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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

What purpose is served by the little toe?

I suspect it provides some (very) marginal help with balancing, at the cost of a microlimb that is particularly exposed to breakage by stubbing. Having broken each of my little toes by stubbing (on different occasions), I can attest that a broken little toe definitely makes it harder to balance. Hell, it makes it hard to stand.

I seriously doubt that there's enough strength in a little toe to provide much help with balancing. So given its propensity for injury, why have little toes not evolved away in large bipeds? (I don't think birds or quadripeds are prone to toe-stubbing)

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Doesn't necessarily need to be effective motor function: it's a probe that provides tactile feedback, both for posture and balance, as well as being the one who gets hit often - being on the outer edge - possibly saving more critical foot areas from irreparable damage. By way of consequence it's helpful when fully functional but not essential as you are prone to hit it by "design" and make it temporarily nonfunctional every so often, all without impairing the whole foot function critical for bipedal walk as humans do it. Also, redundancy: when you break some other toe you're super glad there's a pinky, however comparatively small and weak.

Anecdata: as a skateboarder it's obvious (sometimes painfully so) how every toe matters to get the most information from beneath one's feet.

It is probably linked to fingers in some gene expressions. And 5 fingers I would say is more effective than 4. So changing of number of toes might also affect fingers. So better just to keep the extra. After all it is marginal.

Little toes significantly widen your base. Yours probably don't because you've forced them into shoes your whole life and they are crushed against the others.

The little toe’s most important function is to remind its owner that even the most advanced being on earth can be thwarted by an inanimate object, such as the leg of a coffee table.

When I used to windsurf, it was pretty obvious how important the little toe is for balance, it drives where to push. I can't tell you why, but it was the toe that gave back the most feedback and told me how to push with my feet

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