WHAT IS THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE?

By Siddhant Kansal

A scientific advancement can be defined as a systematic or methodical development or improvement on a previous article. As such, I believe the most fundamental and impactful scientific development is that of our opposable thumbs. They are opposable, as they are able to touch every other finger on their hands, and can therefore grip around objects more efficiently than hands without such an advantage. They are the most crucial scientific advancement for their evolutionary benefits, their emotional effects on infants, and their practical applications.

Evolutionarily, man has been the top of the food chain as an apex predator. Arguably, the main reason that man has become so powerful as a species is due to mankind’s ability to react to selective pressures. Around 2.3 million years ago, when Homo habilis roamed the Earth, one of the main selective pressures was finding food, to survive, as stated by the BBC in their article on “Are humans still evolving by Darwin's natural selection?”. In Africa, forest foods such as fruits were becoming scarce and due to this, animals, including Homo habilis, were forced to find nutrition in meat. This was mainly done through scavenging as hunting and rearing animals for food was not practised at this time, but this was difficult as hunting predators had taken most of the substance. Through evolution, Homo habilis was able to use their opposable thumbs to grip onto material, to fashion rudimentary tools and sometimes weapons out of stone, to crack open the carcasses and access more protected areas of meat. This allowed them to grow stronger and bigger, due to the newfound higher availability of food and thus able to reproduce. As they reproduced, the advantageous gene was also passed down, improving and perfecting the opposable thumbs to provide future generations with an evolutionary advantage. This led to them being able to create more advanced tools and weapons, using their naturally superior grip and being able to hunt and build far more easily than ever before, allowing the human species to thrive.

 Emotionally, opposable thumbs also have a positive impact on infants. In a 1971 article published by A. Kehoe from the University of Chicago Press Journal, The Selective Advantage in Infancy of the Human Thumb, Kehoe states that despite the more well-known applications of opposable thumbs, such as making tools and weapons, largely based on the work of Napier in 1962, there is also a previously not so well-observed advantage of opposable thumbs, which is that they provide emotional stability similar to the act of breastfeeding. The human infant quickly associates the feeling of having a digit-like projection pressing against their cheek or nose with drinking milk, and so when they accidentally place a similarly sized digit-like projection in their mouth (their small thumb), they feel the same emotional response as they would while breastfeeding. Despite no milk being released, this provides them with a sense of calm and reassurance, which acts as a tensional outlet for infants. Due to the fact that the positioning of the human thumb in relation to the clenched fingers makes the infant’s hand press against his face when the child sucks his thumb, this action simulates breastfeeding extremely accurately, and it is theorised that some of the happiest children may be those with “with opposable thumbs set close enough to the base of the finger” as this provides the pressure felt by the child when they are pressed against the mother’s body during breastfeeding.

The practical applications are very closely related to how humans became evolutionarily superior, but focus more on how the grip is ubiquitously used currently. Due to this grip, we can use scalpels, scissors, needles, syringes and countless other instruments, which we need for medical intervention and response to disease. We are able to hold guns, helping us to defend ourselves, and we are able to use tools like microscopes, pens and pencils, as well as tools like the medical instruments to study the world around us and develop as a species. These would not be possible without the mutation in Homo Habilis which granted them the opposable thumbs, and to slightly amend the question, this is one scientific advancement that we not only use today, but will continue to need and rely upon throughout mankind’s time on Earth.