What is this dismissive crock I see before me?

Would it happen naturally? Probably not.

What about in a lab? Maybe, but how will they get funding. Who will give them permission to conduct the experiments?

* Chimps not sexy.
* Sex is hard.
* Differing numbers of chromosomes, more likely to be infertile.
* It's the evolutionary difference that counts.

However horses and donkeys are 10.10 million years apart and have different chromosome numbers. And we're only 6 million years off from chimpanzees.

* Ivanhov tried it three times and failed.
* Oliver was just a chimp.

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No evidence that it's happened and not likely to happen.

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Somehow this seems overly dismissive to me. The evolutionary distance is pretty close far closer than mules. And there are no confirmed barriers to reproduction as such. There's no evidence that it's impossible and less related species have hybrids quite often.