Why are all our fingers different lengths? wouldn’t it be better if they were all the same length?
In: Biology
As with many of the oddities of our bodies, it’s a leftover from when our ancient evolutionary ancestors walked on all four limbs. The longest middle finger (toes at the time) helped with forwards movement while the shorter side fingers helped with turning while moving. And then we started walking upright rather recently in evolutionary terms, and while it helped to make our fingers longer for tree climbing/tool use, there wasn’t a pressure to equalize their lengths, so that didn’t change.
FYI, if a creature has some trait that seems weird or less than helpful, it’s probably because it either:
* Had a use in the past but having a useless version now doesn’t hurt your chances of having sex, so nothing changes (like wisdom teeth or the appendix)
* The process of adding or removing it would’ve been too harmful to the species’ fitness in the intermediary steps (like having half a limb is worse than a full limb or no limb).
* It’s an ornament for sexual selection (think peacock feathers).
* It’s a random mutation that neither helped nor hurt and so evolution didn’t do away with it (blue eyes in humans, for example).
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