This may be a wierd one, (well at least to me)
I know several people (4 in total, 3 in the same family) who have the unique gift of having their little toe and the next in line toe fused together up until the first joint.
I know in the case of the family, its genetically passed down for them to have (in effect) 4 toes.
Their parents havent been playing banjo in the deep south or anything. the 4th person is not related to them in anyway.
Are these people’s toes an example of Evolution at work?
Evolution has no goal, so there’s no way to predict what the next evolutionary step will be. But basically, evolution is a change in hereditary characteristics in a population…so, keep breeding and maybe those freakish (kidding) toes will become the norm in a few hundred generations.
Well, I know a little girl who has 6 perfect toes on one of her feet. So, which would be the superior adaptation.
That’s nothing; here’s a site about the ostrich-footed people
Neither is superior: that’s not how evolution works. Here’s how evolution works, to oversimplify unforgivably: You got a boxing ring, and in it a bunch of boxers, each with a different number of toes. They go at it, and whoever remains standing gets the girl. Needless to say, the number of toes would probably have minimal impact on the outcome of the fight, so neither 5 nor 6 could be said to be “superior.” Also, whether a particular trait is beneficial depends upon the environment. What’s more beneficial, lungs or gills? Let me hold your head under water while you contemplate this . . .
(That said, having 6 fingers, for example, would make learning elementary math as a child a real pain in the ass.)
No, they are an example of a neutral mutation. Joined toes will provide neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to those who possess them, and as such are evolutionarily neutral. If, for whatever reason, people start to think joined toes are particularly sexy and start to choose their mates based on this feature (note that this would be sexual selection, not natural selection), then it could become more dominant in a population. However, in a Darwinian (i.e., natural selection) sense, they are irrelevant to the fitness of a population.
lissener:
I know how natural selection works, I was just pointing out the lack of directionality in an example like the one in the OP. For every person with 4 toes, there might be an equal number with 6. Unless, as you point out, time and circumstances give any of these people a breeding advantage, nothing is going to happen to the average number of toes.
WOW!
I almost forgot about the Ostrich footed people. I read about them years ago. There was something also about a tribe somewhere which has vestigial tails that caused quite a stir, but I can’t recall where.
Anyhow, superior evolution? I doubt it. More or less and environmental or genetic anomaly or defect. Somewhere in the past, something caused a gene to mutate which regulates the last two toes remaining separate. It became dominate. Now it goes down the family line, probably carried by the male seed.
Close knit, secluded communities, ones which don’t play the same banjo, often have developed similar ‘deformities’ in some family lines because of a limited gene pool. There have been studies of small mountain communities in America where an unusual number of people are born with certain birth marks, hair lips, missing toes or fingers and so on.
In south America, according to surgical programs I’ve watched, there seems to be an unusual high number of facial deformities like hair lips to the extreme, appearing in children. I don’t know why, but I do know that gold mining using vast amounts of Mercury is common there.
They blast the little bit of gold out with hoses, collect it in pans of Mercury (the gold sticks to the Mercury while other minerals don’t) then they evaporate off the stuff, leaving behind the gold. Huge areas have become poisoned by the Mercury vapor condensing out of the atmosphere and the miners who work with the stuff are usually heavily contaminated with it.
Mercury can cause birth defects.
Mercury can also cause brain damage. Are there unusually high incidences of mental retardation in that area?
By The Way: I lived for a year in Minnesota (southwestern) in an area where pesticides were once used in abundance. It was common knowledge that the pesticide use in the past caused past crops of mentally and physically deformed/retarded children up to the present day (I lived there in 1998). I never heard this from valid sources, but I did notice retarded kids. I might have just been looking for them (The ‘you see what you look for’ adage). Anyone else know of similar cases?
My brother has the “nine-toed syndrome,” whereas my toes are all extraordinarily long (confirmed by a podiatrist) and separated.
It’s been some time since I saw the show, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They mentioned the mass pollution of some of the waterways there, which serviced large populations of people downstream. Plus silting up the river beds and causing all sorts of problems. The government doesn’t get involved.
However, there has been a couple of shows on discovery or TLC mentioning the problems. I guess the miners are willing to take the chances and the Mercury recovery method is one of the quickest and simplest ways to get small amounts of gold. They buy the stuff cheaply and in large volumes.
Derleth, I can relate a similar annecdote. There was a region of Pennsylvania with high levels of some pollutant (an industrial byproduct, but I don’t recall which), with the apparent effect that women raised in that region have a much higher likelyhood of bearing autistic children. This is believed to be the primary cause for a cousin of mine who is autistic.