It's all in the....hormones

[andrewducker]

An article at Plastic pointed me in the direction of this piece on the whole "what makes people gay" research.

A few choice snippets:

Qazi Rahman and Glenn Wilson conducted a series of neurocognitive tests of spatial skill. They found that gay men performed less well than heterosexual men, but matched the ability of women.

But gay men performed better than heterosexuals and as well as women at remembering the locations of objects in an array.

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.

Dr Rahman said: “Because we know that performance on these cognitive tests depends on the integrity of specific brain regions, the differences implicate robust differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men and women and suggest that hormonal factors early in development (probably during the 1st trimester of pregnancy) produce these differences.”

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

Relatively long ring fingers are a sign of exposure to elevated levels of the male hormone testosterone in the womb.

The findings supported the idea that high, not low, testosterone levels in men produce shifts in sexual preference.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewducker]

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.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewducker]

And that's not even a vague attempt at science.

Sigh.

More time I have to spend tracking stuff down online.

Cheers for that.

Heterosexual Female With Lesbian Finger and Hetro Male Spatial Skils

[(Anonymous)]

Ok,here I am a straigh female with lesbian finger and
hetersexual male spatial aptitude.
No wonder western civilization is taking a nose dive.
You people waste time trying to sterotype and
discrimmate to the point you think you know how I'm
supposed to think.
Where I from we have traditional roles but we do not
say woman verbal and man spatial.We don't say women watch
for lend marks and male mentall map.
Please never foerce the nonsense on my counttry.

Wada Yemen