So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table, and by the way, these things are extremely common in the genome. There are many more variable number tandem repeats in the genome than there are genes.

And the idea that this happens through occasional random mutation of a protein-coding gene that alters something important is, in my opinion, ridiculous. That more likely, vastly more likely, is a system in which parameters like finger length and the length of each phalanx in the finger is stored as a variable, and those variables get readily modified. In other words, if you looked at the hand of every human being, you would see that there is already a ton of variation in the relative lengths of the different digits and the relative lengths to each of the knuckles. And that if those things are reflective of a particular state stored as essentially an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available and therefore evolution can explore what Stuart Kaufman would call the adjacent possible.