"Now a team of scientists in New York say they have pinpointed the genetic mutation that may have erased our tails."

"When the scientists made this genetic tweak in mice, the animals didn’t grow tails, according to a new study that was posted online last week... Darwin shocked his Victorian audiences by claiming that we descended from primates with tails..... 'This question — where’s my tail? — has been in my head since I was a kid,' said Bo Xia, a graduate student in stem cell biology at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. A bad Uber ride in 2019, in which Mr. Xia injured his coccyx, brought it back to his mind with fresh urgency. 'It took me a year to recover, and that really stimulated me to think about the tailbone,' he said.... [H]e compared the DNA of six species of tail-less apes to nine species of tailed monkeys. Eventually, he discovered a mutation shared by apes and humans — but missing in monkeys — in a gene called TBXT.... The mutation that Mr. Xia discovered had not been observed before. It consisted of 300 genetic letters in the middle of the TBXT gene.... Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists. The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches... It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.... 'That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?'"

From "How Humans Lost Their Tails/A new study suggests that a single genetic mutation helps explain why monkeys have tails, while apes and people do not" (NYT).

ADDED: I continued reading the article blogged in the previous post and I ran into this, which I want to put here:

I thought, early on, I would’ve loved to have been a singer. But I realized that, at a certain point, the audience makes a pact. I remember this guy, his name was George Kirby, I saw him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He did the greatest impersonations of everybody. And one week, on “Ed Sullivan,” he just was going legit. He was just going to sincerely sing. And I’m going, “Is there a sandbag that drops on him at one point? You’re breaking your contract with us.” Lorne Michaels has this thing where he says, “You go to the zoo and you see the monkeys and they have a right to be reflective, but if they’re not swinging by their tails and jumping around, we go, ‘I’ll come back later.’ Marty, you’re one of the monkeys.”

"Musk is the first person from the business world to host SNL since Donald Trump in 2015...."

"Such unorthodoxy could give both Musk and [SNL producer Lorne] Michaels what they want: an important new audience for Michaels, and a humanization of Musk during a time of fierce anti-1-percenter sentiment. It also could blow up in their faces.... Musk will arrive on SNL just a week after four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully splashed down at night in the Gulf of Mexico.... Musk has also garnered notice for his quixotic tunnel plans, his cryptocurrency investments, an unexpected move to Texas, an infamous Joe Rogan podcast appearance, a more infamous cybertruck failure, his belief that pandemic lockdowns were ‘fascist,’ and skeptical comments about the coronavirus vaccine, though he later walked those back.... 'I think Lorne recognizes if he just keeps playing to liberals on the coasts, his audience will wither,' said a late-night television veteran familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve a relationship with the producer. 'So he’s trying something.' But those efforts are fraught; previous attempts at audience expansion have backfired. In 2019, Michaels hired the working-man’s comic Shane Gillis in part to appeal to Middle America but had to let him go just days later when it was revealed Gillis had used racist and homophobic slurs. Another bid for red-state audiences came last October with the naming of the young country star Morgan Wallen as musical guest. That blew up, too, when Wallen was seen partying maskless in an Alabama bar...."

Writes Steven Zeitchik in "Elon Musk is being brought in to save SNL’s sagging ratings. He could sink the show in other ways. In the entertainment and business worlds, there is an argument in favor of the unorthodox host — as well as plenty of warnings" (WaPo).

Zeitchik seems way overinvested in preserving "SNL" as a bastion of liberal/woke politics. Or is he beset with flashbacks over that 2015 Trump appearance? That all seemed like good fun — even a good way to hurt Trump — and then look what happened! 

And I can't let this go without mention: "Musk has also garnered notice for his quixotic tunnel plans." He doesn't just get notice. He garners notice. That is he saves up the notice in garners — a "garner" being a granary or a storehouse for corn. "Garner" was a noun for centuries before it was a verb, and as a verb it's a dead metaphor, but some of us — me, chiefly — remember the dead. 

If I worked on this post all day, I could figure out a way to connect garnering to "quixotic," because the reference is to Don Quixote, and Don Quixote famously tilted at windmills, so you have 2 things connected to grain — mills and garners. But I have some restraint. I'll just show you this fantastic Gustave Doré illustration: