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/
Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
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Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#62Probably 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/
Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#63Earlier 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…
Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#64Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#65Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#66A 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.
Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#67Monkeys 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.
Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#68Why does the article mainly focus on the great apes? All apes, including gibbons lost their tails.
Re: Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
#69Once 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
#70It 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.