Losing their tails provided our ape ancestors with an evolutionary advantage – but we’re still paying the price.

https://theconversation.com/losing-their-tails-provided-our-ape-ancestors-with-an-evolutionary-advantage-but-were-still-paying-the-price-224385

More…

If we stll had tails we would still have all those other problems.

Some interesting bits from the article

Current estimates suggest that about half of all fertilised eggs never even make it to be recognised pregnancies and that for every child born about two never made it to term.

And this bit

There’s a relatively high likelihood that in your DNA there will be a change that wasn’t inherited by either your mother or father. You were probably born with between ten and 100 such new changes to your DNA. For most other species that number is under one – often far under one.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Some interesting bits from the article

Current estimates suggest that about half of all fertilised eggs never even make it to be recognised pregnancies and that for every child born about two never made it to term.

And this bit

There’s a relatively high likelihood that in your DNA there will be a change that wasn’t inherited by either your mother or father. You were probably born with between ten and 100 such new changes to your DNA. For most other species that number is under one – often far under one.

It is a bit higher than comparable species but not that much.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4788123/

Although the human germline mutation rate exceeds that for all other species so far analyzed, there appears to be nothing exceptional about it. After accounting for the genomic content of selected sites and the long-term genetic effective population size (which jointly influence the ability of natural selection to reduce the mutation rate), the per-generation human mutation rate is quite compatible with scaling observations derived from a wide variety of other species (Sung et al. 2012). The estimated mutation rate in chimpanzees, 1.2 × 10−8 per nucleotide site per generation for base-substitution mutations, is not significantly different from that in humans (Venn et al. 2014). The per-generation mutation rate in the mouse is ∼  50% of the human rate (Uchimura et al. 2015), despite the dramatic differences in generation lengths, but this may be explained by the fact that selection operates on the mutation rate on the generational timescale, with natural selection being more effective in the mouse owing to its larger effective population size (Lynch 2011).

Tau.Neutrino said:

Some interesting bits from the article

Current estimates suggest that about half of all fertilised eggs never even make it to be recognised pregnancies and that for every child born about two never made it to term.

And this bit

There’s a relatively high likelihood that in your DNA there will be a change that wasn’t inherited by either your mother or father. You were probably born with between ten and 100 such new changes to your DNA. For most other species that number is under one – often far under one.

You’re right, those are interesting. I’ve heard that about one or two new single point mutations occur in each human child. That’s in the genes, so a much lower number than 100 such changes over the whole genome.

Recessive mutations build up in the population until … trouble.