Are humans the result of a pig and a chimpanzee mating? Maybe, says Eugene M. McCarthy, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Georgia, and specializes in studying hybridization in animals.
Uri Bram, in his delightful Atoms vs Bits essay, says the idea that humans are chimp-pig hybrids is worth considering.:
If you've ever been to a primate family reunion, you might notice that we humans are the odd ones out.
The most obvious difference is of course our relative hairlessness, but there are other big differences too.
You'll notice our cartilaginous noses stick out (haha) compared to all the other primates with their little flat nostrils.
While walking over to the drinks table, you might well notice that our gait is very different from other primates: the primates can't extend their knees and lock their legs straight, so they can't walk the way humans do (as King Louis in The Jungle Book would sadly explain).
Meanwhile, the other primates all have a layer of muscle directly below the skin that lets them independently move the skin all over their body, so e.g. they can twitch to scare off flies. (We only have this ability in our necks and faces – without it we couldn't generate facial expressions).
Given their genetic differences, it's extremely unlikely that a baby could be born from such a union. "But if you throw a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years you'll eventually get Shakespeare, and if you throw a million chimps at a million pigs… well, in a different sense you'll eventually get Shakespeare.
The purpose of Uri's essay is less about whether the hypothesis is true, but to encourage people be less reactive when presented with weird ideas:
Many people I've told this theory to have an immediate negative reaction to it, and jump straight to those objections with such speed that it doesn't seem possible they're really weighing up the evidence.
And I think this is a shame. As I said earlier, I think the Chimp-Pig hypothesis is a great way to flex your muscles at having a deeply-held belief challenged (in a context where it doesn't ultimately matter); I think sitting with the discomfort this hypothesis generates is a useful exercise by itself, because I suspect it's the same feeling you would have the day you first heard some deep moral truth that (should) topple the framework of your existing beliefs.
And part of our problem, I suspect, is another thing we're not usually nuanced enough about: degrees of belief. Your available options here are not simply "immediately switch to believing the chimp-pig hypothesis" or "immediately reject the chimp-pig hypothesis"; you could instead move from having 0% belief in it to having (say) 10% belief. That option is open to you, to all of us, for this and for everything else in life. And I'd like to suggest it's a pretty damn good one.
Previously:
• Roomba with animatronic chimp head
