory, then part of French Guinea in Africa. The work was done by a leading Soviet Scientist, Professor Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, and his son. Ivanov was a world famous breeder of hybrids specializing in the field of artificial insemination and the interspecific hybridization of animals. His successes were sensational, especially among horse breeders from many parts of the world. He had wanted to try “the  ultimate test of Darwinian evolution” [interbreeding humans with chimps, i.e., humanzees] … since 1910, and he finally (after consulting with Hermann Muller, the Soviet-loving Drosophila scientist) screwed up the courage to request a research grant in the early 1920s.”[9]

The “top Bolsheviks saw something promising in Ivanov’s idea: a chance to insult religion, the Soviet Unions avowed enemy… in our struggle for the liberation of the working people from the power of the Church.”[10] Only a few months after the Scopes trial the Soviet government gave Ivanov 10,000 dollars, 130,000 in today’s dollars, to prove his ape-human theory.[11]

Ivanov attempted at least three times, without success, to inseminate female chimpanzees with human sperm. He also attempted a set of experiments involving ape sperm and humans, but was unsuccessful for several reasons.[12]  Ivanov used Negro women because they were in his day believed to be biologically closer to apes, thus, he reasoned, the experiment would more likely be successful.[13] His belief was based on the writings of Darwin and others.

Darwin’s Race Teachings

Darwin expected that, at some future point, “not very distant … the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races,” thus making the gap between humans and apes even greater than it currently is now.[14] The eminent evolutionist Professor Carl Vogt, “distinguished, as did most biologists in the second half of the nineteenth century, between crosses of ‘allied’ races [such as negroes and apes] and ‘distant’ ones, such as white humans and apes.”[15] These scientists believed hybridization of the lowest human type and the highest ape type would vindicate Darwin and serve as powerful evidence of evolution.[16]

Both the scriptures and Christian history condemn this attempt. The Bible is very clear: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.”[17]  A real concern is that these experiments, although they will likely fail, will further erode human value and encourage inhuman experiments. Kean concluded that “almost all respectable scientists today would lay money on human-chimp fertilization being impossible.”[18] There are many reasons for these conclusions. For example, they include to activate the system to form a zygote and beginning cell division is species specific. Assuming that a zygote can form, human and chimp regulations of DNA are very different. Although in the case of different chromosomal numbers, a female horse with 64 chromosomes and male donkey with 62 can produce a mule with 63 chromosomes, which is usually sterile, but humans are not donkeys, and the same process may not work for humans. The 15 percent difference in genes (close to 400,000) will also cause enormous problems.

This study recalls the now-shameful 1932 U. S. Government Public Health Service study of the natural history of syphilis among poor Blacks compared to Whites to justify certain treatment programs. The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, and 201 disease-free. Rather than treat the disease with the medicine available after the study began, the physicians allowed it to progress to determine if the progression in Black men was the same as it was in White men.[19] The study continued for 40 years, and by then most of the infected subjects had died, many of horrible and painful deaths. As expected, the researchers concluded no difference existed in untreated syphilis between Blacks and Whites. The breeding study between apes and humans, regardless how it turns out, will no doubt likewise be an embarrassment if not an unethical fiasco.

[1] David Barash. 2018. “It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids.” Nautilus, March 8. David Barash. 2018. Through a Glass Brightly. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

[2] Barash, 2018.

[3] Kean, Sam. 2012. The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 182-183.

[4] Genesis 1:26 (KJV).

[5] Demuth, J. 2006. “The Evolution of Mammalian Gene Families.” PLoS ONE 1(1): e85 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000085

[6] Tomkins. Jeffrey P. 2011. “Genome-Wide DNA Alignment Similarity (Identity) for 40,000 Chimpanzee DNA Sequences Queried against the Human Genome is 86–89%.” Answers Research Journal 4 (2011):233–241. www.answersingenesis.org/arj/v4/human-chimpanzee-genome.pdf . See also Tomkins, J. 2014. “Human–Chimp DNA Similarity: Separating Fact from Fiction.” In: Genesis & Genetics: Proceedings of the 2014 Faith & Science Conference, Springfield, Missouri.

[7] Bergman, Jerry. 2012. Hitler and the Nazis Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazis Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada: Joshua Press.

[8] Bergman, Jerry. 2017. Evolution’s Blunders, Frauds and Forgeries. Atlanta, GA: CMI Publishing, Chapter 14, pp. 219-236.

[9] Kean, 2012, p. 180.

[10] Kean, 2012, p. 180.

[11] Kean, 2012, p. 181.

[12] Pain, Stephanie. 2008. Blasts from the past: The Soviet ape-man scandal. New Scientist, August 20. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926701-000-blasts-from-the-past-the-soviet-ape-man-scandal/

[13] Rossiianov, Kirill. 2002. “Beyond Species: Ii’ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes.” Science in Context. 15(2):277-316.

[14] Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man. London, England: John Murray, p. 201.

[15] Stepan, Nancy. 1985. “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places.” Chapter 5 in: Chamberlin, J. Edward and Sander L. Gilman. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 110.

[16] Wiker, Benjamin. 2009. The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin. Washington, D.C..: Regnery Publishing, pp. 106, 118.

[17] 1 Corinthians 15:39.

[18] Kean, 2012, p. 192.

[19] Washington, Harriet A. 2008. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York, NY: Anchor Books.

Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology at several colleges and universities including for over 40 years at Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored, are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 40 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.