The incredible human hand

Naturally engineered or designed by intelligence?

by Carlos Estrada

As part of a television series called Dissected, Britian’s BBC website has published an article written by the show’s presenter Dr George McGavin titled ‘The incredible human hand and foot’.¹

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In it, Dr McGavin outlines several fascinating features of our hand, which gives us a powerful grip but also allows us to manipulate small objects with great precision. This ability sets us apart from other creatures. The muscles in the hand are ‘strangely’ arranged, since most of the hand’s movements are controlled by muscles not located in the hand but in the forearm. The fingers are connected to the forearm by long tendons that pass through a flexible band.

This arrangement gives the fingers movement and strength that would be impossible if all the muscles were in the hand. In short, the hand looks like a bony puppet controlled by the forearm.

The term ‘bony puppet’ gives a wonderful image of how the hand was designed.

In addition, the skin in the fingers is special because it has cells of fat that give cushion-like protection for the huge number of nerve endings underneath. There are four types of skin receptors that respond to pressure (light and deep), touch, pain and temperature. Fingernails help to judge how firmly to hold anything.

All of this is science, factual things that can be observed and verified.

However, Dr McGavin’s evolutionary bias is on show with the statement: “Both the human hand and foot represent a triumph of complex engineering, exquisitely evolved to perform a range of tasks.”

He continues: “When the first four-legged animals began to move onto the land from the sea around 380 million years ago some had as many as eight digits but the familiar five digit pattern soon became the standard which has since been modified in certain groups such as frogs and birds. The hand is one of the most complex and beautiful pieces of natural engineering in the human body.’’

The writer makes the assumption that these marvels of nature (hands and feet) appeared by random mutation and natural selection in a succession of chance events—without a designer.²

For evolutionists these complex designs are the outcome of natural processes operating in a mindless, self-contained system that does not determine need or purpose in advance, and sets no directions.³ The assumption that nature by itself, without purpose or design, engineered the hand and foot seems similar to finding the Mona Lisa painting in the middle of the forest and claiming that it was done by nature with the passing of time. Of course, evolutionists invoke the Darwinian mechanism of chance plus selection to make such things seem credible. But just saying so does not make it so.

McGavin’s article mixes facts with historical narrative that cannot be verified since no one observed it. The facts are the characteristics of the hand: such as its powerful grip, because of its unusual arrangement of muscles that control it from ‘the outside’, like a puppet. Whereas the narrative that the hand was built by time, chance and selection alone cannot be tested or verified.

Is it even conceivable that such natural processes could have created and engineered hands and feet? The answer is no. Natural selection is a fact, but does not create, it only selects from what already exists, and cannot add the new information required. (Get more answers on natural selection). And the random genetic accidents called mutations have never shown themselves capable of generating the new programs and designs required for such things. (See mutations for further information).

Precision from oddness

McGavin explains in his article how the ‘odd’ arrangement of the muscles mostly being outside the hand gives the fingers movement, strength and also precision when we manipulate small objects. Are your hands the result of mere chance? Or have your hands been designed in advance, with the instructions for the correct assembly of parts coded into the DNA language from the beginning? The Bible gives us the answer in Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ ”