71–80 of 247 posts
There is no "why" -- it happened and was not selected against; it may have been adaptive and that is a kind of why, I guess. I think it would be better to be clear about this in science communication.
If it’s not selected against, it wouldn’t spread at the cost of the tail gene.
Somehow, somewhere along the genome line, non-tailers overtook tailers.
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‘It’s complicated’. Blue eyes, for example.
Don't blue eyes support the "sexual selection" over "life or death" view of evolution though? Blue eyes don't provide any benefits to the owner other than possible sexual selection and surprisingly, they evolved before fair skin (which does provide a benefit for people in northern latitudes to produce enough vitamin D).
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.
Replace tail by arm in your comment and see what is wrong about it.
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But the lack of ridigity also means that it's actually quite hard to control someone through it. If you grab someone's leg, especially near the foot/ankle, you are relying on the rigidity of the joints to be able to control their torso (and therefore their ability to fight back). The most disadvantageous position to be in is to have someone behind you, while they fully control your ankle/foot. Now you can't fully tur…
We have two legs, so grabbing one is a good way to get kicked in the face (or elsewhere). A flexible tail doesn’t have that disadvantage to the grabber, especially if longer than a leg.
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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).
I suspect that there's another reason that apes lost their tails - most likely related to walking on two feet.
Edit: According to this study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6417348/), the tailed chap had difficulty/pain when sitting and during other activites
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Don't blue eyes support the "sexual selection" over "life or death" view of evolution though? Blue eyes don't provide any benefits to the owner other than possible sexual selection and surprisingly, they evolved before fair skin (which does provide a benefit for people in northern latitudes to produce enough vitamin D).
blue eyes have better night vision. video related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgAIWpVSAM8
Lower chance of cataracts too.
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We have two legs, so grabbing one is a good way to get kicked in the face (or elsewhere). A flexible tail doesn’t have that disadvantage to the grabber, especially if longer than a leg.
You can’t land a kick when someone has your foot. Gravity exists, you will immediately fall onto your butt as soon as you lift the other leg.
You might find BJJ pretty interesting. [https://renzogracieacademy.com/about/what-is-brazilian-jiu-j...], [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0edxg2fFmw]
Judo teaches how to deal with it quite well too.
The legs are the strongest part of a human, the arms don't compare at all. And fighting from the ground can be VERY effective if you know what you're doing. Or don't just curl up and wait to die.
Ideally you'd be on your feet and able to move faster of course, and I wouldn't recommend against an opponent with a spear or other ranged weapon - but then they wouldn't be trying to grab my foot or leg anyway eh?
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…