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Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code
- ganzuul 3y ago[flagged]
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- Joel_Mckay 3y agoSome do, but get corrective surgery as babies.
- inductive_magic 3y ago[flagged]
- SoullessSilent 3y ago[flagged]
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- K0balt 3y agoThey buried the lede: Even if the driving mutation identified in the study could be undone, “it still wouldn’t bring back the tail.” Oh well.
- Waterluvian 3y agoSo 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.
- layer8 3y agoProbably the difference between necessary and sufficient.
- icegreentea2 3y agoThe 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 the presence of TBXTΔexon6 is sufficient to induce tail loss". They then tried to "more realistically" replicate the scenario. Instead of just snipping out exon6, they tried inserting in various elements into the mouse TBXT gene to emulate their model of how AluY is cutting out exon6. They attempted a few different methods which resulted in different models that would end up with different relative amounts of TBXT missing exon6 being produced. I'm having a hard time tracking all their conditions and lines at this point, but they seem to claim here that higher amounts of exon6 drop out correspond to shorter tails. They also found that they could not get any viable mice with exon6 snipped from both copies of TBXT. TBXT itself is a transcription factor, meaning that it controls the expression of other genes. There's probably a set of genes elsewhere that together make up the "tail-making machinery" that TBXT heavily interacts with. In this sense, TBXT 'might' be the most important single point lever, but at the same time not be fully in control of the underlying machine. What does seem persuasive is that idea that this mutation kicked off some rate of tail lose in our ancestors, which then lead to some sort of selection advantage. The advantage was then made more durable by accumulating additional mutations to lock in the phenotype. In addition, once the "tail making machinery" is inactive, we have no idea how those genes might have been repurposed. I think it's in this sense that the scientists say that we probably can't bring tails back just by "fixing TBXT".
- GordonS 3y agoJust wanted to say thanks for this excellent summary!
- ummonk 3y ago
- GoodPepper50 3y agoSo close!
- 7thaccount 3y agoThe greatest thing on this thread is how disappointed we all are for some bizarre reason lol. It would be cool to get them back for better balance.
- sebastiennight 3y agoA prehensile tail would do so much for my cooking skills... the possibilities are infinite. Wait - I finally found a use case for Neuralink that I can cheer for!
- underlipton 3y agoYou don't necessarily even need invasive surgery to control an additional limb: https://spectrum.ieee.org/human-augmentation https://spectrum.ieee.org/human-augmentation
- GoodPepper50 3y agoExactly! And why stop at only one extra appendage?
- datavirtue 3y agoThey aren't trying hard enough,then.
- Natsu 3y agoThere are some people who are born with tails, though: https://www.webmd.com/baby/what-is-a-human-tail https://www.webmd.com/baby/what-is-a-human-tail
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoA 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.
- moffkalast 3y agoThe problem might be size, lots of smaller primates have tails which can be very useful as a fifth arm for holding onto branches. As you get larger, tree foraging becomes less viable and the tail less useful and it would need to be oversized to be able to function properly.
- vbezhenar 3y agoMost of animals don't use tails as a fifth arm. My cat seems to use it for extra balance. I think that humans could do that as well.
- OJFord 3y agoMost animals are less dexterous than primates anyway. Humans talk about needing (or name products) a third arm/hand; small monkeys and lemurs and the like swing from them or use like you might imagine we would as an extra limb in climbing.
- nineteen999 3y agoMine used to use it to tickle my nostrils and make me sneeze for its own amusement when standing or walking over my lap.
- whycome 3y agoThis seems like one of the times I can mention that dolphins and elephants have evolved prehensile penises. Sometimes nature finds a way.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
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- anilakar 3y ago[dead]
- bilsbie 3y agoIf we did have rails do you think we would cover it up or keep it out like our hands?
- DonHopkins 3y agoMy favorite "Scan Scene" from The Congress (Ari Folman's film based on Stanislaw Lem's novel "The Futurological Congress"), in which Harvey Keitel's character "Al" tells Robin Wright's character "Robin" the twisted tail of "Joey Fairytail"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
- tomtomistaken 3y agoI love the book!
- DonHopkins 3y ago"The Congress" is to "The Futurological Congress" is to Stanislaw Lem like "Blade Runner" is to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is to Philip K Dick. Both great movies loosely based on both great but very different books by great authors, each with something unique and deep and important to say, that all stand on their own and are worth knowing.
- usrusr 3y agoWait until you've seen the Ijon Tichy miniseries. It's .. a different approach.
- re-thc 3y ago[flagged]
- 29athrowaway 3y agoMonkeys have tails to swing and walk in trees.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoYet there's plenty of animals that have tails and don't spend time in trees, such as dogs, horses and cows.
- dboreham 3y agoThe 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).
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoI'm curious about the "garbage collected" theory as there doesn't seem like a lot of selection pressure to remove tails simply due to them not being useful and consuming energy to grow. The appendix is a far more likely candidate for garbage collection as it has no obvious function and can easily cause death if it bursts. 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6417348/), the tailed chap had difficulty/pain when sitting and during other activites
- wizzwizz4 3y ago> The appendix is a far more likely candidate for garbage collection as it has no obvious function Preserving the gut microbiome through diarrhoea and vomiting.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoI 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.
- pfdietz 3y agoIt 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.
- ekaryotic 3y agoAnd 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.
- userbinator 3y agobut it made me think that there must be a minority of humans with that mutation There certainly are, but it is extremely rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail#Human_tails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail#Human_tails
- ssijak 3y agoIts not because of the tail but because of the farms. Sad state of how we do farming at scale.
- BizarroLand 3y agoIf someone can think of a better way to feed 8 billion people into obesity and early death cheaply then we'll do that instead.
- ginko 3y agoWhy does the article mainly focus on the great apes? All apes, including gibbons lost their tails.
- anamexis 3y agoPresumably because humans are great apes.
- guerrilla 3y agoI feel like people don't focus on gibbons enough in general. It's all great apes and monkeys all the time.
- Gibbon1 3y agoI agree with this 100 percent
- samatman 3y agoThe actual article in Nature points out that there have been independent tail-loss events in non-hominoid monkeys. Which makes it all the more frustrating that gibbons aren't mentioned anywhere. Given when they identify the mutation as having occurred, we can tentatively conclude that gibbons lack a tail for the same reason other apes do: 25 million years for the mutation, and 16.8 million years for the divergence of gibbons from the great apes.
- sschueller 3y agoHow long until humans have an actual "shelve" (indentation) on their pinkie at birth to rest their phone on?
- coldtea 3y agoGiven evolution? Thousands of years...
- lbotos 3y agoa long time? You probably need at least 7-9 generations to select "strong pinky shelf" as desirable and I'm not sure any culture is yet?
- coldtea 3y ago>You probably need at least 7-9 generations to select "strong pinky shelf" as desirable It not only has to be convenient, but also to be sexually selected (partners with that seen as more attractive) or helping with survivability (partners with that live longer and get to reproduce more), which ain't really applicable anyway. Which is the reason we don't have traits for any other minor "convenience" attribute either, but instead for long standing evolutionary benefits.
- msm_ 3y agoEven in case something helps with survivability, the benefit must be strong enough to be selected for. Even today people are dying because of appendicitis, can't imagine the death rate in the pre-modern era.
- jeromegv 3y agoIt’s fascinating that most people don’t get that about evolution. It needs to be a matter of life and death, if it doesn’t, then it has no impact.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoSurely it's more to do with the chances of raising viable offspring. A change that makes a person more desirable to the opposite sex is very likely to be selected for even if it makes the person more likely to die in their 50s.
- ngvrnd 3y agoThere 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.
- Smaug123 3y agoThe article itself is very clear about the sense of the word "why" intended here.
- JBiserkov 3y agoYes: > But while the new study explains the “how” of tail loss in humans and great apes, the “why” of it is still an open question. Title is still clickbait.
- Hackbraten 3y agoThe article itself states that this may be the case, or that it might have had some evolutionary advantage that we're just not aware of.
- o-o- 3y agoThere has to be more to it. 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.
- BoiledCabbage 3y ago> There is no "why" Of course there is a why. It happend and not only was it not selected against, presence of a tail was selected against. Meaning it was, or came along with a beneficial adaptation. That benefit is why it took over our gene pool and why we don't have tails now.
- tzs 3y agoProbably 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263034/
- GordonS 3y agoIf 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.
- jezzamon 3y agoIf 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!
- gigglesupstairs 3y agoExactly. I still find noses and ears to be such noticeable protrusions once I let go of my knowledge of human faces.
- atomlib 3y agoClearly you haven't heard of catgirls.
- happymellon 3y agoAlthough those photos were more dickbutt than catgirl.
- withinboredom 3y agoNSFW, in case you are thinking about checking the link out.
- whythre 3y ago[flagged]
- mock-possum 3y agoI mean let’s not pretend this fetish doesn’t already exist and isn’t already actively being catered to in written and visual erotica.
- williamdclt 3y agoOh no, new aspects of human sexuality to explore, what a terrible thing
- huytersd 3y agoYes sex bad. Think of the women. I can’t even begin to imagine being in this pathetic neutered headspace.
- _factor 3y agoYou’re getting all the furries chiming in here.
- hsjsbeebue 3y agoChairs would have a tail hole. Just imagine having to sleep and roll over with arms in the way!
- underlipton 3y agoMy sweet, summer child~ I can guarantee that each of those sentences is repeated verbatim somewhere on a certain website. EDIT: I swear I meant to type "almost verbatim." That said, Google is no longer a good authority for, "Is it somewhere online?".
- tialaramex 3y agoIf 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.
- ruined 3y agoand then, crispr cat ears
- klyrs 3y agoNot the bombardier beetle's hydrogen peroxide cannon? I'll never understand furries.
- underlipton 3y agoI mean, do you want Zootopia, or do you want that weird (strangely enjoyable) Jamie Foxx Netflix movie? Because one might be mundane, but at least you don't have to worry about some guy blowing you across the block with his shrimp powers.
- larodi 3y agotime to bring it back then, alongside horn implants, and third tit.
- polishdude20 3y agoI'd I'd be drinking milk, it would be out of my nostrils right about now.
- vba616 3y agoHow about a third eye? "The parietal eye is found in the tuatara, most lizards, frogs, salamanders, certain bony fish, sharks, and lampreys...It is absent in mammals, but was present in their closest extinct relatives, the therapsids" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye You may wish to consult your pineal gland.
- agumonkey 3y agowings
- smoyer 3y agoIt's not all it's cracked up to be - https://craphound.com/someone/Cory_Doctorow_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_TownA4.pdf https://craphound.com/someone/Cory_Doctorow_-_Someone_Comes_...
- makeitdouble 3y agoWings are so fascinating. Flying animals have their whole body, from their brain, digestive system, down to their bones internal structure and function [0] optimized for flight. That's where we see species giving up flight ability to get a stronger body, and I wonder what it would take for us to do the reverse to be able to use these wings in any way. [0] https://www.montananaturalist.org/blog-post/avian-adaptations/ https://www.montananaturalist.org/blog-post/avian-adaptation...
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- manarth 3y ago@dang Editorialized title; original title for the CNN article is "Why don’t humans have tails? Scientists find answers in an unlikely place"
- leke 3y agoMakes me think of the episode of the Simpsons where Marge was modified to be some kind of human feline in the episode The Island of Dr. Hibbert
- speedylight 3y agoWould be cool if we had tails, so I could wag it with my future dog!
- tempaccount420 3y agoBut imagine if your tail was hairless :/
- cosmojg 3y agoI imagine that it could still look cool if it were shaped/tapered in just the right way, maybe somewhere between that of a Sphynx cat and a lizard.
- codetrotter 3y agoThat sounds like an opportunity for a whole industry to emerge tbh. Hi we are Tailstyle! For far too long we’ve been accepting that our tails need to be naked like the rest of our bodies. Today I am offering you a share in our company for a very good price. Sharks, listen, everyone knows that wigs and toupees are amazing. What if I told you that my company we can put semi-permanent hair on your tail to look like a tiger! Or a panther? Or you could even have your tail look like that big flying dog in that one movie from the 80s you know which one I mean. And not only that. We’re also making tail socks that you can wear for special occasions! Christmas tail socks. Wedding tail socks. Funeral tail socks. Homecoming ball tail socks. You name it!
- Kye 3y agoThere are already companies that make tails. Not much of a jump to styling existing tails.
- winocm 3y agoTailscale.
- codetrotter 3y agoYeah but those guys would probably pivot to making lizard tails for the people. That’s respectable too. I just think the demand for fur-covered tails is a bigger potential market.
- b112 3y agoMeanwhile, 140k years ago, our 3rd civilization approached our current level of tech. Fashion designers, specifically a group lead by Argot the Great, decided the tail made pants difficult, and broke the lay of suit jackets. So they hired radicals to genetically engineer a retrovirus, to remove the tail. This worked, but due to unconsidered balance issues, all tail devoid children lost the capability for bipedal balance and therefore walking. Most of these children, during their formative years spent their time on all fours, and thud their hand dexterity was pitiful, and society crumbled when they came of age. It was another 46k years before a brain mutation emerged, re-enabling bipedal balance, but by that time all traces of the old civilization was lost, and thus, progress began anew.
- QuantumG 3y agoDehydrate!
- junon 3y agoWhat is this referencing?
- advaith08 3y agoThe dehydrate comment is a reference to the three body problem - a great book!
- thebruce87m 3y agoAnd a series on Netflix at the moment. Quite watchable.
- b112 3y agoNothing. I just wrote it because it seemed amusing.
- nelsondev 3y agoIf I had a tail, could I wave it with Kegels?
- brcmthrowaway 3y agodefinitely
- ijijijjij 3y agonow all we need is for the tailbone/coccyx to disappear.
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoI 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.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoRarely 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...
- npstr 3y agoNature does not refactor. There's the laryngeal nerve somewhere in the neck of mammals that has to go around a blood vessel. On Giraffes, this runs all the way down the neck, around said blood vessel, than back up, all that just to connect two places in the upper neck that are inches apart. Evolution writes the ultimate spaghetti code. More info: https://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2011/08/unintelligent-design-giraffes-laryngeal.html https://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2011/08/unintelligent-des...
- xeonmc 3y agoGod must be a frontend developer.
- linux2647 3y agoOr hacked it all together in Perl: https://xkcd.com/224/ https://xkcd.com/224/
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoHe's definitely full stack.
- temporalparts 3y ago
- gumby 3y agoI’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.
- swasheck 3y agoi suspect there would be adaptations to a variety of other things like sleep, bipedal locomotion, defecation, etc.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI suspect our tailed ancestors slept, locomoted, and defecated.
- Natsu 3y agoCould just ask this guy how well things work for him: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/114937-longest-human-tail https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/114937-lo...
- kelnos 3y agoI think we'd definitely have to rethink our toilets, though. Don't want your tail hanging in there while you're doing your business.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoIn much of the world (weighted by humans) people use squat toilets. So, problem is solvable by installing one after your CRISPR tail procedure.
- prox 3y agoWhat kind of tail are we looking at? One like a bunny or something like a cat?
- itscomingnext 3y agoCan't wait for the first Furry Liberation movement to take hold and campaign for their future kids to grow tails.
- geraldwhen 3y agoThe decision to modify an embryo to have cat ears and a tail is a decision between doctor and parent! As long as you get a doctor involved, no modification is too horrific.
- j7ake 3y agoLink to the open access article : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07095-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07095-8 If you scroll to the bottom check out how long this article went into peer review: almost 3 years! Three years can get you a PhD in UK. Received 14 September 2021 Accepted 19 January 2024 Published 28 February 2024
- PunchTornado 3y agoIs that normal? I imagine the poor bastards wanted to put it on their CV for their next job.
- j7ake 3y agohttps://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/about/journal-metrics https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/about/journal-metric... Median time is 268 days to acceptance at Nature. So this article was closer to 1000 days, above average.
- montag 3y agoNeat. Now could they please do the same for hair loss? :)
- atomlib 3y agoIt would be terrific not to have any hair on my head as a male. I'm so sick of shaving my cranium every morning.
- BlueFalconHD 3y agoThose hackers might get what they wanted. Real life catgirls. It would be so awesome.
- kinleyd 3y agoI have always lamented the loss of the tail. Every time my dog, though almost entirely asleep, wags its tail to acknowledge my presence, I always say to myself "Now, THAT is efficiency." I'm not a furry, but I'm open to the possibility of getting that back!
- ssijak 3y agoIt would be so cool to have a tail.
- hwbunny 3y agoJust give it a few years and besides pointed ears this will be doable. Anyways, I was thinking about whether our ancestors also wagged their tails, just like dogs and cats use them. And what were the triggers inside our nervous system.
- heroku 3y agoHumans never had tails, just ask charlie brown.
- soygem 3y agoGetting closer and closer to getting catgirls
- katejmurchison 3y ago[dead]