Only to varying degrees …
I thought such trains had already disappeared, but no: a six-fingered brass palm on the door of the dining car! I drank coffee, watched us drive through the province of Savo, and smiled at the designer's genius. The restaurant cars of the old Finnish InterCity trains were designed by architect Arto Kukkasniemi in the late 1980s. He also thought about the design of the door handles in the form of a palm print. They should tell you how best to place your hand so as not to leave a print on the glass. The sixth finger seems to have been added to draw attention. And it works! At a quick glance, it is difficult to notice the number of fingers. Instead of pushing through the glass door, I want to put my own hand on the image of the palm. Surely this was discussed by many passengers who decided to have a snack in the dining car.
This image of a palm attracts attention: most people do have ten fingers, not twelve, although not all. Baseball player Antonio Alfonseca is also known as El Pulpo (octopus). The athlete has six fingers and toes. Polydactyly is an anatomical abnormality that causes a person to have more fingers than usual. Often, an extra finger is just a small piece of soft tissue that is removed immediately after birth. Sometimes the extra toe contains bones and is a fork of the normal toe. Sometimes an extra finger grows on the wrist and works like a regular finger.
Excess tissue may be present in about 2% of newborns. 90% of excess tissue is found on the lower limbs. There are about 40 known mutations (abnormalities in DNA) that cause polydactyly. Sometimes this is indicative of other genetic disorders, sometimes it is not. Did the extra fingers make El Pulpo a better player? Hardly. But they definitely helped him become a legend.
Another deviation is more common and easy to spot if you know where to look. Connect your pinky and thumb. Do you have a distinct tendon in your wrist? The palmaris longus, palmaris longus, and its tendon are absent in 15% of people. I don't have it either. The absence of this muscle does not affect a person's life in any way. True, it is often used as a spare part to replace a damaged tendon. So I am missing a spare part.
The extra finger is easy to spot. However, the mutations of many of us are hard to discern. I have a mutation in the FUT2 gene that interferes with its activity. Normally, the gene encodes a protein that forms structures on the surface of intestinal cells. The mutation is invisible and safe. But now the common noroviruses will not enter my body so easily. I will not get sick with severe intestinal diseases! I am a hidden mutant, and I have the supernatural ability to cope with sea travel with dignity!
The Reddit forum has been controversial about strange deviations since the beginning of this year. One person has four kidneys, another has only one. Someone talks about a clicking penis, someone about that can breathe through the ears. Some physical abnormalities do make life difficult, others are not bothersome and only show up on autopsy. If found at all. Few people know about small changes affecting physiology.
The situation, however, is changing rapidly. Decoding human DNA 10 years ago cost about 10 million dollars, and now it is only about a thousand. With advances in medical imaging technology and advances in genome sequencing, mutants have become easier to identify!
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It is difficult to draw the line between peculiarity, deviation, illness and superpower. Some deviations, however, significantly affect our lives. If possible, they must be fought. If the deviation cannot be eliminated or there is no need for it, then they may well be considered as a variant of the norm.
I grew up in a home where it was taken for granted that there were some pretty exceptional individuals in our large family. My uncle had Down's syndrome; in childhood, we were looked after by a schizophrenic or a disabled person with cerebral palsy. And in our childhood games we talked about autism. Other children talked about how little they were given pocket money for a week, and we talked about non-existent normality.
Probably the sixth finger is the creator's joke. However, I myself would like to regard the brass door handle of the dining car as a good-natured reminder that some of us have more fingers than others. We are all a bit mutants. Are you a mutant too?
Lauri Reuter