Very cool, if true

The researchers also found that gay men and lesbians both had longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers than heterosexual men and women.

Gods, I've seen this study, and it's total and complete junk - it's full of just the sorts of simple expectation-based errors that Gould described in The Mismeasure of Man.

One of the things that bothers me about this whole silly debate is that it has nothing at all to do with science and everything to do with politics. I agree with the politics of almost everyone on the "gay gene" side of things, but I think their quest is misguided, not merely because they are wrong, but because proving that homosexuality is innate won't increase toleration for queer folk. Many of the people who support and perform such studies believe this, but race is partially genetic (the rest is cultural perception - the dividing lines of races vary significantly from culture to culture) and racism is still very much with us. Instead, we'll see efforts to test for the "gay gene" and work on genetic surgery to "correct" it. No one claims one's choice of religion is in any way genetic and in many ways I think religious tolerance is better than racial tolerance in many First World nations.

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You think they're lying about the different people performing differently on the tests?

Or about the fact that brain structures are different?

Or what?

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I'm guessing the study is riddled with errors of finding what one expects to find due to unconscious bias. If the same people are doing the cognitive tests as did the pathetic finger-length experiments, I can't imagine that those tests are worth the paper they are printed out on.

I've seen articles going both ways wrt brain differences and know that at least wrt studies specifically on the brains of homosexuals, the biggest and most widely published study used the brains of people who died of AIDs as the pool of "homosexual brains", supposedly to "make certain" that the people were actually queer. Snce AIDs has provable degenerative effect on the brain (and since not every man who dies of AIDs is gay), this study was total and complete junk.

IIRC the above study found the corpus callosum to be smaller in gay men than in straight men and (like several other studies) alleged that women also had smaller corpus callosums (on average and adjusted for body weight) than men. Of course, there are an equal number of studies that "prove" that women have large corpus callosums and this is the origin of myths like "women's intuition". I'm assuming that this means that there is no difference in the size of corpus callosums in men and women.

My cynicism for such studies currently knows no bounds because so few are done well and so many are unworthy of a first year grad student.

One good book to look at is The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris, which deals with issues of bias, assumption, and similar issues in gender-based psych and medical studies.

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In several language tests, traditionally a female strong point, gay men did as well as heterosexual women. Lesbians, on the other hand, performed the tests as poorly as “straight” men.

::giggles:: This whole article is just so silly I couldn't believe it. But this particularly makes me giggle.

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Why? Honestly, I'm curious.

I thought it was a fascinating result. I'm wondering why you thought it was funny.

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I know I shouldn't find bad science funny: it's too serious to be funny. But sometimes bad science is just completely hilarious - and this is one example.

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More details please. Why do you find it hilarious. I find it perfectly plausible (and yes, I've studied science, up to a year and a half of physics at University).

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The scientific method has four steps.

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

In this case, good science would suggest that the group of phenomena called "verbal skills" and the other group of phenomena called "spatial skills" are the phenomena to observe and describe. These skills are describable and identifiable.

Now, if you take a group of people - say 100 - and assuming you are deliberately trying to select a random group from the population as whole, you'll end up with 50 women, 50 men. Probably 2 or 3 of those women will openly identify as homosexual, and perhaps 5 or 6 of the men. A larger proportion of the women will openly identify as bisexual, and a smaller proportion of the men. Plus there will be an unknown number of people in the group who will be homosexual or bisexual but who won't want to admit it to the researchers. The chances that this group had funding to study a number as high as 100 is improbable, but let's do them that credit. Assuming that they did it this way, the correct way, that means that when they talk about "homosexual men" and "homosexual women" they're really using a group far too small to show anything statistically sensible - less than ten, even if you add together the men and the women. Even if you include in those who openly identify as bisexual, I would consider it highly unlikely that in any group of randomly selected people you'd get more than 20.

But, given the description of what they claim to have discovered, I would say that they tripped at the first step. Instead of choosing to study the scientifically-identifiable phenomena called "verbal skills"/"spatial skills", they instead decided to study the non-scientifically-identifiable group of phenomena called "homosexuality", and that this caused them to fall over in an amusing manner.

I'll go on to explain how they then fell over on the second, third, and fourth steps too, if you like.

website outlining the scientific method (http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/AppendixE/AppendixE.html#Heading3)

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broin.livejournal.com

*bitchslap*

Good post. =)

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Yup, I know the scientific method. cheers for the link tho - it may come in useful at some point.

A simple "I suspect that the sample size was too small to be statistically significant" would have sufficed there. Following that, an investigation into the actual sample size and methodology can take place and we can then make an objective decision as to whether the methods and sample size were in any way reasonable.

Now, this means tracking down the paper in question. I'll have a go at that when I have some free time, tomorrow or at the weekend.

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Sure. I suspect that it will be on the same kind of standard as their finger-measuring "science" though.

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I'm seeing a lot of the "I suspect" and "chances are". Not a lot of "here's some proof".

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But the news item you posted didn't offer any proof either: merely made a series of rather silly statements. Now, if you're prepared to go look up the actual paper and discover for yourself the methodology used, more power to you, and I hope you'll post it here. From the news report alone, however, it looked like a complete balls-up of the scientific method.

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The news report didn't mention the scientific method. All it did was mention the vague course they'd followed (done some tests, found some groupings) and some conclusions they'd come to. There was no mention of the methodology, sample sizes or anything like that.

You, for whatever reasons, have decided that the conclusions are "silly" (possibly the political reasons that Heron alluded to) and have then launched into a series of "I suppose" and "it seems likely" designed to cast aspersions.

While I appreciate Heron's input with his recollections of the finger-measuring experiment, you haven't actually offered anything except the fact that you have doubts. Which is good in one way (hey, everything should be doubted), but not terribly productive. Especially when you launch in with "It's silly. No, just silly."

A tiny bit of courtesy and reasonableness would have gotten the whole thing started off on a much better foot.

(Gah, I'm grumpy. And no, it's not all you. I believe I'll go and shoot things until I feel less so)

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No kidding. Btw, the methodology of the finger length study (which was discussed in a Popular Science article in glowing terms about a year ago) was also laughably pathetic. They must be using blackmail to get grants because there is no other way anyone sensible would give them money.

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If you remember a link for the anti-finger length thing, I'd like to see it. It seems odd to me, but then I'm not an expert in human development. I'd be interested to see something showing their methodology in a negative light.

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Sadly, I saw it in a magazine (Popular Science), but haven't seen this info on-line. The basics were that they set up at a queer-oriented street fair, selected people based on whether they "looked" queer or straight, asked them (before measuring their finger-lengths). They then measured the fingers with a hand-held micrometer at a booth in a street fair. I'm fairly certain that this is an ideal way to obtain useless data based solely on what the researchers expected to find.

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