Dr. David P. Barash writes in a op-ed to LA Times:
I also look forward to the possibility that, thanks to advances in reproductive technology, there will be hybrids, or some other mixed human-animal genetic composite, in our future.
This may seem perverse, because even the most liberal ethicists shy away from advocating the breeding or genetic engineering of half-person/half-animal. Why, then, am I rooting for their creation?
Because in these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism, with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed. And this is precisely the message that chimeras, hybrids or mixed-species clones would drive home. The latest tactic of creationists in the United States has been to accept “microevolutionary” events, such as drug resistance in bacteria, but to draw the line at the emergence of human beings from other, “lower” life forms, cloaking their religious agenda in a miasma of pseudoscience. It is a line that exists only in the minds of those who proclaim that the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.
Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism  as our ancient human and chimp ancestors appear to have done long ago  it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.
For the rest of the article go to When Man Mated Monkey
(HT: Krauze of TelicThoughts)