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June 1, 2012
Q. The great biologist Stephen Jay Gould called it “the most potentially interesting and ethically unacceptable experiment I can imagine.” What was he referring to?
A. Mating a human with a chimp, says Jerry Adler in Wired magazine. Gould pointed out that “adult humans have physical traits, such as larger craniums and wide-set eyes, that resemble infant chimpanzees, a phenomenon known as neoteny — the retention of juvenile traits in adults.” This neotonous tendency, he believed, might have helped in the evolution of human beings.
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