Tail as Old as Time: Part 2

in p foul mating. We talked about propulsion, We talked about pre intile tales, climbing, climbing and anchoring, kangaroos using their tails, as as as what to become the rockham sock'em robots that kangaroos are. They lean back on those wonderful stumpy things. Talked about energy conservation, fat storage. But today we're going to talk about biological methods of communication through tales, tales in in self mutilation for survival, and the question of human tales. Where are they are? Where

they go? Are we going to get them back? Perhaps when the world is is perfect, we'll grow that that new utopian tail. We'll get to that too. So one of the first things that we should address is the role of tales in animal communication. I remember we mentioned in the echo Board podcast that much of human communication is nonverbal. It's one of the reasons it's so easy to be misinterpreted over email or in a text message. Your tone, your facial expressions, and your body language supplies

sort of the shadow grammar of what you're saying. And for dogs, the tail can do a lot of this work. In fact, it might be especially important for dogs because dogs don't have language. They can't speak. They might be able to communicate something roughly through barks and other vocalizations. But but the tail is where it's at. And you know this, like some of these things you already know by heart, dogs tuck their tails between their legs to

show submissiveness. That's pretty obvious and widely accepted. You could even compare this tail tucking to closed body language and humans. We you ever thought about that? Yeah, yeah, so sort of even without the tail, we kind of assume that posture, this sort of you know, passive, helpful pronosaurus uh kind of positioning you can take. Yeah, or if we're if we're feeling apprehensive, we can fold our arms and kind of shrink the way you you would when a dog

tucks its tail and gets low. Uh. And we we think that dogs wag their tails to show they're happy. This is sometimes the case, but not always. I read an interesting National Geographic article that talked to an Oregon State University animal sciences professor named Monique ou Dell. And according to this article, dog's signal playfulness with a circular kind of wild, circling wag. But they can also signal apprehensiveness too by a showing a slower, more controlled wag.

That might be the case in general, but some research shows it gets even more specific with what dogs communicate by their wags. And I want to talk about a couple of interesting papers in current biology on dogtail wagging. So if you have a dog at home, next time it starts to wag its tail, look at the directional amplitude of tail wagging. And I do want to throw in you yourself or a dog owner? Oh yeah, yeah, Are you no a dog? No? I'm I just have

one horrible cat right now. Um, and they've never really been a dog person. But I know that some people new to the either new to the show or who are used to you know, previous host arrangements. Um, you know it may not be familiar that we now have dog owners dog people on the podcast right. Well, I have one dog. My wife Rachel and I have a

dog named Charles Darwin. Charlie and I have not yet tried to track Charlie's asymmetric tail wagging, which I'm about to get into, but I plan on doing that for the rest of the week. Anyway, there was a paper in March two thousand seven called asymmetric tail wagging responses

by Dogs two different emotive stimuli. And this, like I said, was in Current Biology, and here a group of researchers discovered what they called quote differential amplitudes of tail wagging to the left or the right side associated with the type of visual stimulus the animals were looking at. So what this means is, depending on how you visually stimulated the dog, what you show a dog, it would tend to wag to the right or to the left. Now, the tail. If you're picturing how a dog's tail wags,

it goes both ways. It wags back and forth, but the amplitude varies, so as it goes back and forth, it might trend more to the left or trend more to the right. I've never noticed that before. Yeah, And so the experimenters put each dog in a special no distractions box that didn't allow it to look at anything else interesting, and it had one opening that the dogs could see through, and it would allow them to see

things in one direction. And the shoal stimuli they tested were the dog's owner, and then an unknown person stranger danger, and then a dominant unfamiliar dog, so this is a dog that has been trained to be the boss and kind of scary, and then a cat, and then of course a control of a blank panel. And they were very interesting results when they observed the dogs in these conditions.

They found that when the dogs looked at their owners, they showed a strong right side wag bias uh, and the unfamiliar human got less wagging and a weaker right side bias. The cat got much less wagging and a very very slight right side bias, the unfamiliar dominant dog got a left side bias, and then the blank control also got a slight left side wag bias. And the interpretation of these results actually had to do with brain lateralization,

possibly in anticipation of motor control. They said, quote in our experiment stimuli that could be expected to elicit approach tendencies, So the dog wanting to approach, such as seeing the dog's owner, were associated with higher amplitude of tail wagging movements to the right side left brain activation, and stimuli that could be expected to elicit withdrawal tendencies such as seeing a dominant unfamiliar dog were associated with higher amplitude

of tail wagging movements to the left side, and they thought this meant right brain activation. So in the study we learned something about how the lateral bias of a tailwag indicates the mindset of a dog. But the big question is do other dogs notice this? Yeah? Like it? I mean it would seem like they would. I mean, just based on what we've studied about, you know, human micro expressions and whatnot, so many things that are that we end up picking up either consciously or subconsciously as

we're observing another person's body language. And we found out the dogs totally do notice this. So the same authors of the two thousand seven study, three of them, were also authors on a November studying Current biology called seeing left or right Asymmetric tail wagging produces different emotional responses and dogs. So this is dogs looking at video of another dog wagging its tail to the left or right, or also a frozen no wag posture, And then I

thought this was really clever. They tried this both with normal video of a dog wagging its tail and then also just with a black silhahwett of the wagging dog on a white background to eliminate other possible cues from the dog, like eyes or facial expressions, and they discovered

this didn't really make a difference. The silhouette wasn't It wasn't a big difference from looking at regular video of the dog, And so the researchers measured the dog's heart rate and then just observe their behavior as they watched the different wags, and the results were that there wasn't really a difference between how dogs reacted to the right wagon static control, but when they saw a left wag, the dog started showing elevated heart rates as if they're

now experiencing stress or anxiety, and the behavioral observation also showed that the dogs exhibited more behaviors associated with stress when they saw the left wag. Curiously, both the left wag and the static control were more stressful than the right wag according to this observation metric. So a dog

sees another dog with the right wag, that's cool. Dog sees a dog that isn't wagging at all, It seems like the dog might be getting some stress reaction there, maybe because it can't figure out what to make of this dog if it's not wagging at all. Dog sees a dog with a left wag. That's definitely a stress reaction. Something's going on here, okay, And this is definitely the kind of thing that a human could pick up on two right, Like that that it's not so uh slide

a movement that we wouldn't be able to see it. No, no, no, I mean they were able to measure it with video. Yeah, but I wouldn't sure that meant that you had to, like, you know, slow it down and all right, let's zoom in on the tail and see to what degree it's actually moving. You know, this is something we would be able to observe. Say that your local dog park. Yeah, from everything I could tell, I think, I mean you'd

have to pay close attention. Okay, So maybe the dog park might be too distracting a location to try to stop yeah, And so they didn't want to draw too many conclusions about exactly what this means about the dog's emotions. I I might have gone a little too far if I said it was definitely stress a minute ago, because what they could look at was these these external behaviors and then elevated heart rate. So that could mean any

number of things. But at least when a dog sees another dog wagging left it, it's having some kind of elevated response. So in this way, dogs do communicate something very relevant about their state of mind with a wag, and they can see it in other dogs. And that makes me think some interesting questions about the nature of communication. Like, in a very different way, the idea of communication by tail could also apply to something like a rattlesnake. Mean,

the rattlesnake is definitely communicating with its tail. It is saying don't get near me. Yeah, And so what did the dog and the rattlesnake have in common if we assume dogs inadvertently communicating information with tail wags, and I mean inadvertently here, I'm talking about the fact that the evolutionary purpose of the right or left side bias isn't

necessarily to share information with others. It might simply be a totally accidental byproduct of this brain lateralization they're talking about, you know what I mean, Like the wag might not be an adaptation that was selected for because it shared information. It might be an accident, but it's an accident that does share information, and now they've learned how to make something of that. So in what sense could we say that this is communication if it's just an accidental byproduct

that we've learned how to draw information from. And to what extent does communication have to be deliberate? Yeah? I mean that kind of underlies the complexity of communication in general, you know, this mix of deliberate and accidental cues and then and mis cues that we have to make sense off. Yeah, it makes me wonder about the origins of human language.

I know that's not exactly the subject today, but just like could human could something like human language have come from originally I don't know, incidental vocalizations that were not intended to communicate information, but they did, And then that could develop into something where we harness that for deliberate use. Yeah, it could all begin with just a simple you know, scream when you're scared, you know, and then that the various nuances involved in in in how we interpret that screen.

Now here's another topic related to tails that I think you've done a whole episode on before, which is when you pick up a bluetail lizard, you catch it, say, in a shoe box, and then its tail comes off and the children start screaming, Yes, what's going on there? Well, this brings us into the area of autotomy. Uh, as it's referred this is the shedding of a tail. Nada. You know that the animals not chewing the tail off,

it's not pulling the tail off. It's just simply and not a mouse in a glue trap situation here, just a straight up shedding of the tail. And indeed lizards get go skinks. H. This is where you you see most of the examples of Caudle autonomy caudles and related to the tail. And certainly there is a there's a whole episode of stuff to blow your mind that goes into this in a lot more detail and draws from specific studies. Uh, But for our purposes here, I just

wanted to go over in brief what's occurring. Yeah, and uh, you mentioned blue tailed skinks. Skilton skink, which is a blue tailed skink, is a is a perfect example of autotomy because the tail is bright blue, so it just adds to the attractiveness of this what is essentially thought of as a predator bribe. So like a cat sees a lizard and says, I'm gonna eat that lizard, and the lizards might not eat it yet. Yeah, yeah, certainly

there's a whole the I'm going to torture. Yeah, the game of cat perdition is is rather complicated and cruel, but essentially the lizard reaction is, look, I'm gonna leave, but I'm going to leave a little of me behind. Uh. First of all, it has fat in it, it's part of me. You can eat it and you will get a meal out of it. I'm gonna leave you a meal. Uh, that's gonna be easier to catch and put up less of a fight. But it's also thrashing around as if

it's alive. It's also bright blue, so it's easier to see. So it really is in a sense of bribe. It's not just a decoy. It's not just something that the cat gets nothing out of. You could eat the tail and get some nutrition. Yeah, it's like the you know, if you have some sort of like a bank heist movie where I've seen this pop up in various stories before, where the antiheroes are the heroes have made off with the loot that somebody the law enforcement is chasing them.

Then you have to say, how much money would I have to drop out of the back of this truck where they would stop, like they would actually pick up some of the loot and make off on their own, or you know, be satisfied with it. So it's it's kind of a gamble that the lizard is making. Another

example of this kind of behavior. And this isn't certain, but there are arguments that a vulture vomits when threatened as as a as a form of bribery as well just saying you can eat me, I'm going to put up a fight, or I could just barf up some food here and you can eat that because delicious as we all know, I mean, particularly dogs of many animals, they're they're not gonna be too picky about their food. If it's just because it's been in the belly of

a vulture, it doesn't mean it can't be eaten. Fascinating. Now there's a there's another theory about lizard autotomy, and this one comes to us from a two thousand nine University of Michigan study of lizards in Greece that concluded that the are there drop their tails when bitten on the tail by venomous snakes. Wow. Yeah, so it's the same. It's they or maybe they don't know. I mean, maybe it's not a brain response, but there's some kind of

automated response. That's that's amazing. Yeah, I mean it's it matches up rather nicely with our you know, our zombie fiction where someone's bit by a zombie, you know, on the Walking Dead, and then you have to solve that limb off so that the so that that the zombie juice won't seep in and affect the whole organism. But the great thing about that, in the zombie stories, you never really know if it's gonna work. Yeah, it's true. Well, you don't have settled zombie science, do you. It seems

like it always does. Like there seems to be a silent rule of zombie fiction that if you go and actually do the grueling hard to watch the limb amputation scene, then that character has to survive. You know, I think I've encountered it in ways that say it buys you some time, but it doesn't completely solve the problem. Maybe you've got to a smaller concentration of of zombie juice

in the door. Then, um, so science scientist, you know, to to go back to the cat example, Like scientists have long thought the tail shedding is an issue of predator pressure. But and so this would mean that the more predators there are for a species in a given area, the greater the need for an effective defense mechanism. So tail dropping explodes in in any area of high lizard

predator pressure. But this two thousand nine study, um, you know, argues that the lizards of the offshore A, G, and C Islands examined in the study, Um, in these cases it all comes down to an evolutionary reaction to their single most pressing predator, in this case the vipers. So these are specialized lizard predators, and so you see an emergence of a of a specialized uh anti predator defense. Now,

I wonder how this adaptation affects the viper hunting strategy. Indeed, Yeah, because any of these these areas, it's Uh, you know, it's an arms race with one side trying to keep up with the other. Certainly, So here's a question I've never found out. Can they grow it back? They can grow it back, but it's not the best way to think of it is it's not a full size spare. You'll grow back a tail that is uh less functional, you know, but but also a tail that can be

can also be dropped again. So when they dropped the tail, the muscles that encircle uh this particular plane of the creatures of body, they constrict kind of natural tourniquet to to keep the you know, blood from from bleeding out. And then immediately after this, the skin also contracts around the end of the of the tail, forming a stub, and then it goes out from there. In these little lizards that are everywhere, that's that's science fiction. It's got

a natural tourniquet. Yeah. And if you're wondering how it even uh severs it to begin with, there's been some cool studies and of this they point out that the tail autonomy occurs at preformed horizontal fracture points. So essentially, um, it's a fracture plane across the vertebra. Um or the the the intervertebral and the lizard assists the the autatonomy

by by contracting the muscles around that fracture plane. And here the structural integrity of the tail in its connection to the rest of the body is maintained by the adhesion force of integrated muscles, complete with micro structures that mushroom out when it's time to release the tail man. Now, it's of course, it's it's interesting when you start thinking about the costs here. You know, the cost of that bribe if you're making, or the cost of losing that

limb to the zombie or the or the viper. Well, it's a it's a calculated risk because it sounds like losing the tail isn't going to hurt the lizard, except that it's just admitting defeat on a certain front. It's saying, Okay, I've put a certain number of resources into the tail. I'm gonna have to give it up. Yeah, it's letting. It's letting the bad money go down the drain. Yeah, the bad money's gone down the drain. And then what do you do when another cat shows up. That's it's

a wonderful trick. But once you've you've used it. You've got to regrow that tail to get to the point where you can drop it again. Um. So it's a it's an interesting strategy and and indeed a gamble, but one that's been paying off for him because it's it remains a staple of of a number of different reptiles. Does anything other than a lizard drop its tail, Yes,

And that brings us back to the scorpion um. There there are rare there are a few rare South American scorpions of the Anatrists genus who also practice coddle autotomy. And when they lose their tails, First of all, they lose it for good. There's no growing the tail back in this case. Uh they have. They just drop it and it's gone. But also if they lose their tail, they lose their anus, and that's because the scorpions anus is located at the end of the tail the gut.

The gut extends through the tail and opens up at the back of the fifth segment, just ahead of the stinger segment um initially draws. You know, we're talking about what's the difference between tails? What are tails like? This is a drastically different tail structure than you find in other creatures because the gut extends back there. I mean, the the anus is at the almost the end of

the tail. That's crazy. Can you imagine if you had an appendage that you pooped out of, like if you could if you could reach into a hole and then poop in the hole, it would it would totally change our bathroom behavior, that's for sure. Now you probably wonder what happens to the scorpion when it's lost its tail and it's lost its anus, uh fleeing from a predator. Well, it essentially cannot poop again for the rest of its lie. So it ends up just inflating like a fecal balloon

until it dies. That's a nightmare. Yeah, but hey, it's a living nightmare as opposed to just dying. So, I mean, that's the hard truth of survival right there. And when you've got when you've got pinching claws like a scorpion, what else really matters? Yeah, you still have your claws like the pinch the world. The creature is still functional. As we pointed out in the last episode, um, a scorpion doesn't even use its tail when it's dealing with a smaller or easier to handle prey, so so you

can keep stuffing yourself with things that you cannot poop. Ever, right, it's it's not game over. It just means you can't staying and you can't poop. But life goes on, Life finds a way, you know. One of the one more thing about autotomy that I thought was interesting is that it reminds me of certain mythological tales in these mythical creatures. You know, there are tons of mythical creatures that are

amalgamations of different kinds of animals. So they've got the head of a lion and the ways of an eagle and the beak of squid or something. But there are some animals that have tails that are snake tails, but they're not just snake tails as in the tail of a snake like a snake's tail, but they have a tail that is a snake, as in the front half

of a snake, a snake with a head. I know, I've seen this mentioned, and at least some versions of the cerberus or caraboss, smith, the chimera, and I think the new a creature all seem to have at least in some versions that I've seen mentioned the tales that aren't just snake tails but are snakes, And I don't know that that seems like an interesting parallel to the idea of of tales that can become separated and then sort of have a life of their own, like they

some of these tales that they get cut off keep wiggling right, And I wonder if stories like this could have been inspired by seeing tales that that can separate and continue to live, like is that a snake or a worm? Now? Huh? Well, you know. And it also would seem in such a creature that it would make sense to have a tail that resembles a snake for either defensive or predatory purposes. Oh, certainly, it reminds me of a particular there's a particular snake and a polotician.

Not having the details, it's in a I did a Monster of the Week post about Cthulhu as Cthulhu appears in a particular movie from the nineties and uh, and in that I talked about a type of snake where its tail is used to lure in other creatures. And the tail I believe is supposed to look a little bit like, uh, a little bit like feathers, I believe. So there are cases where the tail is used as a decoy to to lure something in. Huh, well, I

think it's time to talk about Homo sapiens Robert. Yes, yes, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we will talk about the human tail. So the big question, where's the human tail? Exactly? It's been god for a long time. We're angry. We want our tails, you know, as as individuals who were not born with them. We wonder like, where where are they? Or do we have ancestors that once had tails? Um? Because apart from from apes um, and then that's the main area. Us and

our fellow great ape can we have no tails. Yeah, but you can look at other mammals. So obviously our vertebrate ancestors we believe had tails, but there are other mammals that have adapted to not have tails anymore, right right there, moles, hedgehogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, bears, bats, koalas sloths of goodies, uh, and a handful of other creatures. But that we are the larger primates are certainly the most outstanding examples. Right So, yeah, we're part of the

great apes family. When did the apes lose their tails? Well, it seems like this happened around twenty million years ago. Uh. Fossil evidence points to proconsul an early fossil eight from about eighteen to twenty million years ago, located Eastern Africa areas including Kenya and Uganda. And in this particular species, based on the fossil evidence, again we see a mixture

of Old World monkey and eight characteristics. UH. And it's one of the if not the first eight species that we see without a tail, based again on what the bones tell us. Now it still raises the question though, alright, so twenty million years ago, that's the timeline. But why right, So if tails are useful, why don't we have them anymore? And I think this draws on a principle of evolution that that we often see, which is that over time, if you're not making use of something, you'll lose it.

If you don't need it, it'll go away. It might take some time to go away, but eventually it will go away. It's just the basic economics of evolution. You know, things like all these features that you have. It's like explaining it to a child, right, all these fancy features we have in the house. These are extra and if we're not using that lightbulb, then uh, in that lamp, we need to turn it off. And then that's kind of just the natural way that the forms constrict and

grow over time. But what are some major hypotheses about why it's lost their tails, like why did they become useless? Well, I was reading about this and Reachard Richard Dawkins the ancestors tail and that's t a l e. By the way, it's not all about tales, but he he points out that this is largely an under addressed topic and evolutionary biology, but they're there are a couple of theories that he discusses. One is the hopeful monster theory. Yeah, and this this

has to do with this sort of random mutation. He points out that that max cats have a single gene that makes them tail less. These are the cats that don't have tails tail as cats. And it all comes down to again, do just a single gene. And it's also homozygous, meaning that it's lethal if present twice, so

it's un likely to spread through evolution. But the idea he is here is that perhaps some form of max monkey, some sort of random tail was monks monkey was an exception to the rule, and this random mutation just became the norm. Not a very exciting theory, but it Anny lays it out as sort of a you know, a distant possibility here, those just sort of an accident amplified, right. The better theory the more the one with more weight

to it. Here is the biped theory, and this is that uh that many tailed primates are occasional bipeds, and when something like a spider monkey walks in all fours, the tail gets in the way. So it can be surmised that tree active gibbons have no tails because they project themselves to other branches from a vertical hanging position rather than the monkey's horizontal leaping posture. For the gibbon, the tail would be a drag rather than a steadying rudder.

This sort of goes back to what I was talking about in the previous episode. When you see all these New World monkeys with their pre insile tails, um you you often see them in these thickly forested environments where they're they're swinging from trees and they're using the tails and in climbing situations. The more bipedal you get it seems like the less need you really have for a tail.

It's also worth noting that the large vegetarian for the most part, land based apes perhaps had increasingly little use for either fast attacks or speedy retreats from predators, you know which in which case that that tail would be handy and shooting up into the trees, etcetera. And as such, many of the primary tail uses were lost to them. Again,

it's just the the economics of evolution. You can also factor communication into this, because if we're using we're depending more on vocalization, then maybe there's less need for that communication uh device that we call a tail. If you can say words, you don't need the dogs right egg

left wag signal. Yeah, it's really the interesting thing about this topic is, like all these different animal examples we've brought up, we kind of had to go through all those to even address this still unanswered question of where the tail went, because you have to think about not only what a tail doesn't and you know, for one species, but what a tail can do across the board to end up with some sort of answer for why we

don't have one at all. Yeah, Now this is funny because we're saying we don't have tails, which is true, but in a certain way that's not exactly true. That's right, because we do have tailbones. We do, and m it's just kind of a it's a vestigial um part of our vertebrae, just sort of coiled up there, uh, you know,

inside our butts essentially. Uh. And it's also why it hurts so much if you fall, particularly if you fall into the small in your back or directly under your butt, say while you're um, you know, skating or something, because there's there's not enough padding for the cossacks back there. Now, as we mentioned either at the beginning of this episode or perhaps at the beginning of the first tail episode, um tales are hard coded into us enough that they

remain a part of our embryonic development. Right, So if you watch an embryo develop in the womb, you'll you can see stages where it gets a tail and then it loses the tail again. Yeah. And we've all seen comparisons between say, a killer whale embryo and a human embryo and how close they are, right, because essentially you have this sort of uh, you know, theygue mammalian embryo that then develops more and more until it looks more and more human or more and more like a killer whale.

During the fifth and six weeks weeks of life, the human embryo has a tail with ten to twelve vertebrae, and it's by eight weeks that it that it disappears completely. You just suck it back in. Yeah, so it's just you know, it's kind of like it comes out factory. The factory model has the tail and then you lose it. Yeah, and it's interesting. I've definitely read about cases where tail also have reappeared in babies born in the in the modern world. Oh yeah, yeah, we get into the case

of of atavism. Ativism refers to traits of distant ancestors that reappear in modern day and the most pressing example of this is the tail, probably because it's just resonates more culturally. It's like the idea of like a human with a tail, are they really a human? What's happening here? You know, the fear that we're more beastial than than enlightened human. Right, And I guess there are a couple

of types of tails you could be born with. Right, that's right, there's a pseudo tail and the much rare, quote unquote true human tail. Uh. The pseudo tail doesn't have any bones or cartilage. It's just skin and fat, and as such it's it's easily removed. Uh. Pseudo tails, they just have a superficial resemblance to true tales. Uh. They're also a number of growths or cysts that can

form right at the tip of the tailbone. Some of the more um, you know, unpleasant options are actually large tumors, elongations, elongations of existing vertebrae. Uh. And then also in cases of parasitic twins, there's also it can be some tissue that that that forms back there. So your lost twin could be a tale essentially, yeah. Uh. And then there are the true tales. But the human true tale is uh, this kind of a controversial subject. I mean a little bit.

I've seen it written about as if it's more controversial. But then in some sources are more firm on the matter. Um, it has nerves and muscles, and sometimes according to some you'll find cartilage and vertebrae. Uh. According to the two thousand twelve paper Spectrum of Human Tales, a report of six cases, they indicate that bones cartilage, uh not a chord and spinal cord are lacking in even a true tale. As such, a true tale is easily removed surgically without

residual effects. And it's only you know, rarely is it some sort of a family trait. There's only one case in you know, in recent history, uh where we where it's been reported that they were actually vertebrae in the human tale. So by and large, even a true quote unquote true tale in a human is not an extension of the vertebrate. So it's worth keeping in mind. And

and it's such it's it's easily removed. So in most cases this would not be something that an individual would carry around with them, assuming they had adequate access to medical care. So we still can't say, one ever, cent for sure why we lost the tale. Um, there's some you know, convincing theories here, convincing arguments. I mean, essentially, we lost it because we did not need it anymore. But that of course leads us to the question of are we ever going to get tales again? Right? I mean,

just because we're rere evolved to get them back? Yeah, I mean in a way, if we still have the genetic blueprints somewhere in our DNA about how to make a tale, and then said, we're just saying no, don't do that anymore. What if we reverse that process and said no, by all means build it? You know, yeah, I mean the to go back to the hyperion reference that I made earlier, an orbital environmental gravity environment. Seems like that would be a prime example of a case

where humans might potentially evolve that tale. Right, But you don't have to imagine space travel to think that humans might get tales again, that's right. We can find discussions of human tales and sort of trans human tales in the works of Charles Fourier, a French philosopher. He lived seventeen seventy two through eighteen thirty seven. Uh also an influential early socialist thinker who had a rather substantial impact on utopian thinking, so particularly in the utopian societies of

the mid eighteen hundreds. You know this guy. When I was reading about him, he gave me some very familiar vibes. Realized he was exciting the same st range chords in my brain that I got from reading about John Murray Spear and our techno religion episode. Indeed, Yeah, they have similar time frame as similar sort of futurist visions going on strange futurist utopia the people at the time thought

was very unsettling. Yeah, I mean, and there is a guy who he presented a number of ideas that were potentially unsettling to people, both in a realistic and in a fantastic frame, but also popular to some people. Yeah, because he was advocating change, and he advocated a utopian vision for humanity. He proposed radical advancements in human culture,

advancements that would change man and his universe. So as humans exist at the center of Fourier's universe, elevating ourselves to a state of harmony, uh causes the universe to follow suit. Like we're the We're very much again the center of this universe where the spoke on this wheel. And if we elevate ourselves, we literally change everything else.

So along the same lines as John Murray Spear, he didn't just have in mind making a better society, like improving the rules that govern how humans interact, but truly making a better human being. Yeah, better human being and just and like just a better world that would like literally like he proposed an age uh, in which the polls will have warmed and been rendered fertile by a new Aurora borealis, in which wild animal like so so

utopian is this vision? Wild antibals will will be succeeded by their antidotes, such as anti lions and anti sharks instead of sharks and lions. Like. That's the level of harmony this guy was talking about. Uh. We also we would uh, we'd grow to a height of seven feet tall and we would live to be about a hundred and forty four years old on average. Man, if we're seven ft tall, the anti lions aren't gonna stand the chance against us. I mean, they're just living amongst us.

I guess, you know, dogs and cats living together. But he also the anti lion will lay down with anti lamb. Yeah. Um. But you know he also apparently thought that we might have tales too. And this is an area that it becomes kind of controversial in his history because his critics love to focus on it. Uh. And you would see the political cartoons essentially in which you would see Fourier himself with a tail, and that tail terminating and an eyeball. It's a tail with an eyeball, Yes, Yeah, that's so

good because because that's like a D and D monster. Yeah, and uh, you know, I guess you could look around corners and stuff and you know they're I mean really what just you can list a thousand uses for a tail with an eyeball. You know, though, we we talked in our Grizzly Bears from Outer Space episode about why we think having an eye at the end of an appendage is not necessarily the best idea because it's not right next to your brain and it can become injured

by a bodily injury. Yeah, it's not a good place to stow an eyeball. I mean unless you had, you know, sufficient covering some sort of a sheath that goes over it. But maybe Fourier didn't, didn't really think about that. Yeah. There,

so you see two different sizes to this. So again, his critics are using this to say this is a ridiculous, fantastic idea, this guy's a nutjob, and so at least after eighteen forty and again that's after his death, but but his followers are still carrying his ideas and holding both high. Um. Around this time, his his followers began to sort of chime in and say no, he wasn't

actually saying humans would have tales. It's a little more complicated than that, and it it seems one of the more you the closer you look at it, like it's a little calm and a little calm b like he's essentially saying humans will have tales, But it does involve a a richer, more elaborate mythos so um according to

the book's selections from the works of Fourier. Fourier claims that he claimed that he was referring to the extra terrestrial solarians quote must be endowed with brilliant faculties denied to us humans, so essentially gifts that God knew we weren't ready for, such as an amazing tale. So these solarians factored into four as greater metaphysics, uh, in which so called harmoniums, which are these sort of elevated humans who have who have come to terms with peace on

Earth and utopian existence. Uh. They they enjoy multiple lives on Earth in addition to extraterrestrial lives beyond our planet, in which they benefit from these various physical gifts. So Fourier wrote, I have remarked that this superiority is due principally to a member of which we are deprived, and which comprehends the following properties protection and falling, powerful weapon, splendid ornament, gigantic stream, infinite dexterity, cooperation, and support in

all the bodily motions. In discussing this problem, journalists devoid of imagination say that the Silarians resemble the demons of the Forest of Saint Anthony, equipped with horns, probosis, claws, and tales, and that I wish to create men like this upon our globe. Oh so you're putting fourier and kind of a anton Jessop. I guess I'm kind of

following into that that bit. I mean, clearly, you know, the man that's wild, it's wonderful, but he he makes some good points, right, you know, we would we might be better off if we had splendid ornament, gigantic strength, powerful weapon. Well, it's it's it's interesting that he's referring to many of the things we've discussed here in this episode. You know, the all these strengths that the tale has for other organisms, so why not us? And and it's

you know, it's a false argument. He's makings, he's saying, we'd be better off with these these things, these things that we evidently did not need to to ascend to this level of our evolution. Again, his followers tended to

downplay this. But according to Charles four A, The Visionary and His World by Jonathan Beecher for a certainly did right of human tales, and in these rights, and these writings were censored, you know later on quote the harmony in arm or arquebus is a vertebal tale, a tale of immense length and with one d and forty four vertebrae. This member is as redoubtable as it is industrious. It

is a natural weapon. The arquebus terminates with a very small, elongated hand, a hand as strong as the clause of an eagle or a crab. When a man is swimming, the arquebus will help him move as fast as a fish. It can stretch to the bottom of the water, carrying fish nets and making them fast. With its help, a man can reach a branch twelve feet high, climb up and down the tree, pick fruit at the very top of the tree, and put it in a basket tied

to the archamen. It serves as a whip and a rain to a man who is driving a horse drawn plow. It can be used to tame a wild horse. The writer can tie up the horse's legs with his arcabus. It is infinitely useful, and in the playing of musical instruments it doubles a person's manual faculties since its fingers, although very small, are extremely stretchable. Hey, we were talking about that earlier, were playing music. This guy was was ahead of ahead of us, anticipated like every single thing

we said in this episode. But yeah, so he's talking about a prehensile tale that can can do all of the things we would expect in an arm or a limb, except it's even better. Yeah, and we would use it to do all these utopian things like climbing trees and being a wild horse, which seems kind of counter to the whole harmonium thing, right. I think it's kind of funny that one of the advantages he lists is that it can stretch to the bottom of the water carrying

fish nets. Yeah. I don't know. I guess, you know, it's kind of different time, I guess. Yeah. Again, I guess it's kind of like an in turn return to Eden sort of vibe at this ride is that we would in a sense, we would be we would we were returning to our like pre aphe existence, only with presumably a utopian human intellect. Wait, hold on, so did for you have an idea about why humans did not

have this amazing archibras already? I believe it's because we've sucked because and and again, people who are more familiar with for As work can can write in and uh and flesh this out force a bit. But my understanding, based on the sources I was looking at, is that it's essentially humans have a dystopian existence and therefore have are not are not privy to these gifts because these gifts would be squandered on war and violence and all. And it's only if we true might have a tail,

I would only use it for war. You would you just go and like pick our fights and just start tail flapping fools left and right. It's the it's the xenomorph tail again, it is. Yeah, So yeah, if humans had tales, they would essentially be xenomorphs. And we see that, I mean a little look at all. You know all of our fictional creatures that have tales, they're often using miss weapons. Anyway, that's that's our fantasy, that's our dystopian fantasy.

For for tale usage, Fourier thought differently, though he saw the utopian dream here. I can respect that, you know. It also brings to mind the two thousand nine novel The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, a novel by Russian author Victor Pelvin. Are you familiar with this work? No, not at all. It's an interesting book. It's um. It sounds like it's gonna be sort of a you know, underworld that it's actually a very very literate little work that speaks to the to to the heart of sort

of the Russian soul at the time. Now, wait a minute, this isn't related to that to that werewolf spy novel you found at the beach that you were telling you. No, no, no, that's that's a different that's a far treasure um book. This one. This one has more of a literal area slant, but it does at the heart concern a love story between a an x KGB werewolf and a and a two thousand year old ware fox um and the ware Fox in particular, she's capable of greater yogur powers since

she has additional chakras in her tail. Chakras are, of course, are those energy points in uh in Eastern metaphysics. Um, you know that that go up and down your vertebra. So if you had more vertebra you would have more chakras. So like a very long snake would have tons of chakras. I guess, so yeah, yeah, and you know by that respect, you know many of the animals here. What would what would do I mean, even though a scorpion doesn't have vertebrae, what would it chakras be like? I don't know if

it were. It's of course that a scorpion is a very uh, non yogic creature. It's a very uh, it's a very self centered and spiteful organism. So I can't imagine it engaging in a lot of meditation. Okay, So to finally revisit the question one more time, will humans ever evolve tales again? Will we get them back? My feeling is, if I'm gonna stop messing around and say what I really think, I don't don't really think so,

because why would that happen. It seems like they would either have to be a selection pressure in favor of it, like that people who had them would be more likely to have more children. I don't see why that would be given our level of technology and our you know, civilized technological existence. It just doesn't seem like the strong you know, survival or reproduction preference for a tale would re emerge. But maybe we could get them back just

through genetic engineering. Yeah, if we just really wanted them bad enough, then we could genetically engineer the more. Potentially, I don't know why we'd want that surgically augment ourselves to create tales. But but even then, that's yeah, the genetic would be the only way that we would be alteringing the species as opposed to individual members of that species. And as we discussed, it's been so long since apes

lost that tale, you know, twenty million years. By the time something post human evolved a tail like that would not be a human anymore. That would not be Homo sapiens. That would be something else. That's a great point. So there's that. But we'd love to hear from everyone else, what what do you think will humans ever develop a tail? Wherever evolve a tail? And to go back to the question at the very beginning of this, uh, this two parter would you choose wings or would you choose a tail?

Which one would you acquire and why would you use it? I would probably say neither. Neither. Neither wasn't a choice to chase wings and tail. Well, then I'll go with the xenomorph tail because you never know when you're gonna need it. You never know, all right, So there you have it, uh tales. You know, if you didn't listen to that first the first part of this, go back

and listen to it. There are a lot of great tale uh examples in that episode as well, and you can find all the episodes of the podcast that Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com that is the mothership. You'll also find blog post videos, links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler.

And if you'd like to let us know whether you'd rather have wings or a tail given all of the qualifications we offered at the beginning of the first episode, or if you'd like to let us know an interesting tail fact or give us feedback on any of the stuff we talked about in this episode, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, does it, how stuff works, dot com