Different in degree or kind: our hands (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, March 04, 2016, 21:37 (3186 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Friday, March 04, 2016, 21:43

We are the only organism with hands like ours. Imagine an ape playing the violin. They can't even hammer:-http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146193-"Abstract-"Hand coordination can allow humans to have dexterous control with many degrees of freedom to perform various tasks in daily living. An important contributing factor to this important ability is the complex biomechanical architecture of the human hand. However, drawing a clear functional link between biomechanical architecture and hand coordination is challenging. It is not understood which biomechanical characteristics are responsible for hand coordination and what specific effect each biomechanical characteristic has. To explore this link, we first inspected the characteristics of hand coordination during daily tasks through a statistical analysis of the kinematic data, which were collected from thirty right-handed subjects during a multitude of grasping tasks. Then, the functional link between biomechanical architecture and hand coordination was drawn by establishing the clear corresponding causality between the tendinous connective characteristics of the human hand and the coordinated characteristics during daily grasping activities. The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way. The clear link between the structure and the function of the human hand also suggests that the design of a multifunctional robotic hand should be able to better imitate such basic architecture."-Comment: Article will be retracted because of the use of the word 'Creator'. The authors have apologized. But it still says we are extremely different. A million monkeys at typewriters trying to reproduce a sentence from Shakespeare just won't work on an anatomic basis!:-http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F423788e9-2a6d-4ccd-9aeb-c46b594a07aa-"We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word ?Creator? was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word ?Creator?. What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is a proper ?design? by the '"nature"' (result of evolution) to perform a multitude of daily grasping tasks. We will change the ?Creator? to ?nature? in the revised manuscript. We apologize for any troubles may have caused by this misunderstanding."