I'm going to leave you staring at your fingers all afternoon...

So it goes that I'm reading this book, The Score: How The Quest For Sex Has Shaped The Modern Man, and boy have I been enlightened. In the book, and through subsequent additional reading, I've discovered a theory based on the relative length of the ring and index fingers and in utero exposure to testosterone and how they both develop the mind and body.

The hormone ‘testosterone’ is linked with many traits traditionally seen as masculine, such as aggression, becoming frustrated when you don’t get your way, and, most important of all, social dominance. Those in highly competitive occupations, such as actors and footballers, tend to have much higher levels than those in more caring jobs, such as nurses and the clergy. Men have much greater levels of testosterone in their bodies and brains than women.

Scientists believe that the amount of testosterone we were exposed to in the womb affects the ratio of index finger length to ring finger length. The higher the testosterone exposure, the longer the ring finger. Most women's index and ring fingers are almost equal because they have been exposed to less testosterone. If women have longer ring fingers, then they have more masculine tendencies. In most men, the ring finger is longer because they have higher testosterone levels. If men have ring fingers equal in length to their index fingers, or shorter, they have less masculine tendencies because they have been exposed to slightly less testosterone.

"Prenatal development is a black box," says John Manning of the University of Liverpool. He is one of a small number of scientist&: beginning to wonder if fingers could be used as a way of peering into that box.
In a paper just published in the journal Medical Hypotheses (vol. 54, p 855), Manning highlights conditions such as heart disease, breast cancer, autism and dyslexia. Both heart disease (in men) and breast cancer have been linked with high -levels of the female hormones oestrogen and progesterone. Most of the studies of this link have looked at circulating levels in the adult, but evidence is mounting that too much of the wrong hormone in the womb may be the real culprit.

This may or may not interest you, but I bet $2,000 you look at your hand.