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’s Thumb of Technology.” The panda’s thumb was Gould’s favorite example of the bottom-up tinkering of evolution, which uses whatever biological equipment is available for use, in opposition to the creationists’ claim that nature shows top-down intelligent design. The panda does not have a thumb. The digit it uses to strip the leaves off plants is called its “thumb,” but it is, in fact, an extended radial sesamoid (wrist) bone. It already has the traditional five digits, all locked into place through muscles, tendons, and nerves and designed for tearing and clawing from forward to back. Its extra digit is not an intelligently designed thumb; it is a jury-rigged wrist bone. The QWERTY keyboard, Gould argued, followed a similar principle of historical trajectory, its “design” a sign of its past development, not its current usage.

Since the time I conducted my research for this article, the claim that QWERTY serves as an example of suboptimal path dependency and historical lock-in has been challenged by several researchers. It is claimed that Sholes designed QWERTY to prevent jamming not by slowing down the typist but by separating keys whose typebar letters were close to each other underneath the typewriter carriage, which caused jamming (he moved the T and the H apart, for example). The QWERTY design was thus apparently a result of Sholes’ study of letter pair frequencies, not an impediment to fast typists whose alacrity conflicted with the mechanical ability of typewriters of that time.

Further, it is claimed that numerous typing tests have shown no significant differences between QWERTY and the Dvorak keyboard, and, ironically, it appears that the original test in which the Dvorak keyboard beat QWERTY in a 1944 match-up was conducted by none other than August Dvorak himself, making his data suspect because of a conflict of interest with his desire to market and sell his invention. Some authors have even argued that QWERTY’s inefficiencies—unbalanced loads on left and right hands for the most commonly used keys, and an excess loading on the top row of commonly used keys—may be compensated by the forced hand alternation during typing. This may explain why there is little overall difference in efficiency, even though with the Dvorak keyboard about four hundred of the most common words can be typed from the home row, whereas with QWERTY that figure is only about one hundred.

In response to these critiques, author and investigative journalist Randy Cassingham has compiled the most comprehensive database on this subject, from which he disputes these claims and maintains the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard. See, for example, his book, The Dvorak Keyboard (available at http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/, along with numerous articles and books on the subject), as well as his response to a widely distributed Reason magazine article at http://www.Dvorak-Keyboard.com/dvorak2.html. According to Cassingham:

The Dvorak has the most-used consonants on the right side of the home row, and the vowels on the left side of the home row. Among other design features, it is set up to facilitate keying in a back-and-forth motion—(right hand, then left hand, then right, etc.). When the same hand has to be used for more than one letter in a row (e.g., the common t-h), it is designed not only to use different fingers when possible (to make keying quicker and easier), but also to progress from the outer fingers to the inner fingers (“inboard stroke flow”)—it’s easier to drum your fingers this way (try it on the tabletop). The back-and-forth flow obviously makes typing quicker and easier: try typing the word “minimum” on the QWERTY keyboard, then look how you’d type it on Dvorak. The row above the top row contains the next-most-used letters and punctuation. Why? Because it is easier for your fingers to reach up on the keyboard than down. The least-used keys are on the bottom row. [See figure 9.5 below, from Cassingham’s Web page.]

If its so good, why isn’t everyone using it? Clearly, a good question. There are a lot of reasons for it,