Atomic Nerds

There’s a cool article at the Primate Diaries about Ilya Ivanov’s bizarre efforts to create half-human, half-chimpanzee hybrids and some of the mythology associated with it, as well as what really happened and what really motivated it. (Short version: it wasn’t Communism or any other ideology, it was one scientist- who was justly famous in his field- and his strange obsession with whether something could be done regardless of whether it should.)

The myth associated with it, which seems to originate from a fundamentalist Christian organization trying to link “Darwinism” to toxic ideologies, is that Stalin ordered Ivanov to crossbreed apes and humans in order to create “super-soldiers” for him. Johnson at PD does a fine job of taking apart the historical inaccuracies (suffice to say Stalin did nothing of the sort), but I’d like to comment on the scientific weirdness of the whole premise.

One of the consequences of our strange psychological relationship with “nature” is that we tend to think of our species as a whole as somehow outside of it and diluted from whatever our “natural” origin and state is. We tend to think of humans as frail but brainy creatures and animals, apes included, as fabulously strong and healthy and fierce. This effect tends to spill over to the animals we’ve domesticated, like dogs, and a fair amount of the civilization-savage dichotomy often affects them as well.

The thing of it is, though, is that all animals, humans included, are finely and specifically adapted to whatever niche they fill, including artificially selected animals. The human-ape super-soldier of the imagination is summed up in the quote by Creation Ministries’s fictional Stalin:

Stalin is said to have told Ivanov, ‘I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.’

While whether Stalin would actually have thought like that- the man was no scientific genius- is open to speculation, but whether that would have been the result actually obtained by crossing humans is not. Apes aren’t insensitive to pain nor indifferent to the quality of food they eat. They are stronger than humans, but that greater strength is a combination of sheer lever physics given their different builds and a bias to gross motor skills over fine- stronger, but clumsier. Much worse than that, even if an ape has a theoretically higher pain tolerance, he has far less of an urge and ability to cooperate, or to tolerate discomfort in the name of group solidarity- regardless of how much pain he actually felt, an ape would be vastly more inclined to scream and rip your nose off for inflicting it in the first place.

Ape-human hybrids wouldn’t be super soldiers, they’d be worse humans and worse apes at the same time; perhaps stronger, but also much more poorly adapted to bipedality and fine motor coordination, so unable to march or operate weapons nearly as well. They’d be vastly worse cooperators, and thus much more likely to fight within their group than to watch each others’ backs. They’d have less patience and capability to delay gratification, so you can throw soldierly discipline right out the window. They wouldn’t be as bright, which might be an advantage in the mind of someone whose picture of the ideal soldier is less ability to question, but with vastly less inclination to be obedient that wouldn’t matter either. Some super-soldier.

Again, this applies to dogs as well. There’s a lot of legend and myth-making (as well as some scattered cases of actual doing) about dogs and wolves and breeds of dogs supposedly outcrossed with wolves to make them better sled dogs or fiercer guard dogs; again, wolves are well-adapted for being wolves and working dogs are vastly better designed to be working dogs. A wolf parent wouldn’t make a sled dog a better or tougher sled dog, it would make him a less efficient runner (the extra mass wolves have in their fore, neck, and jaws for taking down large prey would be dead weight to a sled dog), more likely to fight within his team, vastly less inclined to take orders from a human, and equally less inclined to work himself to exhaustion for the fun of it or on someone else’s say-so.

Likewise, a guard dog with a wolf parent might at best have bigger teeth and jaws, but would be equally less cooperative, more likely to challenge its own charges for dominance, less inclined to protect the group at all costs, and less territorial. For either a guard dog or a sled dog, a wolf parent would make it less able to thrive on a lower meat and higher “scrap” ration in its food, making it more expensive to feed.

Apes are well-adapted to being apes and humans are well-adapted to being humans, as wolves are well-adapted to being wolves and dogs are well-adapted to being dogs. The things that make them strong in their own roles wouldn’t necessarily bring anything useful to the other, and even when we go to war we aren’t being more “animal” and needing those strengths, we’re doing another human thing in our particularly human (or doggy) way.

Posted Science: we'll fuck you up |