xXAsherahXx said:
Red heads are a dying breed. I assume our pinky toe and pinky finger will vanish since the same happened to horses all those millions of years ago.
shift keys on keyboards and dozens of other devices suggest otherwise.
The rule with evolution is: "Use it, or lose it"
We lost our keen animalistic sense of smell when millions of years ago our ancestors began walking on two legs, so several feet off the ground is no position to be following the scent trail of things left on the ground. Our sense of smell for telling if food is rotten (as we bring it to our mouths to eat) is actually very good because we keep using that.
You can tell by sniffing when milk has gone off far sooner than all but the most expensive scientific equipment. Yet we can't follow the trail of animal musk on the ground like a dog can.
A function we are not using much right now is callous formation. We wear very comfortable shoes outside almost universally, and gloves for any abrasive work, we don't really need to form callouses on our skin where it is worn the most. The presence of man-made physical pollutants (broken glass, nails, etc) pretty much mandate shoes to protect from cuts that callouses never could. So this is likely to be a long term trend in humanity.
You aren't going to lose something that could cost your chances of making a family.
Being "deformed" and missing digits does reduce your chances of finding a partner and passing on your genes. It's not like it takes a huge amount of energy to have pinkie fingers.
Our ape ancestors for millions of years lived on a high fruit diet which gave them plenty of vitamin C, so much so the process in their liver of synthesising vitamin C became redundant and there was no pressure to retain it. Now all the great apes - including humans - are quite unique among mammals in absolutely NEEDING vitamin C in our diet, if we don't get it from an outside source then we get scurvy as out blood vessels disintegrate and eventually we die from massive haemoraging and infection.
