He is best known for his discovery and study of the human quadrupedal condition he named the Uner Tan syndrome.
He graduated from secondary school in Çorum and started college at Ege University, at the Faculty of Medicine, in 1956.
[1] According to Tan, persons affected by this syndrome walk with a quadrupedal locomotion and are afflicted with "primitive" speech and severe mental retardation; he postulated that this is an example of backward evolution.
[2] He proposed the syndrome after studying the Ulas family of rural southern Turkey, five of whom have these symptoms.
[citation needed] Neuroscientist and evolutionary psychologist Roger Keynes, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and medical scientist John Skoyles have argued that the gait of these individuals is due to two rare phenomena coming together, not atavism.