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

Re: Then you shouldn't need anyone to explain the scientific method to you!

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

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

Re: Then you shouldn't need anyone to explain the scientific method to you!

[andrewducker]

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

Re: Then you shouldn't need anyone to explain the scientific method to you!

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Then you shouldn't need anyone to explain the scientific method to you!

[andrewducker]

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)