On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Tommy Kelly wrote:
> There are no "accidents" in the process of evolution. The reason fingers
> where developed - over time, of course - was because of some factor in the
> species environment; otherwise it would not have stood the test of time.
> This includes the number of fingers on the hand... watch someone with a
> missing finger or two and you will notice their hand movement is slightly
> different in certain things, nothing drastic though.
No, this is what Gould and Lewontin ridicule as "fundamentalist Darwinism". Even Darwin did not make the bold claim TK makes above. It is naive sociobiology to assert that every single discrete characteristic of a species must exist because of adaptive pressures. (My favorite example from Lewontin: the human chin is an inadvertent result of shifts in facial bone lengths over many eons; we do not need an adaptationist story to explain the existence of the chin at all--unless you're a dogmatic sociobiologist!)
Miles