If other species can breed and make offspring (like horse and donkey to get a mule), why can't a human breed with a chimp? Hypothetically of course.|||It's been tried. It didn't work.
Back in the 1930s, Stalin became interested in the idea. Hybrid human/chimp soldiers would have been an advantage. He ordered scientists to set up a program to attempt such crossings. Short answer: It didn't work.
Today's ethics prohibit such research. With Stalin, when women refused to participate the team attempted to fertilize them without their knowledge. Another issue is carrying such a hybrid to term. Implantation of a fertilized egg doesn't happen to to the species differences. There's also the immune system (look up the Rh factor in blood) Finally there's the chromosome differences. It's different between the two species, humans having fused to chromosomes into on.
While much is made of the close kinship with chimpanzee (the estimates range from 99% to 96%) It's good to also consider the variation in the human species. There .01% variation in the DNA of humans. Consider how different humans look with .01 difference and you start to see why human/ape hybrid are unlikely.|||A simple way to look at it is; a horse, a donkey and a chimp are all animals, and a human is a human, totally and utterly different, despite the closeness of DNA with the chimp. The former three are all referred to as "its", while the human is referred to as "him" ;-).|||No, chimps and humans are not close enough (different species and different genera).
Its more like between common and pygmy (bonobo) chimpanzees (both genus Pan) or between homo sapiens and most recent Neanderthal (genus Homo).
Bonobo-chimps hybrids have been reported in circus I don't know if they are fertile or not like a mule.
Recent (30 - 40,000 years) sapiens-Neanderthals presumed hybrids look sickly or dead at a young age.
Having said that, you do what ever you want with your chimp, that doesn't concern us.
@ Kristen
Different numbers of chromosome pairs is not an absolute barrier to hybridization. Human big chromosome #2 is the end-to-end fusion of 2 apes chromosomes, so they could fit.
For example, Mongolian horses (33 pairs) are interfertile with other horses (32 pairs) and produce semi-fertile offspring.
But you're right, all experiments of human chimpanzee hybridization failed.|||Yes the biology is similar but it is a matter of genetic distance.
Horses and donkeys separated from their common ancestor about 3 million years ago, chimpanzees and humans separated from their common ancestor about 6 million years ago so the species have a much greater genetic distance between them which would imply that fertilisation is not possible.
The 1930's experiments give us no real absolute indication of potential species interfertility because when they were carried out it was not even possible to perform in vitro fertilisation between humans so what could not be done them could be possible today, however ethics considerations would not allow such research to take place.|||Can't be done. There has to be a chromosome match for viable offspring. Between Chimps and Humans there is no match.
Clearly, there was between Humans and Neanderthals.
They estimate a separation of about one million years for the two to diverge enough to stop the match. Evidently the 300,000 years which separated us from them, wasn't enough to cause a miss-match because not only did we produce viable offspring with the Neanderthals, we still have 4.5% Neanderthal DNA in modern Humans. A legacy of the time we spent along-side them.|||Impossible. Humans have 46 chromosomes. Chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes. Therefore, the chromosones can't pair up correctly and create a fetus.|||We have different numbers of chromosome pairs, so "breeding" with chimpanzees would not work.
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