It is possible to implant a human fertilized egg into an ape and have them bear the child and research is being done to stretch it to even in a pig. However It hasn’t been researched upon enough and human cloning (which is what this falls under) will not happen for a long while.
There is some research that’s being done in that field. It started with exchanging Big Cats’ mothers/wombs and that’s the last I had studied of them.Research has now gone as far as dogs giving birth to tigers and so on. The technology is being stretched, hurdles understood and the gap is being bridged.
Research is being headed by 2 fronts.
1)Embryologists(developmental biologists), stem cell researchers and geneticists that combine together to bring extinct animals back to life. (More novel)
2) Supporting them, are the guys who want to protect already existing but endangered species of animals. (Easier and more responsible)
But this research cannot and will not reach Humans ANYTIME soon. When it reaches, lets be sure of two things again. 1.) We’d already have mastered the art of surrogate. 2.) We would not know of the consequences.
Next Phase in Genetics and How that will influence the research:
Natural Selection and gregor mendel’s studies are the first important pieces of genetic research happened in 1850s-1860s. Epigenetics is a phrase coined in the 1940s That says that Genetics doesn’t explain enough. In 1970s work on classical genetics lead to breakthroughs in using the information we understood to begin using it in our world and the genetic revolution begins from then on.
Epigenetic research has only been worked on since the 1990s and became a little more important after the Human Genome project got over (this was an international project on deciphering all the genetic information humans had in their cells) in 2003.
This new branch of genetics than the classical Mendelian and Darwinist evolution. It deals with Lamarck’s evolution though he doesn’t refer to it directly (he didn’t know enough). The Ultimate question being: What influences an organism: Nature vs Nurture.
Epigenetic Revolution is magnitudes larger than the genetic revolution.
Epigenetics is the study of what exists outside genetic information that controls the way cells grow and divide. Why is it that though they have the same genetic information, a neuron looks so different from an intestinal cell. We often can’t even say that they are from the same species let alone if they are from the same organism by just looking at it under a microscope.
Some Genes are switched on and some switched off, when a fertilized egg becomes more than just a clump of cells that look alike. At this stage these cells are called [embryonic]stem cells. They have different genetic information in them from a certain stage on. This switching on and off happens because of the environment of the cell (its neighboring cells, space, fluids etc)
The most impact that Epigenetics have, time wise, is on a developing egg and less major influences until a human is 4-5 years old. Heaviest impact of Epigenetics will be on the cognition as neural network development is a very fragile process, but at the scale directly impactable by epigenetics.
Nature Vs Nurture:
If we change the environment they grow up in (earlier suited for an ape or a Pig) to epigenetically influence development of man, we will change the way they think the way they feel etc. If we continue to breed such people with each other.
It will lead to mutations in regions other than what humans are used to. Eventually leading to new organisms. We can expect behavioral changes to be subtle on the outside but stronger from within. Let me show you an example: Dogs, when you look at them directly into their eyes, usually behave first with Love. Cat, when you look at them directly into their eyes, usually behave as if you are threatening them. This is because a dog is a pack animal and a Cat a solitary one. I’d expect similar changes with Lions vs Tigers. (which is why the research of the dogs giving birth to tigers is an interesting experiment for me)
So MAYBE the human that is born out of an ape will behave with more of the social structures that that particular ape species have. And Humans born out of Pigs would be too far for me to imagine (It would be interesting to know of their social structures).
Maybe the way the organism perceive the world around them change with their biology. I’ll allow these video to capture your imagination better than this text would:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ9xJUyIWY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hYaT4gvjNc
So we can’t go all the way to the Shrimp eyes that the video mentions but maybe to dog eyes or so. ( closer the animal is to humans more likeliness of the scale of mutation)
How will Humans deal with this MASSIVE hurdle and the inability for them to let this mingling happen:
When we understand the value of epigenetics (and most of us don’t yet) we will do our very best to avoid this kind of influence into the fertilized egg.
This might happen in CRAZY ways that we cannot predict yet from a new embryonic sac to, altering the composition of the amniotic fluid to the embryo with drugs or bypass-amniotic fluid. Again.. we cannot predict how they might try to stop it.