201–210 of 247 posts
It would be so cool to have a tail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rarely is human genetics this simple. For ages geneticists thought large swaths of the human genome were "junk" and over time more and more of it has been proven to have a purpose or function, it just wasn't readily apparent for various reasons. Think of the human genome as sort of the ultimate dependency hell...
There still is a lot of non-coding dna in there.
I believe this suggests that we could CRISPR an embryo to knock-out the offending Alu element in the TBXT gene and the child will develop a tail.
Other layers include: epigenome-layer, transcriptome-layer, proteome-layer
Each layer can compensate for deficiencies in another layer.
So lets say you knock out a gene in utero and it has a phenotype. But when you do the same procedure in an adult organism, there is no phenotype, although the gene should be important in an adult. It's like phenotype and genotype are two states whose correlation is dependent on many variables. In this example at least time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we'd definitely have to rethink our toilets, though. Don't want your tail hanging in there while you're doing your business.
In much of the world (weighted by humans) people use squat toilets. So, problem is solvable by installing one after your CRISPR tail procedure.
Probably good that we lost them. Judging by photos [1] of some of the rare cases of humans who were born with tails human tails wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing. Although perhaps human tails that are the result of something going awry might not be a good indicator of what human tails would be like if we had kept them. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263034/
Clearly you haven't heard of catgirls.
I’d really enjoy a prehensile tail, despite the adaptations required for trousers and chairs. Also, I was enough a nerd growing up that other kids would have pulled it.
i suspect there would be adaptations to a variety of other things like sleep, bipedal locomotion, defecation, etc.
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I didn't know about that, but it seems a poor trade-off to me. Acute appendicitis is the most common abdominal surgical emergency in the world.
Yet most people never suffer it, while I'd assume 100% of the population suffered bouts of vomiting/diarrhea. Looks like the trade-off is alright.
But it might not be that important at all; do people with an appendectomy struggle more to recover from diarrhea?