The Committee to Nuke Elysium

jellyfishdirigible:

m1k3y:

Podcast discussing the Pig-Chimp Hybrid hypothesis in more depth.

Which is basically this:

Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence and McCarthy does not disappoint. Rather than relying on genetic sequence comparisons, he instead offers extensive anatomical comparisons, each of which may be individually assailable, but startling when taken together. Why weren’t these conclusions arrived at much sooner? McCarthy suggests it is because of an over-dependence on genetic data among biologists. He argues that humans are probably the result of multiple generations of backcrossing to chimpanzees, which in nucleotide sequence data comparisons would effectively mask any contribution from pig.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html#jCp

NO. NO. SPECIATION. IS A THING. For hybridisation to occur, the species must be sufficiently similar and closely related. Suggesting that pigs and chimps are similar and closely related enough to produce viable hybrids is actually ridiculous. So completely so, that I suspect this guy may be trolling.

The most recent common ancestor of primates and pigs is like 80-90 million years ago. Humans and chimps diverged about 4-6 MYA. For perspective, the MRCA of cats and dogs was about about 55 MYA and have you noticed how cats and dogs can’t make babies together? That’s because when populations split apart and change over time, the changes accumulate, and the populations become so distinct from each other and the parent population, that they are no longer able to interbreed, and hooray speciation has occurred.

Most successful animal hybrids are between subspecies within a species, eg dogs and wolves. For two distinct species to hybridise, they generally have to be within the same genus. So, eg, lions and tigers; horses and zebras; w/e. Some crosses within the same family but different genera can happen, but they’re not very common and as far as I can tell only seem to happen within domesticated Artiodactyla families via human meddling, eg sheep and goat; camel and llama. Rarest of all, crosses from different families but within the same order, have been observed. In birds. Just in birds.

4-6 MYA when the first proto-humans and the first proto-chimps agreed to disagree on the trees v. not-trees debate, pigs and primates were already so different they wouldn’t even be placed in the same ORDER.

Shit this is 1st year biology concepts idek what crack this guy has been smoking. He’s also trying to say that platypuses are a cross between mammals and birds I mean. Cannot tell if trolling or complete fucking idiot. Or just wants to justify romantic feelings toward pig.

Here are some articles:

http://observationdeck.io9.com/no-humans-are-not-chimp-pig-hybrids-1474029809

http://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2013/dec/04/theory-chimps-pigs-hybridisation

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/12/yes-you-share-a.html

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_%28biology%29

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VSpeciation.shtml

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/e/evolution.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/monotremefr.html