Quote:
bokonon wrote
There were some real surprises in that article for me. Humans are still capable of having children with chimpanzees today? Species interbreed in the wild all the time? I was under the apparent misimpression that it was the ability to interbreed which distinguished one species from another. I guess it's back to the books for me.
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No, humans are not capable of producing offspring with chimps. This is because humans have one less chromosome pair than chimps. At some point in the human evolutionary lineage, two chromosomes fused. This distinguishes humans from other great apes.
There is no catch-all definition of what precisely is a species. By the biological species concept, a species is a group of individuals that can reproduce fertile offspring. But yet there are some species which can produce offspring in captivity, but never do in the wild due to isolating mechanisms. Some species look quite different even though they are capable of interbreeding and thus they never breed in the wild. Other species are capable of interbreeding, but their habitats don't overlap in the wild so they don't interbreed.