What if you got a fully functional extra finger next to your pinky finger in both hands?

[Xhor1021]

Will you surgically removed it? I think that would be awesome and unique.

https://www.livescience.com/20241-hands-fingers.html

An extra digit next to our pinkies would make some tasks easier. We could strum more complex musical instruments, type faster and grip objects more firmly. "And a broader hand would make it easier to palm a basketball," said Cliff Tabin, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who studies limb development in vertebrates. "But our fine motor manual dexterity is mostly thumb and index finger. An extra little finger more (or less) would not change much," Tabin told Life's Little Mysteries.

If we had six fingers on each hand, Tabin said we would surely have adopted a base-12 system, where the numbers would progress as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, x, y, 10. "We would think of base-12 as the easiest and most natural system and would find base-10 as inconceivable as base-14," he said.

[Marble-eye]

It would certainly make it easier for me to count to 12 instead of just 10.

[JamesE]

I lived in Grenada for a while and polydactyly (as the "condition" is known) is pretty common. In the west, it happens just as frequently but it's snip-snip-glue-here's-your-perfect-baby. There it was kind of celebrated. Most of the extra digits were vestigial and useless other than sporting some fly nail polish or for casting hexes.

[kerryd]

Some people could pick both nostrils at the same time.

Others would send out even more BS tweets than they used to with just 10 fingers.

Would "foreplay" become "fiveplay" ? (Nowadays, "fiveplay" is usually referred to as an "orgy".)

Having the opposable thumb is supposedly the "evolutionary" trait that made us what we are now. It allowed us to grasp and make tools, which lead to us evolving differently from our primate cousins.

Think where we could/would be now had we evolved with 6 digits instead of a mere 5.

We'd probably be basking in the light of the triple suns of Alpha Centari by now, whining about how the Leather Goddesses of Phobos have been increasing their rates despite a lack of customers because of the inter-galactic spaceways being closed due to Covid-722 restrictions.

(In other words, most of us wouldn't be that much further ahead of where we are now. Just maybe in a different location. Inside a shiny new clone. Still whining about sports and the gov't and them damn kids and their space Ferraris blasting around the planet, messing up the holographic TV screen signals.)

Edited September 15, 2021 by kerryd