Stephen Strauss wrote articles, columns and editorials about science and technology for the Globe and Mail for more than 20 years. He has also authored three books, several book chapters, and for his efforts received numerous awards. Through all his time in journalism, he still remains smitten by the enduring wisdom of the motto of Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Say what is.

Could it be that two new similes for indiscriminate sex have loosed themselves on the world? Will we now say that someone is as promiscuous as a polar bear? Or should that be as randy as grizzly?

These images came to mind with the recent — one seeks a proper Arctic-related word — blizzard, avalanche, iceberg flow of stories about the offspring of a female polar bear and a male grizzly which was shot in the Northwest Territories in April.

In the past the hybrid — do we call it a "pizzly," a "grizzlar," a "grolar" or use the Inuit word "nanuluk" which also combines the two animals' names — would have seemed most likely to have been stuffed and mounted in a circus freak show.

The animal's initial positioning was as a poster boy for bestiality by beasts. Or, as David Paetkau, the geneticist who confirmed the animal was indeed a hybrid, sweetly put it, "Once you can't find any one of your own species to mate with, perhaps you lower your standards."

On another level the animal has been turned into the biological incarnation of a character from Dickens' Christmas Carol. It is, say some worried environmentalists, the ghost of the Arctic environment's future. Traditionally the differences in their habitats would have meant Mr. Randy Grizzly and Ms. Promiscuous Polar Bear would never have met. Or if they had, the encounter would have amounted to nothing.

To produce the pizzlar, a grizzly and a polar bear would have had to spend up to 10 days together. This is because female polar bear biology is very particular about who a father is; she won't ovulate until after multiple fur rubbings. But, if the Artic is warming up, one consequence might be the extension of the grizzlies' terrain north.

And as they interact, the male grizzly would beat out the male polar bear in the breeding game.

"As grizzly bears expand their range north, [inter-breeding] becomes another potential threat to polar bears," says Paetkau.

"If there's too much inter-breeding, the grizzly bear genes could eventually wash out the polar bear, and they could become basically grizzly bears with a little more northern habitat."

Finally, the finding of the pizzlar was cited in stories appearing a few weeks later discussing evidence that human ancestors and chimp ancestors may have split apart and then several hundreds of thousands of years later started mating again to produce hybrids. These hybrids are supposedly the ancestors of today's humans.

These could be called, depending on your linguistic bent, chumans, humanzees or manpanzees. The argument here was: If promiscuity and bestiality produce hybrid pizzlar bears, why wouldn't the same process have worked for proto-humans and their beastly proto-first cousins?

There is a thing or three to say about these arguments. The first is that there is nothing that says that the gene flow from polar bears to grizzlies won't go the other way. Indeed, given the picky tastes of the polar bear female, one can imagine the males grumbling, "Geez, you say 'not tonight,' well then maybe I'll amble over and schtupp Ms. Grizzly."

Grizzlies are generally seen as a sub-grouping of brown bears and male polar bears have mated with female browns in zoos, producing offspring that were fertile and could mate with either parent species.

The reality is polar bears get more sympathetic press because they are what is called in the environmental preservation game "charismatic megavertabrates" — that is to say they are very big and cute enough to become a stuffed animal.

Grizzlies are big and in some places endangered, but they are big and scary - their Latin name is Ursos arctos horribilis - so we are less sympathetic about their fates.

Nonetheless, there is still the question of what happens if the gene flow started going in one direction or the other. Would we kill the hybrids in the name of species purity? Would there be a campaign: Save the polar bear and the grizzly, but kill the pizzlar?

Generally what happens in nature is the hybrids are sterile — think the horse and the donkey making a mule. But if pizzlars are healthy, and fertile, and sexually attractive — similar crosses in zoos have proven so — I say bring on the pizzlars.

Nature, as Darwin told us, works through evolution. What matters is not purity of blood line but survival of the fittest. Therefore, I say again, bring on pizzlars.

Which brings me to the humanzees. What would we do if one of them happened to come into being now? There have been attempts to create them, including astounding research in the 1920s in which Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov first tried to impregnate chimpanzees with human sperm.

He then artificially implanted orangutan sperm into women volunteers. His cross-breeding didn't produce any hybrids, but what if?

My sense is that our brute first reaction would be fear, as with the pizzlar. Fear that the balance of nature was being upset. Fear that we had legitimized bestiality. Fear that we were potentially polluting human gene pools.

Well, I am nothing if not consistent here. I say, if nature lets it happen, if other humans or chimps want to breed with the hybrid, bring on humanzees too. With the extension of temperate climates north, they should have plenty of more trees to swing from or haul to the sawmill.