Top scientist “says we could soon crossbreed with all great apes,” reads the Sun headline. But that researcher, psychologist Dr. Gordon Gallup, Jr., denies the claim and says that the paper quoted him as stating things he “would never dream of saying.”
The Sun certainly has gotten a lot of mileage out of this story, with the high profile Drudge Report linking to two articles the paper published a couple of days in a row. The first piece cites Gallup as claiming that a former university professor told him that a human-chimp hybrid was born in a 1920s Florida lab, but was later euthanized over ethical considerations. It also cites Gallup as expressing the belief that “humans can be crossbred with all the great apes,” as the Sun put it.
The second article also makes both claims but emphasizes the latter, quoting Gallup as saying, “All of the available evidence — fossil, paleontological and biochemical — including DNA itself, suggests that humans can also breed with gorillas and orangutans [as well as with chimpanzees].” In fact, while these hypothetical creatures aren’t known to ever have existed, they’ve already been given names such as “humanzees,” “hurillas,” and “hurangs.”
But when I e-mailed Gallup and asked why he was making the “claim that humans can cross-breed with apes,” something that “science states is impossible,” he responded, “The piece that appeared in Sun was supposed to be a follow-up to the widely cited BBC television program entitled Humanzee that featured an interview I did on campus and was produced about 15 years ago. It is unfortunate that the reporter for this tabloid managed to misconstrue much of what I said and put quotation marks around things I would never dream of saying.”
This is perhaps not surprising. The Sun was so sloppy in its reporting that it even misspelled Gallup’s given name twice in its second article, writing it not as “Gordon” but “Gorgon”(the latter is actually a mythological Grecian monster who can turn those who gaze into its eyes to stone — e.g., Medusa).
Gallup may now be wishing he could turn the Sun reporter to stone, especially since he has a reputation to uphold. A renowned scientist who teaches at the State University of New York at Albany and researches biopsychology, Gallup is known for developing the mirror self-recognition test (MSR), which gauges self-awareness in animals.
This is yet another reason why it would be interesting to get specifics from Gallup. He responded to my first e-mail, which I wrote as just a general complaint, believing he’d made the statements the Sun attributed to him. When I realized there was a story here, though, I told him I was a journalist and would like to ask him some questions. After the Sun’s sleight-of-hand, however, he’s not giving any more interviews. One can hardly blame him.
One can certainly blame the Sun, however, for peddling fake news. Let’s be clear, a “humanzee” is like the Yeti: Such a thing, again, is not known to ever have existed. As to creating such a creature, the Sun uses both the terminology that humans and apes can “breed” and “can be crossbred,” with the former having the connotation of unaided mating and the latter implying scientific hybridization. Yet neither will yield a man-ape mix, as the following video explains.
While the Sun likely just wanted headlines, there can be an even more nefarious agenda behind humanzee stories: to discredit belief in divine creation by reinforcing the notion of godless evolution. The idea is, “Look, man really is just another animal — we can even breed with beasts!”
Many things can be said here. First, man and beast certainly are “related” — we have the same Creator. Evolutionists will speak of how genetically similar people and chimps are, pointing to this as proof of accidental evolution. Yet we share commonalities with all creatures; we’re all carbon-based life forms that require water, oxygen, and sustenance to survive, for instance. Is this surprising? We all must survive in the same environment (Earth). Moreover, is it surprising that beings created by the same source share a degree of sameness?
Second, whatever mixes or monsters we may be able to create via bizarre, advanced genetic engineering (as opposed to normal hybridization), we are children of God, reflecting Him in that we have free will and intellect. This means that, to an extent, we can figure out how our Father performed His miracles and manipulate His creation. This doesn’t mean we always should — or that we won’t create Frankensteins.
Most significantly, though, it isn’t mainly the physical separating us from the animal kingdom but that we’re bestowed with souls. Believing otherwise implies that we’re mere organic robots, some pounds of chemicals and water.
As for the Intelligent Design vs. evolution, the two are not mutually exclusive. After all, couldn’t “evolution” be the vehicle through which God created life? Here’s some food for thought (not a statement of dogma), from my 2008 New American essay “Intelligent Design and Evolution”:
We have all seen that accelerated video footage of a flower blooming before our eyes or clouds racing across the sky. Ah, how modern technology can make the ordinary appear just a tad miraculous. Or, is it that our modernistic perception has made the miraculous seem ordinary? Regardless, let us assume for argument’s sake that life evolved, that beasts ascended from the muck and man from beasts. If you then took all the Earth’s history from the time it was a lifeless orb to now (some 4.5 billion years according to expert opinion), and accelerated it so that the “evolution” would have occurred in the blink of an eye, what would you see? Among other things, would you not behold man rising from the muck and instantly coming to flower? For the human eye would not perceive the stages, only the end result. Now, isn’t this at least vaguely reminiscent of Genesis’ description? Could it not be said that the main difference is that the creation story provides fewer details about the process but the answer as to what — or who — initiated it?
The obvious objection to this thesis is that, whatever the impetus behind it, the development of life took a very, very long time. Yet this is without foundation, because the best of both theologians and scientists agree on a relevant point: time is an invention of man. The early Christian fathers realized long ago that God is outside of time, and Albert Einstein called time “a handy illusion.” (This is why time seems to pass faster as we age; it is relative and all a matter of perception.) Thus, it is irrelevant if something happened “slowly” or “fast,” as the ultimate reality is that everything is “now.”
What’s not “now” and wont’ be “later,” either, is man “breeding” with apes. Having said this, the Sun certainly has proven that cross-breeding is possible — after all, it has obviously managed to cross-breed a reporter with a used-car salesman.
Photo: Clipart.com
