Baby born with tail is no evidence of evolution



Crowds are converging on Indian temples to see a baby with a "tail."

Many believe the boy is a reincarnated Hindu god. The boy, at one-year old in early 2002, is named Balaji, another name for the monkey-faced god Lord Hanuman.

The baby's "tail" is 10 centimeters long, and he is being exhibited in temples throughout India, where people are paying 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."

But these "tails" are not real tails. They don't have any bones in them and don't have a nerve cord either. Do they have anything to do with the idea that humans and monkeys may be related? Not in the slightest. They are 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."



Source
http://www.users.bigpond.com/rdoolan/babytail.html

He may not live long
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_545086.html

sweet merciful crap, that tail is creepy looking...

It looks a lot like a finger....

Looks to me like a deformed carrot But yeah, I'd heard of this sort of thing happening every so often.

yes, there are another records of humans tails....speaking of freaks, i hear a new about a girl in Saudi Arabia who cry little stones or something like that...anyone knows about it?

Eww. That tail is really, really gross looking.

I've always kinda thought it would be cool to have a tail. Not like that one though.

Some sort of long prehensile tail would be neat though. I'd hang from trees or something.

Could be fake , & it isn't even in the middle of his back by the looks of it

That poor kid

I just want to cut that think right off!
Grandad must be making a packet

oh, it won't be fake...this has been known to happen from time to time. It's just an unusual growth where the body stores fat. There's nothing mystical about it though, or evolutionary...just a mutation that pops up now and then.

ugh that is nasty looking. At least he is being praised and not ridiculed for his tail

Amazing!.... But looks like he has a tumour. According to the article, the kid was born to a Muslim family, while Hanuman is an Indian God...man what a mess...

omg, its a Saiyajin(sp) from DBZ

I TOLD YOU ALL THEY WERE REAL OMG :/