To view something awesomely strange...
Today's erudite palpation centers upon The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds. (St. Martin's Press, 1994). All 36 authors sheltered within these 312 pages - men and women desperate to seize the brass ring of academic tenure, churn out grad students while luxuriously consuming grant monies, or ride their 15 minutes of fame before the cameras while decrying the heinous despoliation of their favorite vacation spots - are of one mind: Great apes (bonobos, siamangs, gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees) merit the rights and privileges of human beings; and identical protection from harassment (habitat destruction), unlawful detention (zoos, entertainment) and medical experimentation. There is not one page submitted from mainstream scientific, biological, medical, or conservation sources, thus keeping the struggle for personal wealth and publicity, which is to say ape rights, pure.
Lest we descend into murky depths of ape Welfare, social worker counseling, and monthly Social Security checks for unemployable disabled worker compensation (more than $600 tax-free each month in California for anyone claiming to be addicted to anything) we will eschew classic thousand-points-of-light debates. Let us pursue the straight skinny of sexual harassment. Apes and humans - certainly chimps and humans - can interbreed.
Chimp diploid chromosomes number 48 versus humans at 46. The genetic overlap exceeds 98.5% (Science 281(5382) 1432 (1998)). 18 of 23 human chromosome pairs (4, 9, and 12 are revamped) are identical to those of chimps. Humans express N-acetyl-neuraminic acid rather than N-glycolyl-neuraminic acid on all cell surfaces, and bear fusion of two corresponding chimp chromosomes. Will these obstacles require fertility clinic intervention?
Bonobos and chimps interbreed (diploid count of 48 each) as could chihuahuas and St. Bernards were brazen fleshly discord bypassed. Siamangs (2n=50) and lar gibbons (2n=44) spawn hybrid siabons despite glaring chromosome (but not genetic code) mismatch. Sequence homology takes precedence over its apportionment into packages. Jane Goodall and her ilk have lying open before them an absolute pathway to preservation of ape habitat and its occupants. Remember high school biology? Beings that sire young are by definition of the same species. She need only do a heavy date with one of her male subjects, successfully breed, and call a UN press conference to claim human rights violations on massive international scales overshadowing even Hitlerian atrocities.
The moment a hupanzee extrudes into this world every research venture and zoo will be liable for crimes against humanity. Each African native who has eaten chimp for dinner will be an official cannibal, confirming European anxieties dating to before the 14th century. Our multitudinous celebrants of ethnic diversity will finally have lesser someones to discriminate against, or at least to outscore on standardized intelligence tests, maybe.
Consider this danger lurking hidden within every African watering hole during Happy Hour! Breeding a mare (female horse) and a jack (male donkey) delivers a mule - a useful albeit sterile animal combining the best features of both parents within an economically valuable farm labor animal. Breeding a stallion (male horse) and a jenny (female donkey) begets a hinny - a miserably worthless hay burner. How easily we explain the socio-economic squalor of the extant population of Sub-Saharan Africa were this same procreative dichotomy to apply to hupanzees. It is the stud chimp who must pay for the drinks if we wish to obtain a serviceable offspring. It is the stud humans who have been fooling around after hours and forcing their male chauvinist pig sexuality upon naive and then raped lady chimps who forever after suffer the onus of single parentage without receiving child support payments or day care center cost reimbursements.
The UN raises such a snit about the ethnic cleansing of Moslems in Bosnia, Hutus and Tutsis clogging local rivers with each other's bodies in Rwanda-Burundi, Somalis gorging upon international aid like pigs at the trough while killing off the blue-helmeted delivery boys... Certainly there is compassion in abundance yet remaining for a gaggle of OG homeboy hupanzees running roughshod (unshod!) in Africa without the benefits of automatic weapons or even Jockey shorts to hide their genitalia.
Official truth has decried sex and drugs and Rock & Roll for being expressive vehicles of teenage disenchantment. Body piercing, tattoos, scarification, branding and other Modern Primitive rites have yet to penetrate fervid Church and Beltway minds. Won't mothers of the proximate future be boggled when their daughters, not content to bed the largest beer-bellied, hairiest, greasiest, smelliest, foulest Hell's Angel in town, slip into a circus sideshow one balmy spring evening and nine months later deliver a REAL surprise?
To return to Uncle Al Outrage Central, click here
To view something awesomely strange...