Evolution is a Fact #33 - A Tale about Tails

by cofty 6 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • cofty
    cofty

    Humans are classified as Apes.

    Apes don't have tails.

    Except when they do.

    We used to have tails. I don't mean "we" as a species; I mean you and I as individuals. We all had tails.

    Embryologists divide the development of a human embryo into 23 "Carnegie Stages" based on multiple physical features. Stage 23 corresponds roughly to day 56.

    From stage 14 - roughly day 32 - the embryo has approximately 12 tail vertebrae which extend beyond the anus and legs, accounting for more than 10% of its total length. The tail of the human embryo is a complex structure. Apart from 12 vertebrae it has a secondary neural tube (spinal cord), a notochord, mesenchyme, and tail gut.


    By the eighth week of gestation a process known as apoptosis or cell-death has eliminated the sixth to the twelfth vertebrae as well as the other tissues. The dead cells are consumed by white blood cells known as macrophages. The remaining vertebrates also reduce and fuse together to form the coccyx.

    Patrick Foye of the New Jersey Medical School reports that the construction of the coccyx is variable and often consists of anything from three to five bony segments.

    Sometimes the signal to dismantle the embryo's tail fails to be activated resulting in around 100 examples of humans being born with atavistic tails.

    Less than a third of these are poorly developed "pseudo-tails", but others contain muscle, blood vessels and nerve fibres. They are covered by normal skin with hair follicles, sweat glands, and sebaceous glands. They vary from about one to over 5 inches in length. A few - as in this x-ray of a six year old girl also contain some of the tail vertebrae.


    This example from evolutionary developmental biology poses a difficult challenge for creationists. Why would the human embryo go through a stage of growing a complex tail only to reabsorb it? When babies are born with complete working tails where did that genetic information come from?


    Evolution is a Fact 1 - 30 Index...

    Evolution is a Fact #31 - Ten Questions for Creationists ...

  • atomant
    atomant
    So lm a monkeys uncle then.l better go to the zoo and see if l can find him.
  • cofty
    cofty

    automant you claimed you had "researched evolution extensively".

    What are your answers to these ten basic questions?

  • cofty
    cofty

    The process of embryos developing features and then removing them is not uncommon. Our fingers and toes begin as webbed before the skin between the digits gets removed by apoptosis. Just like babies that are born with a tail some babies have webbing between fingers or toes when this process fails.

    It helps to think about our genome in terms or a recipe rather than a blueprint. To make a human rather than a pre-human ancestor, roughly the same recipe is followed up to a point. Then some moves have to be undone and additional steps added. The field of evolutionary developmental biology is revealing some fascinating connections between the embryology of different species.

    In a future post I will look at the clues to our fishy ancestry in the human embryo.

  • Slidin Fast
    Slidin Fast

    'All in all it's just another brick in the wall.'

    it gets more structurally sound with every bricK. Thanks Cofty.

  • Half banana
    Half banana

    Thanks for info Cofty.

    There is never found irrefutable evidence for direct and independent creation.

    Your subject of tails in primates is a solid evidence for us being placed on the evolutionary continuum. Even in the improbable event of an example found of a creature which had no connection to the phylogenetic tree; it would still not invalidate the truthfulness of evolution.

    There is simply no sensible evidence for an invisible being making all things, it is just silly puerile thinking distorted by religious programming.

  • Vidiot
    Vidiot

    Every scientific mystery that has ever been solved has turned out to be not supernatural phenomena.

    That fact alone is telling, IMO.

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