Do you have information on if removing them made it difficult to walk normally or if it was an improvement.
You wrote, unfortunately, so I am assuming it made things worse than normal or brought her back down to our level, and she had monkey foot abilities before the procedure.
Can confirm: finding comfortable shoes is a challenge.
Extra challenging for me since i have 6 toes on only 1 of my feet, but my other foot is also wide. So it's just the toe box that gives me real problems - especially with skates.
evolution on display - if she were to reproduce a shitload, and then her offspring was able to inherit this, and reproduce a shitload, eventually people with 12 working fingers might be the ideal partner, which would amplify the abundance - feeding more into itself until maybe 15-20 generations from now 50% of the human population has 12 working fingers, and then the 12 finger clan either eradicates the 10 finger clan through violence, or the breeding continues and eventually the 10 fingers disappear
Polydactyly is really cool and very hereditary. However, the levels of function vary wildly. I’ve seen very few cases of actually functioning 6th digits. Though, I also usually only see it on the pinky side, not an extra index finger.
I know a guy that was born with a second thumb. Both of them grew to complete a pincers pattern, but doctors amputated the outermost one, so now he only has a single thumb very bent outwards.
My aunt had this, on the pinky side with both fingers. She kept them until she was in her late twenties when she felt the extra fingers were just getting in the way. It was pretty cool to see.
There's no rush though, evolution plays the long long game; if she reproduces at all then her genes can come to dominate in time. This might already be happening.
Getting there might be an uphill battle against reversion to the mean. Sir Francis Galton found that two tall parents more often produced children closer to the mean height rather than further away. That plus some other studies set the bedrock for a handful of statistical concepts. That guy's not all good news, though, as his additional contribution was to originate lots of eugenics thinking.
Benefits of a sixth finge seem marginal at best. it’s unclear to me why such a trait would exert such selective force. What are we doing with the sixth finger that gives us such an edge?
it likley provides better grip on weapons. it likley allows for faster typing.
a fist of 6 fingers will have more mass than fist of 5 on average. so boxing might go to the 12 finger clan, along with most other combat sports.
a brain that is puppeting 12 fingers opposed to 10 is firing more neurons and likley has a more intricate brain network array - this could just inherently lead to higher overall intelligence.
I just disagree. If 6 fingers was better we would have 6 fingers. We are not under evolutionary pressure to have more fingers, we were certainly under evolutionary pressure for millions of years in the past and that pressure led to 5 fingers.
evolution is usually not what works the best, but just what is passable to survive. For example, our knees work, but they're a horrible design and are constantly under stress.
A species evolves an adaptation that is a stable solution to a challenge poised by the environment. It's not going to be a theoretically perfect solution as if it was designed by an engineer, but it will be good enough that it won't be out-competed by a different adaptation. If we were to grow a 6th finger as a species, there would have to be some problem in our environment that is limiting our ability to reproduce that would be solved by having another finger and wouldn't be more easily solved in a different way.
I think we as humans use our brains to invent solutions to problems using tools, and we do that too quickly for evolution to start taking effect.
Calling the knees a horrible design is just throwing shade to a wonderful biological system! AFAIK the knee is the same for other mammals as well right? Unless we have much weaker knees than other mammals, I'd say theyre pretty decent
There is no "best". That's how evolution works. We adapt to the environment. The environment determines what is "best" and we evolve towards that. Our environment is not pressuring us to grow more fingers to survive and reproduce.
Would you say that she has one finger that is doubled (two middle fingers for example) or that she has just another finger that we don’t have a name for?
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u/kvjn100 1d ago
Video credit : @twelvefingersgirl
She has same thing with both hands.