A human baby born with a “tail” has some people thinking it's an evolutionary throwback.
The baby born with a tail is no evidence of evolution
Crowds converged on temples in India to see a baby born with a “tail” in 2001.
Many believed the boy was a reincarnated Hindu god. The boy, at one-year old when this report came out in early 2002, was named Balaji, another name for the monkey-faced god Lord Hanuman.
The baby's “tail” was 10 centimeters long, and the boy was being exhibited in temples throughout India, where people paid to see him.
Indian newspaper The Tribune said the boy's grandfather showed journalists nine spots on the baby's body, which is what Lord Hanuman supposedly had.
Cases of babies with “tails” surface occasionally. A paper in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1982 by Dr. Fred Ledley was titled “Evolution and the Human Tail.”
There are two types of tails involved in this discussion. The non-bony tail, and the bony tail.
Non-bony tails
This Indian baby's “tail”, like nearly all cases of human “tails”, is not a real tail. And it is not evidence of evolution. It doesn't have any bones in it, and doesn't have a nerve cord either.
Does this baby's tail have anything to do with the idea that humans and monkeys may be related? Not in the slightest. It is just skin and fatty tissue, and can easily be cut off.
As biologist Dr. Gary Parker once said about these fatty tumor tails: “So far as I know, no one claims we evolved from an animal with a fatty tumor at the end of its spine.”
Bony tails
The second type of “tail”, a rarer type, is one that has bone in it. For some strange reason, a few evolutionists think this is clear evidence that humans evolved from creatures with tails.
But this is like recognizing faces of your friends in clouds. You read into the facts an assumption that is not supported by the facts.
Abnormalities, sadly, occur in humans as well as in animals. And sometimes simple ailments such as back aches are wrongly claimed to be a result of evolution.
Evolutionists have for decades pooh-poohed anyone who says humans evolved from monkeys. They insist we evolved not from monkey-like creatures, but from ape-like creatures (they usually phrase it: “humans share a common ancestor with apes”).
But monkeys have tails and anthropoid apes don't. If evolutionists believe that the bony tail is evidence that we evolved from monkey-type creatures, why do they insist that we evolved from a common ancestor with apes, which generally don't have tails?
They change their evidence to suit the occasion. So they can't blame people for treating evolution as something of a “fairy tail”.
For a refutation of the misleading article on “human tails” on the TalkOrigins website, see the CMI article Human tails and fairy tales.
Related topics:
- Do human embryos retrace the stages of evolution?
- Do we get back pains because of evolution?
- A chicken with no feathers challenges evolution.
- Is evolution a fact, like gravity?
- The Tourmai fossil found in Chad was not a pre-human ancestor.
- How can you know if God exists? Maybe Santa Claus exists too?
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