Why Did Homo Erectus Not Retain a Tail?

If God had designed man then there is lots and lots of blame to be assigned to God.

of course not, why would I blame something that there is no evidence for? You stated a tail would be very useful, according to you god designed everything, ergo, your god made a mistake when she didn't give you a very useful tail.

...why is it so easy to give credit to the natural selection process, but not be able to give credit to something putting that process into motion?

What do you suppose the "natural" in natural selection means? Why would a natural process need to be put in motion? What does that even mean? How could a process like NS not work in an imperfectly reproducing population? Seems like it would require outside intervention to stop it, not to start it.

Unless I miss my guess, your real question would be more accurately stated as "why is there something instead of nothing". Could we just skip the next several hundred wasted posts and say "don't know" right now?

I can guarantee it

I do not find bare assertions on your part particularly convincing.

As for a tail not being useful, that is a ridiculous statement. Balance, open doors, scratch your back. There are plenty of advantages to having a tail.

These are all things that I can do without a tail. How about you?

Here are some more things I can do without a tail: not shut my tail in a door by accident, not break a bone in my tail, not get an infected wound in my tail, not get gangrene in my tail, not have mosquitoes bite my tail, not have parasites burrow into the flesh of my tail ...

So when you come to me telling me that a tail would be an advantage because if I had one I could do stuff that I can do anyway, it's not much of a selling point.

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Put it this way. Suppose you were to go to a venture capitalist and say that you wanted to start a company to make prosthetic tails. There'd be a huge market for this product, you explain, because they're so gosh-darn useful. Why, you could open doors with them! So can you have a few million dollars for R&D?

How do you suppose you'd get on? In fact, we know how you think you'd get on, because you have not, in fact, tried to meet this supposed need, have you? (This is supposition on my part, I admit, and if you have in fact founded a start-up company called Tails R Us, then I shall apologize for jumping to conclusions and admit the sincerity of your argument. Otherwise, not so much.)

As for the rest of your comments, not worth replying to each..... as usual. Of your 12k posts, how many are actually of use? 20 ... maybe 30?

You are not obliged to answer me; I shall form my own judgment as to why you do not.

Mr Inadequate

Oh, look, you also got my name wrong.

Did you take some sort of religious vow? It is hard otherwise to account for such obsessive consistency extending, as it does, to the most trivial of details.

Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If we were in the same room, I guarantee you would be more respectful.

If we were in the same room, hopefully when you asked a question as poorly phrased as this one, the question would get rephrased in short order. In this case, we can note that your question was answered multiple times.

Point is, why is it so easy to give credit to the natural selection process, but not be able to give credit to something putting that process into motion?

This appears to me to be a question easily answered by considering what can be confirmed by the scientific method. But perhaps this is just another poorly phrased question. Should we wait for you to rephrase the question or should we attempt to answer?

DrJones* writes: ergo, your god made a mistake when she didn't give you a very useful tail.

But then she'd have made a monkey of him, rather than letting him do it for himself.

mram10 writes: As for a tail not being useful, that is a ridiculous statement. Balance, open doors, scratch your back. There are plenty of advantages to having a tail.

That isn't how evolution works. It doesn't anticipate what "might" be useful.

If an organism born without a tail survives to reproduce, the "tail gene" may be missing in its offspring. Eventually, a tailless population may evolve.

You should be thinking about why the tail wasn't useful - i.e. why the ones without tails survived - instead of telling evolution what it "should have done".

Simple: Homos never naturally evolved from any monkey. Otherwise, prove it.

welcome to the fray, djufo,

Simple: Homos never naturally evolved from any monkey. Otherwise, prove it.

All Homosapiens (Homos) are hominids, and we share a common hominid ancestor with other hominids, like our cousins the Neanderthals.

All hominids are apes, and we share a common ape ancestor with other apes, particularly chimpanzees, our closest ape cousins.

All apes share a common primate ancestor with monkeys, but apes evolved to be tail-less before hominids evolved, and thus hominids did not have a (prehensile) tail to lose, just the remnant coccyx.

You are correct that humans did not evolve from monkeys, but wrong that humans did not evolve from primates.

The evidence is readily available in documents on the internet if you are truly interested in finding out the evolutionary history of humans, based on evidence rather than opinion or belief.

Enjoy.

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Edited by RAZD, : clrty

djufo writes: Otherwise, prove it.

In a court of law, the prosecution has to "prove" its case to the jury, not the spectators.

Similarly, science aims to make its case to people who have actually looked at the evidence. No offense, but nobody's interested in "proving" anything to you.

ringo writes: In a court of law, the prosecution has to "prove" its case to the jury, not the spectators. Similarly, science aims to make its case to people who have actually looked at the evidence. No offense, but nobody's interested in "proving" anything to you.

As nobody is interested in the "belief" of the scientific "religion" therefore common sense tells any mortal with average IQ that a creation of homo sapiens makes much more sense than a fairy tail of a missing link.

djufo writes: As nobody is interested in the "belief" of the scientific "religion" therefore common sense tells any mortal with average IQ that a creation of homo sapiens makes much more sense than a fairy tail of a missing link.

Harrumph.

If you want to have a debate - rather than raise a series of disjointed claims, accusations, technical errors and random side-swipes at science - why don't you stop splattering stuff across numerous forums? Try making a single point and properly present it; preferrably in more than two sentences.

At the moment you look like just another muppet.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

djufo writes: Blah blah blah....

You didn't repond at all to the post you were replying to.

Here it is again:

quote:

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In a court of law, the prosecution has to "prove" its case to the jury, not the spectators.
Similarly, science aims to make its case to people who have actually looked at the evidence. No offense, but nobody's interested in "proving" anything to you.

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If you want to demostrate that you have an average IQ, try addressing the topic instead of blathering inane platitudes.

I see a lot of emotions going on. Usually emotions are used and manipulated by "science" to successfully convince the masses into "belief" The only muppets here are those trying to put together a monkey skeleton with shoulders and arms out of place to make it look somewhat similar to a human skeleton next to it. Theres a lot of people who pays for shark meat instead of real tuna and they don't know it. Prove that we evolved from primates. The missing link is just hilarious. Tell me where he lives and where does he works because I can't imagine the descendants of a missing link wearing a suit.

Nobody's being emotional, but you are merely throwing out unsupported (and unsupportable) claims.

Science requires evidence.