Uner+Tan

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Uner Tan is/was a Turkish Neurosurgeon born on May 1, 1937. He is most famous for the discovery, documentation, and study of a neurological condition known as Uner Tan Syndrome, a proposed syndrome that has been cited as an example of "backwards evolution." Uner Tan Syndrome is primarily neurological in nature, with its most visible symptom is the natural preference for quadrupedal movement, or in layman's terms, motion utilizing all four limbs instead of just the legs, against what is generally expected in humans. Other symptoms include a lack of fine motor coordination in the limbs, involuntary eye movement, and overall underdevelopment of the cerebellum (the region of the brain responsible for motor control.) There is room for variations, as the syndrome is responsible for symptoms unique to an individual. Other symptoms include limited speech and cognitive functions, both also neurological in origin, though their relationship with the main symptom of quadrupedal movement is uncertain. The immediate cause of this syndrome is uncertain, due to the extreme rarity of the syndrome and the associated difficulty in properly studying what happens to them. The most accepted explanation is that the syndrome involves the mutation of a recessive gene, which would certainly explain its rarity, though one family member had genetic traits similar to the ones his family had, yet he did not display the generally accepted symptoms of the disease. So the syndrome is accepted to be not solely genetic in origin. Some researchers have proposed that the syndrome is produced from a genetic abnormality and is compounded by the social environment in which the subject lives. The "bear crawling" has been suggested to start in childhood, with approximately 5% of children adapting that instead of a regular walk. This leads to the current hypothesis that it a multitude of factors that influence this syndrome, no one of them particularly dominant. It has also been said that bear walking is a potentially natural inclination for human movement, but through millions of years of evolution bipedalism has become the norm and quadrupedal movement has fallen into disuse. In that conjecture, Uner Tan syndrome can be though of as an evolutionary throwback, though that is still uncertain.

Citations:
1. Downey, Greg. "Human, quadruped: Uner Tan Syndrome, part 1." //blogs.plos.org//. N.p., 3 Sept. 2010. Web. 14 Jan. 2013. .