Variations on a Gene

I just can’t get over how beautiful this little appendage is. It belongs to a baby born to a Daly City couple. Six fingers on each hand, six toes on each foot, and all perfectly formed and fully functional. Click here for the Geekologie link with more pics.

This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened, of course—plenty of kids get nubs of underdeveloped extra digits lopped off—but it’s just phenomenal anyway. It might take some getting used to, seeing something out of the ordinary like this, but it’s exactly the kind of—I hesitate to use the word “oddity”—we need to embrace. (And this is probably where I should not speculate on what you can do with two middle fingers on each hand…)

~ by JT on February 5, 2009.