The Ulas Family

Sorry if this has already been posted about, but i havent posted here for like 6 months so i think i'm due for posting anyways.

I just watched a show on PBS entitled "The Family That Walks On All Fours". Well, actually i only caught the last 10 minites of it, but it was enough to get me highly interested. Its about a family of 19 in Turkey and 5 (1 male, 4 female) of the 19 members have to walk on all four. Nobody can really tell what causes it, though some think its the DNA makeup. at first the assumption was sometyhings not clicking right in their head, but was disproven by Prof Roger Keynes, a neuroscientist at cambridge university when he noted that the father has the same trait but can walk (unbalanced, like a drunk) bipedality. So the brain cannot be the whole story since individuals born with a lack of cerebellum can still in a manner walk bipedality. Anyways, heres my cites and links. Sorry if the info up above isnt 100% accurate, but im tired and like i said, i only caught the very last 10 minutes.

The family that walks on all 4

The PBS site

Ulas family site

world science

Daily Mail (UK)

man nobody has any opinions on this?

Originally posted by Schmidt1989
man nobody has any opinions on this?

Didnt see it. Wierd. Great. Now il get a 1 line warning again.

It is too bad that you aren't getting any responses with your first post in six months. I am sure it is facinating and all, my mom watched it, said for one thing the mom and dad were first cousins and that scientists thought that somehow their brains were de-evolving. Also the girl was mentally retarded. (Sorry for the use of that ugly term)

All in all I am not interested enough to read up on it, cause sooooooo many other things to check out.

Thanks for sharing, though!

I wonder if this is a completely isolated case. If so it's probably nothing that I would really think too much about myself; genetic mutations that are isolated to one family out of the entire population just don't interest me too much. What does interest me is the whole idea of de-evolution. If incest is the cause of this mutation, then blah blah blah, people should stop sleeping with their hot cousins. But if this is caused by a genetic mutation having nothing to do with inter-related procreating, then de-evolution might be a very interesting topic to research. Is it possible that we're reaching the climax of our evolutionary progression? I believe a species must always be evolving, (or de-evolving); I don't think we can just get to a point and stop. If cases like this start to pop up all over the world among non-incestual couples I think we might have a very intersting situation on our hands. I think that's highly unlikely, but a very intersting story nonetheless.