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There's an argument against intelligent design right there (4 or 6 fingers per hand are obviously better).
by FabHK 7y ago
There's an argument against intelligent design right there (4 or 6 fingers per hand are obviously better).
- Retra 7y agoSure, if you assume the only purpose of fingers is for counting.
- alexanderdmitri 7y agoEh, evolution is a pretty nifty mix of oo class extensions, recursion, brute-force and bias weightings. I'd wager Gawsh made the best system S/He could given product constraints (completely unfocused if you ask me [which I know no one did]) and the real need to deliver (take it easy over there Leibniz, the world is still crap as evidenced everywhere). Anyway, can't knock it 'til you've built it. This is an interesting article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-most-species-have/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-most-speci...
- FabHK 7y agoWell, my comment was partly in jest (though I do think it's by no means clear that 5 is a local optimum, thus it's quite possible that 4 or 6 would be better, and twice either would give us a better base for counting), but I'm amazed that there's actual scientific discussion of the issue. I wish to quote the most pertinent part of the article though: > Is there really any good evidence that five, rather than, say, four or six, digits was biomechanically preferable for the common ancestor of modern tetrapods? The answer has to be "No,"