NEWS: Keep Your Hands To Yourself

Shouldn't the scientific community be giving these people the intellectual equivalent of being stuffed in a locker right about now?

With alpha = 0.05, about 5% of the correlations you find will probably be due to random chance. This study sure smells like that 5%.

Correlation does NOT necessarily equal causation.

However, were these "findings" to have any real "proof" it would be interesting.


As it stands, it simply sounds like some kids looking to make the grade any way they can. Even if they have to stretch the intentions of the scientific method past their breaking point.

Jace, that would be poetic justice indeed.

My ring finger is a good centimetre longer than my index... please don't tell my husband that apparently I'm a lesbian.

Lesbians have a high incidence of longer ring finger (I think it was 89%), but a lot of straight women have it too. It's just that a far lower percentage of straight women have the longer ring finger.

Sort of like how all lesbians are women, but that doesn't make all women lesbians

Reminds me of of of Douglas Adams books where a census shows that staistically everyone in the universe has 3.1 legs and owns an hyena.

Jokes aside, "correlation" do not equal "statistically significat scientific proof" and I don't think they'll be able to publish these findings in any scientific journal unless they have rock solid data to back their claims. Which I found unlikely.

And the size of your pecker corresponds to the size of your feet...yep!...aha!

Yeah, my index and ring fingers on my right hand are roughly equal length. I guess I fuck dudes.

but Albert Einstein had brown eyes, so yes, we brown eyed people are all geniuses!

No, I think it's the SMELL of one's feet that correlates to the smell of the penis.... mah feets smell likes CANDY!

These findings should be tested and reviewed by other scientists in order to confirm or debunk them. If they're confirmed by enough people, then they're likely true. That's how science works, no matter what it's trying to test. Science does not have the luxury of being nice or fair or pretty.

No, JD, correlation doesn't equal causation, and that's why this news article is completely misleading. I haven't read the new British study, but I'm quite familiar with the Breedlove work. He has never proposed, as the news article says, that

In fact, that's a really irresponsible distortion of his work.

It's bizarrely fascinating that, although the claim that homosexuality is not a "choice" and has a biological basis is the foundation of most arguments for equal rights, a number of gay men and lesbians seem intent on trashing scientists who share this belief (based on what they know about biology) and provide empirical support for it. I don't get it. Isn't that a job for religious nutjobs and the GOP?

And Breedlove isn't a "kid" or just a "psychologist" (the original article seems to use that term pejoratively). He's a senior neuroscientist and psychologist, and one of the world's leading experts on the sexual differentiation of the nervous system.

I'm not slamming you, JD, I just get really pissed off at anti-science articles that reflect absolutely no understanding of the original work or its scientific context. How is that different from the creationists' tactics? (The comparison to phrenology is pretty ironic, actually. Who's the phrenologist here?)

And apesamongus is absolutely correct. If people think Breedlove's findings are bullshit, they're free to try to falsify them. Go for it. But simply asserting that the work isn't statistically significant ain't gonna cut it.

well...my ring finger is longer than my index finger and i hate math and love cock.

bah

.

How many inches of cock do you love? Now what's that in centimeters?

The article is terrible, laden with scare quotes, fearmongering, and poorly conceived conflation with phrenology. Science writing in the media is poor in general, but this is a half dozen sigmas down the bell curve.

Brosnan has a summary of findings here.

-TTm

The report that I was aware of (at least a decade old) related the finger size to Lesbians ..... BUT also, importantly, to boys with Autism.

I think the link was due to an excess of testosterone during gestation.

These processes are not completely known to us.
An example were the >4 legged frogs being born.

We know very, very little about medicine. A specialist doctor (and Protestant) said to me that,

"medicine is at about the same level that engineering was in the year 1200".

"if the Catholics hadn't killed off the inteligensia during the inquisition, we'd be further ahead".

So does that mean my up-turned left eyebrow, rising to a point in the middle and which I affectionately call my "Devil-Brow", is the reason I'm such a smarmy jack-ass?

That is a great point, something I forget about more often than I'd like. We lost huge amounts of pharmacopial data in those years, and a great deal of knowledge concerning herbal treatment was forced underground since it was practiced by gypsies.

Re-reading the article, I'm a litle confused at the intent.
Are you upset the generalisations OR that research is being done into gender specific qualities???

Through evolution, I'd hope that the males (hunters) had greater hand eye coordination and spacial awareness - else, throwing the spear would be a challenge.

By the same argument, females have greater social skills and verbal skills - who were out in a group collecting fruit, vegetables etc. whilst the men hunted the meat.

No pseudo science about this - this is how our ancestors got us to where we are today.

These differences show up in society and are important areas of research.
For example, the advanced learning capabilities of teenage girls c.f teenage boys (we just take an extra few years to get there).

Boys have testosterone - Girls have estrogen/progesterone, we can't change that - and I'm sure that they do affect us in different ways - good, bad or indifferent.

Here is a list of some researchers,

Stian Reimers was lead scientific advisor on the Sex ID project. He is a psychology researcher at University College London.

Michael Peters is Professor of Psychology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

John Manning is Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire.

I think the problem here is that it is the linked article (which is about the original research) is the one drawing the harsh conclusions, not the scientists themselves.

The work has been published - the first Breedlove study correlating finger digit ratio to sexual orientation was published in Nature, subsequent studies have shown up in other reputable scientific journals. Which, of course, doesn't mean that it's gospel truth, but that at least their methodology is sound.

A more recent paper from the Breedlove lab shows that in fact there are some serious inconsistencies in published findings on the subject that should make anyone hesitate before drawing the kinds of conclusions that the linked article, and hence the original article do.

It was already posted earlier but worth repeating because it's true -

Having a characteristic of one doesn't automatically give all the of the characteristics of the other.

Let's try to contain the hysteria, folks. Plenty of women have been good at math, both heterosexual and straight.