Thursday 1 December 2005

Pic of the day: Darned low-digit-ratio guys are just coming here to check out our girls - and boys too - and make trouble. Science has proof! Or has it?

Digit ratio

This entry was originally posted in my LiveJournal, but I think it is actually more at home here. More's the pity, since some young people do read my LJ from time to time.

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Today I happened on an article saying that the length of the index finger relative to the ring finger was correlated to violent tendencies, physical violence only, in men only.

For the first time in my life, I looked at my relative finger lengths. The article did not say what was normal, or good, or bad. I looked at my right hand, and found that the fingers were almost of the same length, altough the ring finger was just slightly longer. OK. Then I happened to glance at my left hand, and stopped in profound disbelief. My left index finger was very noticeably shorter than the ring finger. Where I had needed to look at the right hand for quite a while to make sure, any passing stranger would be able to see it on my left. How could this be? I looked again, and found that on my right hand, the ring finger is slightly recessed, that is, it is starting from a lower level than the middle finger. On the left hand, they are nearly equal at the base.

I then googled for "finger length hormone" and read up on the topic. The theory is that the balance of testosterone and estrogen during early pregnancy influences both the relative finger length and the brain, causing people with overly much testosterone to become gay/lesbian and, if male, violent. Except these differences are only statistical, you can't say from any given person's fingers what goes on in their brain. And then there was one small mention in one article about a fact that in my view invalidates the whole theory, even though it is a very nifty and logical-sounding explanation. The comment was that ethnic groups that lived closer to equator had a lower digit ratio.

Now if these studies were conducted in North America, or even Britain, they would be honor-bound to include at least white and black people. Now we know which people are euphemistically referred to as ethnic groups living close to eqator. We also know that in North America and to some extent Britain these people are culturally encouraged to violence, through the way they are portrayed in mass media and the way they are treated in school and by the automatic reactions of people they meet on the street. That this is a social role is very obvious because you can find other ethnic groups fulfilling the same social role in other cultures, and likewise you won't find the same behavior in the whole of society in the nations where these people predominate. Now suddenly you get a nice scientific publication to print the equivalent of "people with dark skin are statistically more likely to act violently and be homosexual". Uh huh. Good job. I feel a sudden urge to beat these guys up... with my left hand.