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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Surely if it were that, then fingers should wrinkle faster?

If I stick my hand in water then it gets wet immediately, but doesn't wrinkle for... what, fifteen minutes? And that's warm water -- cold water (like practically all the naturally-occurring water in the world) takes a lot longer.

And then, I can dry my fingers much faster than I can un-wrinkle 'em. Surely the circumstances in which an ancestral human would:

a) Spend fifteen or twenty minutes in the water, then

b) Need to pick up something vitally life-preserving within the next few seconds

would be sufficiently rare that it probably wouldn't have been a major selection pressure?

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It doesn't seem like you understand how this would be a useful. This is not an explanation for slipping in the water and wrinkling to climb back out, it's for spending long periods, perhaps for fishing or during the wet season, and still being able to grab and manipulate objects.

Sorry, I am missing your point. In the absence of wrinkling, what is stopping me from being able to grab and manipulate objects?

I can do that without wrinkling, even in water.

Unless it wasn't selected for in humans. Or any great apes. But perhaps in a much older mammalian ancestor. And in humans it simply has not been selected against, which is why it's simply not as good or useful as it used to be. Sort of like wiggling your ears.

What was wiggling our ears for? Attracting mates? :]

Echo location, just like a dog or any animal with long ears.

There's probably a cost to having wrinkly fingers which is why they don't wrinkle immediately.

But if enough of our ancient ancestors fell into bodies of water surrounded by steep, slippery rocks, then the 15-minute delay for gecko fingers to set in would be worth the wait. As long as they could tread water or hold their heads above it long enough, the grippy fingers might have really helped.

Edit: I like katovatzschyn's reasoning even better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2718662

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