- “I hear Claire broke all the office’s typing speed records.” Polydactyly isn’t overly uncommon, but fully functional extra digits are rare.
Why is it that the vast majority of abnormalities that occur in humans are harmful? Shouldn’t it be that on at least a semi-regular basis, someone develops an abnormality that is advantageous?
What I mean is that we often hear about people with horribly rare and debilitating (or fatal) diseases, but we almost never hear the flipside. To illustrate: I have blogged previously about the infection a young woman in Brazil contracted that ultimately led to her death, but I have never had the opportunity to write about someone who contracts a something that, I don’t know, say allows them to grow back appendages.
Shouldn’t the law of averages allow that for every ebola-like virus that is a virtual death sentence, there is one that allows us to breath underwater? Or at the very least improve our musculature?
Sadly, it doesn’t seem so.
Or so I thought.
Marvel Comics, until recently, had a whole swath of superheroes who were simply born with their powers. A very simple way of having to avoid having people accidently irradiated or involved in industrial accidents or exposed to unknown forms of radiation. Being born different, but better, is one of those underlying pieces of evolutionary theory that we ignore as if it were an over-attentive uncle.
I don’t expect to soon see people born with functional wings or tails or x-ray eyes or the ability to walk through walls, but this is definately a start.
I’m going to have to do some more reading about polydactyly.
