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Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

cnn.com

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Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#61
post #60

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/

If we'd never lost tails, probably we wouldn't find then so "un-human". Also, presumably most people would have "normal" (as in, the same as most others) tails, rather than like the images in that article.

Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#62
post #60

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/

If we kept tails both the tails and our sense of what is attractive would be under evolutionary pressures so they probably would be normal to us!

Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I’m guessing this is less like, “we found the flag that toggles tail production” and more “we found a chunk of code that belongs to tail production”? The first bit of the article sure makes it sound like this DNA is what does it all.

The scientists believed that the extra AluY element was functionally working to block out a part the TBXT gene (exon6). In their mouse model, they first directly snipped out exon6, and found that mice that were heterogeneous wildtype TBXT and exon6 removed TBXT developed a full spectrum of tail phenotypes from no tail to full length tail. At this point, the statement is "These results provide further evidence that th…

Just wanted to say thanks for this excellent summary!

Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#66

A tail is grabbable. I'd think in primate fighting, a tail would be big negative. It could be grabbed. Can you imagine Chimp fights if they had tails that could be held on to and the owner dragged around.

The NFL would definitely have to come up with a rule about grabbing the tail of an opposing player.

Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#67

Monkeys have tails to swing and walk in trees.

Yet there's plenty of animals that have tails and don't spend time in trees, such as dogs, horses and cows.

The tail seems like vestigial anatomy (originally useful in fish) that has three possible states in mammals: 1. Repurposed for a new function (tree swinging, signals) 2. Not much used but still in the repo (mice) 3. Garbage collected (apes).

Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#69
If we're doing germline edits, the obvious thing to fix first is vitamin synthesis. There are a bunch of useful things other living things synthesise from first principles, and we don't so we need to eat something that has already synthesised the thing we wanted, and we can't cook or preserve it in any way that destroys the material we needed or it won't work. That's what scurvy is, a tree or a lizard just makes its own vitamin C, but humans don't, so, if you're stuck on a ship eating preserved food for months your body runs out of vitamin C and you get very sick and eventually die. But synthesising vitamin C isn't hard per se, it's just that the synthesis instructions can be deleted and the humans are descended from an ancestor who had such a deletion, we can put it back.

Once vitamin synthesis is back working, next up is amino acid synthesis. Amino acids are the constituent parts of proteins, your DNA is a bunch of instructions to fasten together a series of 22 different coded amino acids to make proteins. When you eat something, any proteins are broken back down into amino acids. Given some amino acids you can in principle make the others, but humans only make about half of them this way. As a result if your protein mix is wrong you are eating amino acids, and your body needs amino acids but some of them are different amino acids - and instead of synthesising the ones needed from spares you don't need using energy, which is abundant in most human societies, you just get sick and eventually (if you don't fix your diet) die. We should fix that.

Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code

#70
post #29

It takes metabolic resources to grow a tail. If the benefit was less than the cost, mutations that prevented the tail from growing were selected for.

And they're unhygenic. Sheep farmers for instance routinely cut the tails of their flock because it is difficult to shear and becomes a breeding ground for blowfly larvae. That said, i saw a movie called Shallow Hal(2001) which had a scene in which a man was shown to have a tail. Now it may have been cgi, but it made me think that there must be a minority of humans with that mutation.
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