Original Blog Blurb from 2013
(with the links updated)
You might reasonably ask yourself why Episode 59 is being posted before episode 58. I could go all postmodernist on you, arguing that requiring integers to ascend is just another expression of the tyranny of the patriarchy, but instead I will offer an analogy:
During the original run of Firefly on Fox, why would the network executives pass over the pilot, specifically written to introduce all the characters, and show “The Train Job” first?
Honest answer: Because we are idiots.
References:
Monte Reel, whose book Between Man and Beast is not out until 3/12/13, but can be pre-ordered.
My previous mentions of Shipwrecked!
Darwin the Abolitionist:
The Lost World:
Updates from Summer 2023
The Internet Archive, where the full original blog for this series is stored, is having a fund drive. As a boost to their efforts, I include a link to The Sample, an AI-driven newsletter recommendation service that forwards this e-mail to people not on the Substack list.
Triad Stage
Triad Stage, where my kid and I saw Shipwrecked! is officially gone.
June 20, 2023: After 20 seasons and more than 140 mainstage productions, Triad Stage is permanently closing its doors. Complete details of the theater’s liquidation plan are being finalized and will be released over the summer.
This is after their warehouse sale of costumes and props a few months ago, when they swore it was just to make room. Everything was fine. They even accepted a $25,000 grant from Creative Greensboro. Will they give that back? I can’t say.
It was a one-two punch. Co-founder and longtime artistic director Preston Lane was dropped by both Triad Stage and UNCG over allegations of sexual abuse. Then the COVID-19 pandemic kept people away for two years. My wife and I had season tickets, back in the days of full-time professorial employment, but we hadn’t seen a show in probably five years.
Almost Human
I stumbled across this 2022 documentary on HBO/Max. It is the most detailed version I’ve seen of Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov’s experiments in attempting to create a human/ape hybrid. It includes the actual text of letters back and forth between Ivanov and the Soviet department of agriculture:
The topic proposed by professor Ivanov should become a decisive blow to the religious teachings and may be aptly used in our propaganda and in our struggle for the liberation of working people from the power of the church.
This was pretty much doomed to fail, in actual fact, because humans have 46 chromosomes and great apes all have 48, meaning that a hybrid would have 47, and odd numbers are really bad for either process of cell division. Down’s Syndrome is a mild example. Generally, embryos with 1 or 3 copies of a single chromosome just die, so early in development that they go unnoticed.
But hey, this was Africa in the 1920s. Who was going to protest? Certainly not the 13 female chimps procured for them. Nonetheless, Ivanov and his son performed the artificial insemination procedures out of view of the locals, with pistols in their pockets in case the chimps fought them too hard (one of them bit the son rather badly, and chimp fangs can do a lot of damage).
When the first two crosses didn’t work, Ivanov went full mad scientist and proposed to the French colonial authorities a project where he would artificially inseminate African women without their knowledge or consent, under the guise of some other medical procedure. To recall Monte Reel’s book, at this point “gorilla” is basically the worst racial slur you can use, and there were all sorts of urban legends about chimps and gorillas raping women (which eventually played into the Tarzan books, among other pop cultural properties). In any case, the French governor banned that procedure for political reasons.
In the west, they were more interested in nurture than nature. Cuban heiress Rosalia Abreu (who I had never heard of) was the first to successfully breed chimps in captivity, and her personal habit of letting them out of their cages led to American primatologist Robert Yerkes and others raising chimps in their homes. One expert compared human-raised chimps to autistic children, suggesting that there was an important mismatch between human and chimp social signals. People who have raised wild wolves have come to similar conclusions, that dogs have genetically evolved to be more socially compatible to us. Wolves supposedly can’t recognize pointing the way dogs can, for instance.
Having been essentially kicked out of French Guinea in west Africa, Ivanov took his captive chimps home to a warm little spot on the Black Sea. The females all died, but he went on the lecture circuit, attempting to recruit Soviet volunteers to be inseminated by his remaining male chimps. This is the point where my NC students always rebel, but according to historical records in the documentary, there were Russian women willing to give it a shot:
Dear professor, with my private life in ruins, I don’t see any sense in my further existence. But when I think that I could do a service for science, I feel enough courage to contact you. I beg you, don’t refuse me. I ask you to accept me for the experiment.
Unfortunately for Ivanov, even the male chimps had died at this point, and the only thing he had left was an orangutan (I’m writing this as I watch the doc). He reached out to Rosalia Abreu, and sought funding from — and I am not making this up — the AAAA, the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (like AAAS, but not). I have definitely got to point this out to my sometime acquaintances at SCOTT, the Secular Community of The Triad. They are pretty good people, who do trash cleanups along Summit Ave, among other public service projects.
Anyway, then the Klan got involved. Also Nazis. The rest I will leave to your lurid imaginations, to encourage you to watch it.
I sent a strictly nonfiction pitch on this topic to an anonymous science fiction publisher, and was roundly rejected. But (and this was not something I sent them) . . . what if it had worked? It’s certainly not impossible for a chromosome to spontaneously duplicate (or for all of them to spontaneously duplicate; plants do so pretty regularly), thereby restoring an even number that won’t derail cell division. It just didn’t work in our specific scientific timeline.
What do you all think? Worth turning into a Substack-exclusive story?
As of last Friday, we were up to 121 free subscribers. Growth is picking up, and I will have some announcements about new initiatives coming sometime in August. In the meantime . . .
VSI Episode 59