Can you breed animals to be more intelligent?

In a Swedish lab, Alexander Kotrschal has deliberately moulded the intelligence of small fish called guppies. From a starting population, he picked individuals with either unusually large or small brains for their bodies, and bred them together.

Are animals with larger brains smarter?

There are many examples of intelligent animals that are also large-brained for their size. Humans are a particularly extreme case; our brains are roughly seven times larger than expected for an animal of our size. Dogs are also famously large-brained and smart, as are whales, dolphins and elephants.

Which animal will evolve intelligence?

The Chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte) and the Bonobo (Pan paniscus) are typically the first candidates that most cognitive neuroscientists would name as potentially gaining human like intelligence.

Is it possible for humans and chimpanzees to interbreed?

Is it possible for humans and chimpanzees to interbreed? Early interbreeding by early ancestors may not translate to modern day.

What do humans and chimpanzees have in common?

But today, although humans and chimpanzees share 99 per cent of the DNA sequences that code for proteins, that DNA is packaged differently into the chromosomes. The human chromosome number two is actually two ape chromosomes joined end-to-end, and nine other chromosomes have inverted sequences of genes compared with their equivalents in chimps.

Did early humans interbreed with other species?

Early interbreeding by early ancestors may not translate to modern day. Genetic analysis suggests there may have been a long period of cross-breeding between early ancestors of the humans and chimpanzees, before they finally split into the Homo and Pan (chimp) genera around six million years ago.

Can a humanzee be created by artificial insemination?

There are documented cases of Soviet experiments in the 1920s where artificial insemination was attempted using female chimps and human sperm. However, none of these experiments resulted in a pregnancy, much less the birth of a ‘humanzee’.