Man In Space

A schematic representation of the form that I suspect Homo sapiens would evolve toward in a "weightless" (i.e. free fall) environment, over a period of millions of years.

The form shown is topologically equivalent to today's Earth-bound form. The parts have been rearranged by adjustment of proportions. The large sphere represents the head; the small spheres represent the expected location of the eyes, having shifted toward a disposition providing an optimum compromise between the need for stereoscopic vision and the need to supervise the operation of all four hands.

The legs are reduced in size to equivalence with the arms, and the feet have returned to the prehensile form seen in our simian ancestors, since large, heavy legs with almost no manipulative capability would be useless in free fall. The internal skeleton has adjusted itself so as to dispose the four limbs toward the vertices of a circumscribing regular tetrahedron, such symmetry being optimal in a weightless environment. The fingers have adjusted their arrangement to be more symmetrical about the wrists than ours are now. I show six fingers per hand, as indeed occurs in some rare individuals now, but I wouldn't claim to know the optimal number of fingers.

This form looks very strange our eyes now, but then the fishes with whom we have a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago must think we air-breathing beings look strange. It would never occur to them that we are related to them.

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Incidentally, I think it would be possible to test the hypothesis that we would evolve toward such a form, by a method like that of Genetic Programming [link]