David Barash’s ‘humanzee’ ‘chimphuman’ hybrid breeding is just an attack on Christianity

University of Washington psychology professor emeritus David Barash’s shocking proposal in a new article for Nautilus, “It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids,” based on a forthcoming book by Barash from Oxford University Press., is nothing more than the latest veiled attack on Christianity.

stock photo Photo/Caelio via Wikimedia Commons

Barash writes: “I propose that generating humanzees or chimphumans would be not only ethical, but profoundly so, even if there were no prospects of enhancing human welfare. How could even the most determinedly homo-centric, animal-denigrating religious fundamentalist maintain that God created us in his image and that we and we alone harbor a spark of the divine, distinct from all other life forms, once confronted with living beings that are indisputably intermediate between human and non-human?” (Emphasis added, The Dispatch)

So, it’s clear that Professor Barash’s agenda is to see chimp/human chimeras brought face to face with humanity to force us to acknowledge that humans are not in any way exceptional.

“…the nonsensical insistence that human beings are uniquely created in God’s image and endowed with a soul, whereas other living things are mere brutes has not only permitted but encouraged an attitude toward the natural world in general and other animals in particular that has been at best indifferent and more often, downright antagonistic, jingoistic, and in many cases, intolerably cruel…. It is only because of this self-serving myth that some people accord the embryos of Homo sapiens a special place as persons-in-waiting, magically endowed with a notable humanity that entitles them to special legal and moral consideration unavailable to our nonhuman kin.”

According to Barash, we need to debunk The Bible, these outdated teachings in Genesis. From “It’s Time to Make Chimp/Human Hybrids”:

I propose that the fundamental take-home message of such creation would be to drive a stake into the heart of that destructive disinformation campaign of discontinuity, of human hegemony over all other living things.

There is an immense pile of evidence already demonstrating continuity, including but not limited to physiology, genetics, anatomy, embryology, and paleontology, but it is almost impossible to imagine how the most die-hard advocate of humans having a discontinuously unique biological status could continue to maintain this position if confronted with a real, functioning, human-chimp combination.

Let’s repeat that “drive a stake into the heart of that destructive disinformation campaign of discontinuity, of human hegemony over all other living things.”

There is nothing exceptional about humans according to these scientific extremists.

Leading atheist Richard Dawkins is onboard.

Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and ‘animal’ is absolute. ‘Pro-life’, to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.

What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets ‘put to sleep’. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is ‘human’. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.

But such ‘essentialism’ is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could … fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case … who could interbreed with a chimpanzee.

Deeply un-evolutionary?

Barash and Dawkins are on  a mission from “their God”: to make us all see the truth about our selves, that we are only animals.

That is not a presumption as Barash writes: “But what about those presumably unfortunate individuals thereby produced? Neither fish nor fowl, wouldn’t they find themselves intolerably unspecified and inchoate, doomed to a living hell of biological and social indeterminacy? This is possible, but it is at least arguable that the ultimate benefit of teaching human beings their true nature would be worth the sacrifice paid by a few unfortunates.”

Could you believe a Nazi or Hitler himself could speak such horrors?

One of the Mengele twins, victims of Nazi experimentation said this:

We were treated like animals — we were his guinea pigs. But it hurts 10 times more today to realize that some American scientists and doctors want to use this data regardless of the pain and suffering paid by the victims. The advocates for the use of the data claim they want to save human lives. It is obnoxious to me that some of the advocates are so magnanimous with other peoples’ lives and suffering.

h/t Ann Gauger

NOTE: Humans and chimps do not have the same number of chromosomes and our apparent genetic similarity is masked by tens of millions of biological differences between our two species.