Wet Wrinkles

The Times recently reported a study that examined 28 fingers wrinkled by water. Published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, the study found that the fingers exhibited the same pattern of wrinkling - unconnected channels that diverge from one another the further they are from the fingertips. “The wrinkles allow water to drain away, as fingertips are pressed to wet surfaces.” The wrinkles, like tire treads, improve traction.

So we need wonder no longer why our fingers look like prunes after we’ve spent the afternoon lazing on a float in our swimming pool, our hands dangling in the water. It’s good to know that water wrinkles helped our remote ancestors to survive. Just think, folks, we might not be here, to say nothing about our swimming pools, were it not for wet wrinkles.

So if water wrinkles gave an evolutionary advantage, what about the other wrinkles, wrinkles that won't go away without Botox or surgical intervention, wrinkles caused by the sagging of the flesh, the increased thinness and decreased elasticity of the skin? It would be pleasant to suppose that these too conferred an advantage on our remote ancestors. Could they, perhaps, have made our forebears appear less appetizing to a marauding tiger? Perhaps it sniffed with disdain at our wrinkled ancestor and stalked off in disgust, just as today we reject an overripe banana.

There’s more than one problem with that elegant hypothesis, not the least of which is that by the time the wrinkles have appeared, our ancestor might no longer have been capable of producing offspring. But this suggests another hypothesis. Wrinkles announce to the opposite sex that our years of fullest strength and vigor are behind us and that even if we can still produce children we are no longer capable of raising them. Thus we become less eligible as objects of desire, less of a threat to the perpetuation of the species. In case you were wondering, this hypothesis does not apply to Silvio Berlusconi.

What would the world be like if no one could tell our age, if we were all like Dorian Grey, without, of course, his sins? Who would give us seats in the subway? Who would pay attention to our pronouncements when the gravitas accompanying the appearance of old age is absent? No doubt our senior discounts would be taken away. The Republicans would have yet another excuse to abolish Medicare. Our peers would no longer be the aged but the adult population at large, who would pressure us to buy - and even worse, use - the latest electronic gadget. We’d have to listen to rappers, spend hours on social network media, and gyrate on the dance floor.

So if the wrinkles that accompany aging reflect no evolutionary advantage, at least they encourage others to let us live in peace, treating us with more respect than we otherwise deserve.

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