I have a little bush of hair in the middle of the otherwise mostly hairless chest. Biologically, it is most certainly useless: too small to be relevant for thermoregulation, too miserable and inconspicuous to be of any use during the mating season. However, I find it very useful while showering, as it is perfect and conveniently positioned to make foam from soap bars. I rub the wet bar vigorously a few times and voilà, a nice and thick foam is ready to be spread all around.
What’s yours?
Pinkie fingers are next to useless. They’re short, weak, and in terms of control are only barely independent of the ring finger. For the most part, I’d rather them be gone completely, or have an extra set of thumbs. And yet they do prove useful for hitting a handful of keys while typing.
Pinkies are ever so slightly useful for fretting guitar chords, as well.
Pinkie toes. The only thing they do is get stubbed if I’m going around barefoot. So they serve the purpose of being a painful reminder to wear shoes.
If we didn’t have 'em the keyboard would be laid out differently.
It’s like saying ears are useful for keeping eyeglasses in place.
They’re also useful for keeping face masks on.
And pencils and cigarettes.
Come on Dopers, is pinkies the best that you can come up with? I pity myself for thinking that this topic was full of potential.
Back hair can be surprisingly warm, in conjunction with a windbreaker and a shirt.
How’s that? Better than pinkies?
Thanks, you’re sweet.
Let me throw some ideas out there: the extra skin on the elbows, (men’s) nipples, pubic hair (or any hair, for that matter), belly fat rolls, moles, ear lobes. There may be more. Ever found a creative use for any of these?
(And this sentence is just because Discourse is nagging me that this post is too similar to the one O just deleted…)
What are those plates on your back good for, @Stego, and what do you do with them?
(My whiskers are good for sneezing)
My wide pelvis is useless for birthing babies since I don’t want 'em, but my wide hips are good for carrying stuff and holding my pants up.
I’ve never understood the purpose of earlobes, but they’re great for attaching sparkly rocks once you punch holes in them.
I’d have thought the hair on my head pretty useless, but it does help keep hats in place.
I thought everyone knew earlobes were for amorous nibbling.
I see you’re a connaisseur. Earlobes definitely are an erogenous zone.
I was just going to mention foreskin. Same with men’s nipples.
Nature’s Dental Floss
Every time I trim my toenails and change the nail polish, I have to use a cuticle trimmer to trim back the little remnant of toenail leftover from when I had my ingrown toenail fixed. When I see it again, grown over the paint, I know it’s time to trim and paint again.
Pubic and armpit hair: yeah, useless. Head hair, or the overall scattering of hair over the extremities, likely helped keep our ancestors warm when they were out chasing a mastodon for supper.
Hair color, now that’s useless. Blonde hair is no more (or less) protective than brown, black or red. Just a side effect of migrating to someplace where excess melanin was a) not needed, and b) affected vitamin D production, so you were better off with less melanin. But plenty of northern folks have darker hair.
Moles are simply a random extra concentration of melanin and belly fat rolls just mean you caught too many of those mastodons.
Earlobes: it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some benefit to them; the shape of the human ear, including the ridges, supposedly does help funnel sound into the inner ear. Maybe the purpose of a lobe is to give an enemy something less critical to grab in a fight. Your earlobe gets ripped off, you can still hear. You get your whole ear ripped off, you can’t hear as well, and you get killed more easily so you produce fewer children?
(as a side note: my husband’s grandmother had mismatched ears. One looked perfectly ordinary. The other: all the ridges etc. on that ear were nonexistent - it was completely flat. She heard just fine - well, she had the usual age-related hearing loss but nothing beyond that.
I have a muscle on the palm of my hand (pinky side) that I can manipulate. Apparently, no one else on the planet can do this. So I guess it makes me fun at parties.
(I didn’t even know this was a talent until one day, I showed a friend and he was like: "Whoa! WTF!)