Ever been in East Africa listening late at night to a gorilla tracker tell a story? Ever sit there, looking at the stars, as the legend of BORGo dances across the vision of your imagination? Ever wonder who and what BORGo is and, more to the point, what BORGo is to you?

One version of the legend of BORGo, like the legend of Tarzan, describes a powerful man raised in the jungle by apes, who forsakes civilization and remains in the wild. Another humorous version describes a gorilla who, as part of a computer-based language experiment, begins at an exceptionally primitive level with the help of students and scientists to blog and update his own facebook page. Another version describes a human with an unusual percentage of non-human primate genes.

Each legend of BORGo describes an ape-human hybrid but don’t be fooled into thinking that BORGo is a mere exercise of our collective imagination. Approximately 6 million years ago, the ancestors of humans bred with the ancestors of non-human apes, and BORGo as such is part of the story of how we modern humans came to be. And twenty-first century genetics, with its actual ability to insert genes from one species to another, opens the door at least part way to the existence of a contemporary real-life BORGo.

So what? How does the legend of BORGo affect us? BORGo has the potential to teach us about ourselves and our place in the natural world, which affects our relationship with all living creatures, but the lesson doesn’t stop there. BORGo, according to one legend, is deeply religious and these legends, like the elements of The Monkey Bible project, hold up to our species a mirror reflecting light of both science and religion. Do we dare to peer in?