| He makes the argument on his website: http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html#at_pco=cfd-... 1 people think hybrids are sterile, but they're not
2 people think hybrids don't occur in nature, but they do
3 people think only plants hybridize, but animals do to From this basis, he concludes that a chimp-pig hybrid is plausible, and proceeds to lay out his theory. The problem is the three facts he starts with are trivial compared to the obstacles raised by PZ Meyer. To take just one, there is the difference in chromosome number. In most cases, if a human ends up with the wrong number of chromosomes, it's a lethal condition. Or you end up with Down's syndrome. With one extra chromosome. The hybrid this guy posits has a dad with 38 chromosomes and a mom with 48. I could argue that that's not a big deal. In the plant groups I study stranger things happen. But that's in plants. Primates, as I understand it, are much more sensitive to chromosomal abnormalities. There are many logical, evidential reasons to discount this hypothesis. Again, check out the pz meyer post linked elsewhere. Claiming I don't understand evolution because "given enough tries anything is possible" is facile. Of course anything is possible. But what is probable here? |
Sure the hybrid has parents wildly different genetically. But if two individuals who have a high chance of producing fit offspring may by chance produce unfit individuals, then we also agree the hybrid would have to have been a minimally fit individual by chance born from two parents who have a very low chance of doing so. A person with Down syndrome is not a catastrophe of nature, and not fundamentally a disease, such that through successive backcrossing (women with Down syndrome are usually fertile) it could theoretically produce a different kind of Homo that would be fit for some imaginary environment conditions. Or at least would still be a far more intelligent creature than all other animals we have on this planet.