Is better for humans to have 5 than 4 fingers?

Take a look at your fingers. You only have four of them on each hand. And two thumbs, one on each hand. : ))

There’s a strong likelihood we would use base 8 for numbering.

I am not understanding what your second paragraph is about. What does doubling numbers have to do with anything?

We would all wear puffy white gloves with three little black lines on the back.

Without and opposable thumb, we would have a lot of problems grasping things.

Pretty uncomfortable to play the piano!

It couldn’t be four. Four is an anomaly when it comes to digit development. (of course, this is coming from someone who was born with 6 toes on each foot, so what do I know?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.html#fingers

@cprevite Lol

You can choose not to use the fifth finger, but you can’t choose to use the fifth finger that you don’t have.

If having four fingers was better, we would have four fingers. Natural selection is cool like that.

Right. What @Mariah said. Evolution has decided that 5 fingers is the optimum number.

But evolution doesn’t work like that. Leastways that’s what they’d yell at me when I said what you guys have. They’d always say that selection favors a solution that works, not the best solution.

I’m by no means the expert on this, but as natural selection is all about beating out the competition, I would think that eventually we would trend towards the optimum solution because a better solution will tend to be more successful than one that just “works.” Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.

Given that pentadactyl animals are back quite a ways in the evolutionary chain, it’s hard to say what is optimum. Although toothed whales have five digits, baleen whales only have four. Why would that be advantageous?

Similarly, canines have five digits, but one is way up the leg and contributes nothing.

I like @cazzie‘s explanation that it’s all based on Fibonacci numbers.