eli5 if horses can breed with donkeys and goats can mate with sheep why can’t we make human / ape cross overs?
In: 5
Honestly, the most eli5 answer is that biology is weird, and interspecies mating is a weird exception to how biology normally works.
It’s rare, but some species that are very closely related can mate, and usually the offspring is sterile (e.g. Donkeys and horses will produce a mule, but the mule is sterile and cannot reproduce), and even more rarely, closely related species can produce fertile offspring (e.g. Wolfes and coyotes can produce coywolves that are fertile and can have their own offspring with wolves, coyotes, or other coywolf hybrids).
The definition of species is that a species should only be able to mate with other members of that species, but biology is weird and sometimes they are exceptions.
In humans, we have previously had interspecies mating of fertile offspring between homo sapiens and Neanderthals (though some scientists think we are actually two subspecies and not 2 separate species). But we diverged from other apes too long ago and are too different from them to mate.
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