Currently reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel – a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, a book that explains how we/food/animals moved around the globe, developed and why. It’s a little dragging compared to my normal reads but it is causing my brain to ponder in tangents it doesn’t tend to go off in.
Today I sat on my balcony with my feet up and thought “I wonder how long it will be until humans will evolve to no longer have toenails?” I mean, toenails require maintenance yet are no longer necessary body parts for humans. In a thousand years maybe kids won’t even realise that people used to have nails on their toes. Or maybe they’ll have flippers and live in the ocean and paddle around all day with talking fishies.
I don’t know whether we’ll ever un-evolve toenails, for the simple reason that they don’t really pose an evolutionary disadvantage. Sure, they’re a bit of a hassle to keep in trim, but until toenail-less mutants (or at least mutants with slow-growing toenails) gain the upper hand in having and rearing children to maturity then it’s not going to be an evolutionary factor.