Scientists attempted to create ape-human hybrids in Africa
Mar 3, 2024 23:19:45 GMT -5
anansi likes this
Post by zarahan on Mar 3, 2024 23:19:45 GMT -5
Just looking at a link and it gets bizarre. SOme scientists of the atheist
Bolshevik regime actually tried creating ape-human hybrids in Africa to
test evolution. This included attempts to artificially inseminate
African women with ape semen without their knowledge.
Per the book "Red Dynamite":
muse.jhu.edu/pub/255/oa_monograph/chapter/3006912
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QUOTE:
"Despite the wild exaggerations of later anticommunist conspiracy theorists, Bolshevik support for evolution and opposition to the organized power of religion were very real.
That support also inspired one truly bizarre venture that later produced fodder for creationists. The Bolshevik commitment to evolutionary science became international news in 1926 because of a controversial research project in Kindia, Guinea (then part of French West Africa), at a facility of the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris. The lead researcher was Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (1870-1932), an evolutionary zoologist who had pioneered the practice of large-scale artificial insemination with purebred horses. His project was to artificially hybridize humans and apes.59 As strange as the scheme sounds today, the idea had been taken seriously by leading European scientists in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Russia. Recent discoveries of hominid fossils, as well as living gorillas, fired a popular and scholarly interest in humanity’s origins.60 While Ivanov and the Bolsheviks did not motivate the project using racist terms, the colonization of West Africa and prevailing racist conceptions of a lower “African” race made the scheme sound reasonable to Europeans. Moreover, the preceding decades had seen a European vogue in the science of rejuvenation. The supposed virilizing powers of ape sexual glands fueled an interest in collecting specimens of live orangutans, gibbons, and chimpanzees.61 Successfully appealing to the Bolshevik government for initial funding, Ivanov stressed the project’s ability to aid the ideological campaign against organized religion and for Darwinism. In later discussions with the Academy of Sciences—which refused to support Ivanov’s work—he stressed the scientific value of his research for human evolutionary studies.62
Once in Guinea, Ivanov did carry out at least part of the experiment—artificially inseminating several captive chimpanzees with the sperm of a local Guinean man. When the animals failed to become pregnant, the researchers sought to try their luck inseminating local African women with chimpanzee sperm (hoping to do so without the knowledge of the women, who were patients at a French colonial hospital). But the French authorities denied permission. When Ivanov complained about this to his Soviet sponsors, they ordered him not to attempt to impregnate women without their consent. One important legacy of the entire venture, however, was a primatological nursery in Sukhumi, in the Soviet Republic of Abkhazia (later Georgia), where Ivanov continued his work in the late 1920s, soliciting Soviet women volunteers for artificial insemination. Hybridization failed, but the population of chimpanzees gathered at Sukhumi would later produce the animals that rode Sputnik flights into outer space. Those voyages spurred Americans to strengthen scientific education, unintentionally inciting a backlash of creationist activism in the 1960s.63
Many Americans became aware of Ivanov’s work because of prominent coverage in the US press. In June 1926, a Time magazine titled “Men and Apes” reported that “Ivanoff,” supported by Moscow, was headed to Africa to “‘support’ Evolution by breeding apes with humans.” Readers also learned that the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (AAAA), led by Charles Lee Smith, was publicizing the project and actively raising funds for it, though Ivanov’s staff in Moscow disclaimed any connection with the group. That may well have been because leaders of the AAAA had absorbed the “scientific” racist ideas of British anthropologist F. G. Cruikshank. His artificial breeding scheme recommended the following pairings: orangutans with the “yellow race,” gorillas with the “black race,” and chimpanzees with the “white race.”64 But the basic story, as expressed in two June 1926 New York Times headlines, was true: “Russian Admits Ape Experiments” and “Soviet Backs Plan to Test Evolution.”65
Red Dynamite- Creationism, Culture Wars, and
Anticommunism in America -Carl R. Weinberg 2021, pp 22-53
Bolshevik regime actually tried creating ape-human hybrids in Africa to
test evolution. This included attempts to artificially inseminate
African women with ape semen without their knowledge.
Per the book "Red Dynamite":
muse.jhu.edu/pub/255/oa_monograph/chapter/3006912
---------------------------------------------------------------------
QUOTE:
"Despite the wild exaggerations of later anticommunist conspiracy theorists, Bolshevik support for evolution and opposition to the organized power of religion were very real.
That support also inspired one truly bizarre venture that later produced fodder for creationists. The Bolshevik commitment to evolutionary science became international news in 1926 because of a controversial research project in Kindia, Guinea (then part of French West Africa), at a facility of the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris. The lead researcher was Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (1870-1932), an evolutionary zoologist who had pioneered the practice of large-scale artificial insemination with purebred horses. His project was to artificially hybridize humans and apes.59 As strange as the scheme sounds today, the idea had been taken seriously by leading European scientists in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Russia. Recent discoveries of hominid fossils, as well as living gorillas, fired a popular and scholarly interest in humanity’s origins.60 While Ivanov and the Bolsheviks did not motivate the project using racist terms, the colonization of West Africa and prevailing racist conceptions of a lower “African” race made the scheme sound reasonable to Europeans. Moreover, the preceding decades had seen a European vogue in the science of rejuvenation. The supposed virilizing powers of ape sexual glands fueled an interest in collecting specimens of live orangutans, gibbons, and chimpanzees.61 Successfully appealing to the Bolshevik government for initial funding, Ivanov stressed the project’s ability to aid the ideological campaign against organized religion and for Darwinism. In later discussions with the Academy of Sciences—which refused to support Ivanov’s work—he stressed the scientific value of his research for human evolutionary studies.62
Once in Guinea, Ivanov did carry out at least part of the experiment—artificially inseminating several captive chimpanzees with the sperm of a local Guinean man. When the animals failed to become pregnant, the researchers sought to try their luck inseminating local African women with chimpanzee sperm (hoping to do so without the knowledge of the women, who were patients at a French colonial hospital). But the French authorities denied permission. When Ivanov complained about this to his Soviet sponsors, they ordered him not to attempt to impregnate women without their consent. One important legacy of the entire venture, however, was a primatological nursery in Sukhumi, in the Soviet Republic of Abkhazia (later Georgia), where Ivanov continued his work in the late 1920s, soliciting Soviet women volunteers for artificial insemination. Hybridization failed, but the population of chimpanzees gathered at Sukhumi would later produce the animals that rode Sputnik flights into outer space. Those voyages spurred Americans to strengthen scientific education, unintentionally inciting a backlash of creationist activism in the 1960s.63
Many Americans became aware of Ivanov’s work because of prominent coverage in the US press. In June 1926, a Time magazine titled “Men and Apes” reported that “Ivanoff,” supported by Moscow, was headed to Africa to “‘support’ Evolution by breeding apes with humans.” Readers also learned that the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (AAAA), led by Charles Lee Smith, was publicizing the project and actively raising funds for it, though Ivanov’s staff in Moscow disclaimed any connection with the group. That may well have been because leaders of the AAAA had absorbed the “scientific” racist ideas of British anthropologist F. G. Cruikshank. His artificial breeding scheme recommended the following pairings: orangutans with the “yellow race,” gorillas with the “black race,” and chimpanzees with the “white race.”64 But the basic story, as expressed in two June 1926 New York Times headlines, was true: “Russian Admits Ape Experiments” and “Soviet Backs Plan to Test Evolution.”65
Red Dynamite- Creationism, Culture Wars, and
Anticommunism in America -Carl R. Weinberg 2021, pp 22-53
