I am a strong supporter of the evolution theory and I am certain that this theory correctly explains the emergence of complex life forms on Earth. Yet, there is one aspect that I find puzzling and hard to explain, and it is not what we can see but rather what is conspicuously missing. Here is a small example and it concerns a third hand - an organ which should be abundantly present. For simplicity let us concentrate on vertebrates - close to 60,000 species including mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles and amphibians. All have symmetric bodies and the organs that appear on the symmetry plane are relatively small such as nose, penis, beak, tongue, tail, etc. Under the hood so to speak, symmetry is gone with single organs like liver, heart, pancreas, etc thrown randomly into the body cavity.
Third hand would have been a great gift from nature for just any vertebrate, yet none has it! For some silly reason nature nixes a development of a flexible appendage staring somewhere on the breastplate and ending with six or eight cute little fingers. The advantages for humans are completely clear - texting, eating popcorn while playing video games, scratching - third hand would have been a great help. For countless everyday tasks third hand would provide support and efficiency. I am not sure whether it would be helpful in sports other than boxing, car racing (for changing gears), climbing
and hand to hand combat. Certainly humans with a third hand would live longer and have tremendous evolutionary advantage. This is how a small bump on a chest of a Neanderthal man should have grown bigger and over several hundred generations evolved into this much needed organ. Quite frankly the lack of it can only be attributed to un-intelligent design, particularly when so much of the evolutionary energy was devoted to perfecting often useless tails.
The benefits for hand-less animals would have been far greater. Consider birds with their sloppy and un-hygienic eating habits throwing away most of what they try to eat. Equipped with a third hand they would elegantly feed themselves with their head raised and on a lookout for predators. Fish would not have to use their mouth to dig in the mud, and cleaning their gills would have been a triviality. Furthermore, a third hand would have allowed them to groom each other, hopefully leading to the development of a more intelligent
biological community.
Are there any drawbacks of having a third hand? It is hard to think of any but for humans there might have been a small problem of what to do with it when it is not used. Should it hang like a weird tie or should one nonchalantly wrap it around the neck? Perhaps it should roll into a ball, or wrap around the waist? No matter what, I am certain that we would have figured it out.
The lack of a third hand was bothering me for quite a while. I mentioned it to my wife and she immediately came up with a theory which sadly made me realize that greater forces might be at work. The main evolutionary disadvantage of the third hand is that it provides ability for endless and biologically useless sexual gratification. In other words, it is conceivable that Nature kept providing us with the third hand but the owners foolishly did not produce enough offspring and this part of the Tree of Life kept on drying up.
