Captured Thought: Hands

I am a very touchy-feely person; I love holding hands and hugging and other things of that nature. Recently, I've been looking at boys' hands and mentally comparing them, and today, in Academy, I had an epiphany: all the hands of the guys I know that play volleyball have really square/circular palms, and their fingers are about the same lengths as their palm, and the hands of those that play basketball have thinner palms and long, thin fingers. Maybe this isn't the most astounding insight ever made, but I felt a strange but oddly satisfying wave of accomplishment hit me as I realized those connections. I'm probably not going to go around at do a clinical trial examining the hands of GBN's volleyball and basketball teams, but it would be very interesting to see the results.

Let's assume that my observations are true for all, or at least a large majority of these athletes. What does that mean? I'm not sure if it would be possible for a sport to alter the hands of a person; they usually seem to be something hereditary that can't be changed. Therefore, is it possible that hands could tell you something about your personality? Chiromancy, the art of palm reading, has been practiced for centuries, and involves evaluating the "lines" of the hands, characteristics of fingers, nails, fingerprints, skin texture and color, shape of the palm and flexibility. Among all the future-predicting/"psychic" arts, I almost think that this one makes the most sense, because rather than relying on crystal globes or tea leaves to predict things about your life, chiromancy is based on something that is inherently yours, that no one else can trick or beguile.


On a darker note, what if humans got this down to a science, and if, at birth, everyone was characterized with a list of possibilities for the kind of person they would become, based on their natural physical features? Or, if parents could be genetically analyzed to predict what kind of person their children would grow up to be? Our world has always been a mad race, a survival of the fittest; how soon do you think it will be until scientists literally take it into their own hands and choose to create the humans with the most potential, based off of their physical, inherited characteristics?