Cecil, are there such things as “baa-baa-babies”? In other words, if a human male has sexual relations with a sheep, can the sheep become fertilized and deliver a quasi-human-sheepish blob, otherwise known as a “baa-baa-baby”? Several associates claim there are bottled baa-baa-babies in the labs at UTA, and that there are laws prohibiting sexual union between men and sheep. I can’t say if these people are speaking from real-life experience or not, but I say it’s absurd. Granted, like creatures can produce blobs among their own kind–we’ve all met a few–but baa-baa-babies? There are several ways of finding out the truth about this, but it’s cold in Dallas this time of year [Letter arrived in December–C.A.], and besides, if I wore a wool scarf to the rendezvous, I’d just make her nervous. So what’s the straight dope? –Drew Hunter, Dallas
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I know, I know, I shouldn’t encourage these people, but it’s been a quiet summer. Besides, you ought to see how much mail I’ve gotten on this subject. The partner usually proposed for these unholy couplings is a chimp or gorilla, whose chromosomes are alleged to be 99 percent identical with ours. On a related matter, some wonder why in horse-donkey crossings the union of a jackass and a mare produces a mule, but a stallion and a jenny (female donkey) produce a hinny, a horse (or quadruped, at least) of a different color, so to speak.
The numbers that people throw around in this regard are deceiving. A much-publicized paper by Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson in 1975 declared that the DNA of humans and chimps was 99 percent identical. But so what? Each human gene is made up of roughly 100 to 1,000 nucleotides, which are like the coding in a computer program. Seemingly trivial changes in this code can cause big problems. An 0.3 percent difference in a single gene, for instance, can cause sickle-cell anemia, and it’s possible an equally small difference could prevent interbreeding.
