http://lonestar.texas.net/~lochness/darwin/content_2.html Needless to say, upon reading this, I was shocked. The source was very informative and seemed credible enough, but is this... true? A simian-human hybrid? That's distrubing, but fairly believable, I must say. Does anyone know more of this or know other sources that mention it? If one reduces the URL to http://lonestar.texas.net/~lochness, one arrives here. This page mentions "fan fiction". Does this answer the question? The original page doesn't make any eerie or farfetched claims other than this one, though, so I can't be sure.
I find that quite believable. Who would take care of it and what kind of a life would it lead? It would not fit in anywhere. There really wouldn't be any good reason to bring a life like that into the world. Probably end up looking like something outta Planet of the Apes.
They'll have to either reclassify the chimpanzee, which is currently called Pan troglodytes, or else change the definition of genus. A genus is supposed to be the highest taxon within which different species can interbreed and produce hybrid offspring. The way the lion (Panthera leo) and the tiger (Panthera tigris) can produce hybrid cubs - by artificial insemination, to be sure! Or the way donkeys can crossbreed with both horses and zebras to produce mules or zebrasses. Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes are not supposed to be able to produce offspring because their DNA doesn't match up well enough. The usual monkey wrench (as it were) in the works is that two species of different genera don't have the same number of chromosomes -- that really screws up any chance of sperms and eggs combining. Don't read too much into that "only two percent" difference. All mammals have a huge DNA overlap. The difference between a human and a mouse is only about five percent.
I suspect that humans and chimpanzees were classified in different genuses for quite a different reason! If humans and chimps were shown to be able to produce viable offspring (I'm sceptical - I'd need much better sources), then there would certainly be pressure to reclassify chimpanzees. I believe that such reclassification is not unprecedented.
The context of the page is here: Tetrahedral Man. See Chapter 2, Chronology. I've got to admit I'm not inspired by the subtitle: Ayn Rand and Charles Darwin: Resolved. There is a reprint of the source (Chicago Tribune) article here. You can email the subsource here: Brunetto Chiarelli. The chain can't be traced beyond Mr Chiarelli, because he apparently doesn't know the lab/s where the experiment was supposedly performed.
