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Thumbs Are the New Fingers for GameBoy Youth
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is running an interesting story on how the use of gadgets such as mobile phones and GameBoys has caused a physical mutation in young people's hands. The use of the thumb is a deviation from the use of the index finger..."
Evolution (as in "altering of physical form of whole populations of individuals due to external factors") seems much more likely to happen over a few generations. The "old school" is teaching us that evolution is happening only on course of hundeds or thousands of generations. This may not be the case actually.
Artificial breeding is another example of very fast changes in the gene pool of populations.
Except for the fact that our eyesight is going down the tubes for playing all these games. We are going to be the most versatile group of half blind geeks around. I know personally I'm only in my early 20's but have been playing games since I could pick up a controller and I'm having some problems with my hands lately. If I don't use an ergonomic keyboard I'll be in major discomfort for a few days. I've started taking Vioxx as an anti-inflammatory for my right thumb and index finger. I must be overworking these. I don't know about other geeks out there but I get scared about my hands cause these are my livelyhood and how I bring home the $$. I lose a finger or two and I'm SOL. So a message to geeks of tomorrow: Protect the digits at all costs!
"I'd always had longer hair than other boys. I was a long-haired musician before hippies came along." Willie Nelson
Back in the NES days I would use my index and middle fingers for the b and a buttons, the genesis controller was designed so I could do the same. But once shoulder buttons started to be on all controllers, from the SNES onwards, I couldnt pull that off. Now that the GBA has shoulder buttons, I cant think of a game system that you can reasonably use all the buttons with out using your thumb as the main button presser
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I know most left-handed individuals feel that many standard tools are awkward to use because of some subtle biases towards the right-handed majority. E.g., think about the standard manual can opener.
Will the "thumb users" find standard objects equally awkward to use? What about after some thumb-based tools have become widely available (e.g., I could imagine swapping out a standard keyboard for a thumbboard), since that will provide less exposure to finger-based devices?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Stop poking fun at this article. There are some very some very serious social ramifications of this adaptation/mutation. It clarifies some important trends I have seen in my life time.
My parent's generation was most adept at using the index finger...and they always accelled in the art of wagging it at me.
My generation: let's just say that we learned to use the middle finger, and would wave it back.
The kids today are in a horrid situation. In US culture, thumbs up means "A Okay". They are transforming into an anything goes generation. They seem just willing to give thumbs up to anything
Of course there are some terrible international implication. I understand that an Arab thumbs up is the same as a New York middle finger. Like all important sociological articles of the day, this brings us back to 9/11. Could this mutation be the real cause for the current US/Middle East crusade?
This strikes me as really being just a matter of practice and conditioning. As has been pointed out in many of the posts above, a musician has not only learned what to press/move to come up with certain notes, they've developed a certain "muscle-memory" that allows them to hit notes without really thinking about it.
Same thing applies to any twitch-type game - the player learns the right keypress combinations through highly repetitive actions. Eventually, they don't think "Left, Left, A, C, A, B, Up" but rather they think "I need to use a whirling dragon kick here."
I'm a touch typist and the same thing applies...
One other example of what Reuters would incorrectly call mutation that I haven't seen here would involve the ability of those born without arms to use their feet almost as well as many of us use our hands. I remember seeing a show about that many years ago and was fascinated by it. I decided that if they could use their feet, then I could certainly teach myself to write with my left hand. It didn't work too well, though.
My parents are very intimidated by their computer and are constantly calling me for tech support... I got a Vic 20 when I was 12 and never learned that fear... just a different kind of muscle memory I suppose. They don't want to experiment because they're still unfamiliar with the computer and don't know what will and won't cause problems. I think it's just practice...
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.
A Refutation:
1) Nothing is random. Actually logic and science teach you the exact opposite. At a quantum level, everything is random, you don't know if a particular particle will decay at a given moment or not, and as far as science can tell, there is no way of knowing. In larger systems, tiny variables add uncertainty until the system becomes completely unpredictable. We will probably never have accurate 1 year weather forcasts. Theoretically if you knew the position and speed of every particle in the system (note: this is by definition impossible) you could theoretically predict, and perhaps if we knew the exact state of the world at 4 Billion BC, an infinitely powerful computer could predict the outcome of evolution. But since this is unimaginably difficult, the individual events that influence evolution, and the mutations that give it material to work with, are for all intents and purposes "random." *
2) Nothing is absolute, nothing is for sure. An arguable point. According to pragmatic philosophers at the turn of the (last) century, there is no absolute truth, and scientific knowledge in its current state represents the closest thing to an absolute that we have. This philosophy generally fell out of favor by the 30s. I don't really see what it has to do with your point though.
3) Say what? Let me get this straight... if our actions control revolution, we with our brains control evolution? Why, because they rhyme? I'm sorry, but I don't get you here.
Nobody is arguing for a "mysterious force of nature" a mysterious force of nature would imply some sort of push or outside control. Evolution is an almost mathematical trend to all self-replicating systems. In survival situations the best genes survive, and those genes get passed on, making for a more fit next generation. That's all there is, really. Modern alterations to the theory come from discoveries about how the genetic code is structured, how major structural changes can be achieved with the change of just a few genes. All this means is that the process can be faster than we previously thought, but the basic idea remains unchanged from Darwin.
The language of some can confuse the point. It's hard to phrase sentences about evolution that don't make it sound like evolving is something that individual creatures actively do, or that evolution is some giant ghost nudging the little critters in the right direction. The best analogy I can think of is the Adam Smith's invisible hand. (The "force" that generates more wealth in capitalist systems) there is no hand, there is no mysterious force, it's just a typical result of free market economies, it goes with the system. Evolution is just a natural product of populations of reproducing things.
* Here's the source of a very common misconception. While the events that make up evolutionary process are random, the process itself is anything but. Think of an ideal gas, while the individual particles are moving in a basically "random" fashion, the gas itself will expand according to very strict laws. Evolution works on populations. While a mutation or an accident has an effect on the genes of a particular member of this population, for the population as a whole, such chance events work out to be constants in the equation rather than noise that throws the whole thing out of whack. And like gasses, evolution behaves simply and predictably in the lab, throw it out in the wild, where those gasses become warm and cold fronts in a storm system, and predictability goes out the window. Evolution is a chaotic process made of random events, on the short term it is predictable, but due to the system it is in, it rapidly becomes unpredictable. But it is *not* random in the sense of a tornado flying through a scrapyard and creating a 747.
Richard Dawkins does a better job of explaining this than I do.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The QWERTY keyboard has also changed the priorities humans place on which fingers to use. 200 years ago we held teacups with our thumb and index finger; now we are much more likely to use the middle finger as well. Anybody remember Pac-Man Elbow? 2600 Joystick Blister?