Giving Science The Finger

A few weeks ago, I linked to Usha Alexander's account of the birth of a religion on a remote island where the adherents base their faith on the faulty correlation between earthly actions and heavenly rewards. Here is yet another example of an irrelevant and shoddy (IMO) cause and effect reading, this time in the field of science.

 

I cannot comment on the statistical significance of such studies but I find them quite useless and in some manner, harmful. Given that most people operate around the middle of the bell curve, whatever the pursuit, very few of us are likely to set the world on fire with our brilliance or be abject failures in life. Given a modicum of dedication, most of us are capable of learning math, science, philosophy or the arts without straining our brain beyond repair.  Unless universities and research institutions (where the tail end of the higher aptitude of the bell curve is likely to congregate) plan to grant jobs, tenures and scholastic funding based on the relative lengths of their candidates' fingers (or other physical attributes), I don't see the utility of such studies.  And while they are at it, they may as well consult a palmist, an astrologer and a phrenologist for good measure.

Here we go again.

New scientific “evidence” has been released, bolstering the old claim that women who excel at math and science are less feminine—or at any rate more masculine—than their sisters who can’t balance a checkbook or tell the difference between a phenome and a phoneme, but can talk up a storm.

In the August issue of British Journal of Psychology, a team of researchers led by psychologist Mark Brosnan of the University of Bath, England, have published findings that suggest women who are good at science and math have longer ring fingers than index fingers, which indicates a relatively high level of prenatal exposure to the male hormone testosterone. Conversely, longer index fingers indicate higher levels of the female hormone estrogen, according to the study, and a corresponding aptitude for verbal communication. The study used standardized test scores of 75 British seven-year-old boys and girls and compared them to photocopies of the youngsters’ hands.

The media had a field day: “Study Correlates Finger Length to Performance on SAT,” trumpeted FOX News. The widely-linked LiveScience.com asserted: “A quick look at the lengths of children’s index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims. Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.”

Many of the news reports didn’t mention that the British SAT—upon which Brosnan’s study was based—refers to the Standardised Assessment Test, which is given to all British schoolchildren at age 7, 11 and 14, and is not the same as the U.S. College Board exam that uses the same acronym.

Still, the idea of using finger length to make predictions and assumptions is not out of keeping with Brosnan’s conclusions. On his website, Brosnan states:

• “Digit length is fixed in utero and relative digit lengths remains constant through develoliment and is constant across ethnicities.”
• “Digit ratio is an index of exliosure to lirenatal testosterone.”
• “Prenatal testosterone slows the growth rate of the left side of the brain while enhancing growth of the right side.”
• “The right hemislihere is associated with better visual-sliatial and mathematical abilities.”
• “Traditional sex differences in visual-sliatial and mathematical abilities can be attributed to differences in exliosure to lirenatal testosterone, indexed by a sex dimorlihic liattern in digit ratio.”

Brosnan’s is not the first study linking finger length to sex hormones. In March 2000, S. Marc Breedlove, who like Brosnan is a psychologist, and other researchers at University of California at Berkeley, published a study in the journal Nature that ostensibly described the proper “masculine” and “feminine” hand configurations, and claimed that people whose hands deviate from these characteristic shapes are likely to be homosexual.