• Question: what would happen if a gorilla had sexual intercourse with a woman? would the lady give birth to a hybrid?

    Asked by kapayaewh to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 14 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know – many species do not have the right DNA makeup to be able to cross breed. Whether humans and gorillas share enough genes for this to be possible I honestly don’t know.

    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Gorillas and humans have different chromosomes, so it is extremely unlikely that a hybrid would be possible by intercourse. If you wanted to cross-breed animals of different species, you would need to do gene-splicing in the lab. That’s how we end up with pigs that glow like jellyfish and other bizarre creations. I don’t think it’s very likely to be approved for anybody to use human genes for experiments like this any time soon though.

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      you’d have more chance with a bonobo (see bonobo.org) these are a small and very rare chimp-like species, that are just a little closer to us than either gorillas or chimpanzees. There’s 98.4% similarity, but I really don’t know if that’s enough to yield a hybrid that would survive. You may or may not know that there are plenty of hybrids of lions and tigers (called ligers and tigons, depending on which is the male). These tend to be beautiful, but infertile, animals. To reason about the possible answer to your question, it would be good to know what the percent similarity is between lion and tiger DNA. I tried to google that, but haven’t come up with anything yet. Why don’t you give that a try. (I mean, googling for lion/tiger similarity — not the other thing).

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      You have some good answers below and I don’t even want to think about this one, ewwwwwwwwww!!

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