eli5 if horses can breed with donkeys and goats can mate with sheep why can’t we make human / ape cross overs?
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People mention chromosomal mismatch, and how it works with horses and donkeys and mules, but it is worth thinking about what a chromosome is. A chromosome is like a binder for paper. Most of the time, DNA is unwound in the nucleus of a cell. When a cell divides, the DNA has to be copied, and each new cell has to get one copy. So the DNA is coiled up into structures called chromosomes, and when the cell is split in half, the chromosomes are moved in a controlled way that would be impossible with unspooled strands.
If you have a book that is a thousand pages long, you can put it in ten binders of 100 pages, or five binders of 200 pages, or random sizes, as long as it adds up to 1000. But if you mix together two books, the binder arrangements have to match, or it can’t be copied accurately.
The genes might be similar enough to create a human- ape hybrid, but the chromosome structure just doesn’t match.
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