{Please note footnote of message 1, which was added after this message was already posted. - Adminnemooseus}
Gibbersome writes:
quote:
Species cannot produce fertile offspring.
Going with your correction that different species cannot produce fertile offspring, that simply isn't true. Different species can produce fertile offspring such as dog/wolf hybrids.
The question of just what is a species is not easily answered. While it is true that if two organisms cannot reproduce or only produce infertile offspring is good evidence that they are not the same species (since members of the same species produce fertile offspring...remember, the contrapositive of a true statement is true), it is not necessarily true that because two organisms can produce fertile offspring that means they are the same species.
Speciation can happen through reproductive isolation. Note, it is not enough that the members of the species just can't physically get to each other. It's that they don't.
All that said, I don't think anybody has ever tried to do a human/ape hybrid. One problem to get around is that humans and the other apes have a different number of chromosomes. This isn't always a problem: The common horse and Przewalski's horse have a different number of chromosomes (64 and 66, respectively) and yet they are able to produce fertile offspring (with 65 chromosomes). However, differing numbers of chromosomes can lead to problems with fertility and viability.
So is "Big Foot" a human/ape hybrid? The world will probably never know: We have no evidence of the existence of "Big Foot" so we can't test it directly and nobody is going to run the risk of actually trying to create such a hybrid.
This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 12-29-2005 11:32 PM
Rrhain
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