Is palmprint fortune telling really reliable?

We know that the so-called fortune telling is superstitious and unreliable. Those fortune tellers often look down at the palm prints of their guests. They clearly describe a striped road as representing wealth, future, feelings and so on, which seems reasonable. However, the statistical results of modern medicine show that palm prints and fingerprints can indeed reflect people's health and intelligence to a certain extent. It is speculated that this may be because palm prints and fingerprints can be formed in embryos. However, the nutrition in the early stage of embryonic development and the mood of the mother may affect the fetus, thus affecting the direction of these lines.

There are not many modern people who really believe in fortune telling, and everyone regards it as the talk at the dinner table at most. But there is one exception to fortune telling, that is, reading palms, because many scientists are also studying this problem. According to statistics, in recent 20 years, more than 400 palmistry papers can be retrieved/kloc-0, and all of them have been published in regular journals.

The palmprint here refers to the ratio of the length of index finger and ring finger, hereinafter referred to as 2/4 finger ratio. It was a German anatomist who first discovered that there was something fishy about this ratio. He wrote for the first time in the 1970s of 19 that there was a gender difference in the ratio of 2/4 fingers, and men were smaller than women. But after the paper was published, it didn't cause any repercussions, and it soon sank into the sea.

It was John of Swansea University in England who first made this matter a household name. In 1990s, Professor Manning cooperated with a fertility clinic to study the relationship between fetal left-right symmetry and hormone content in uterus. He vaguely remembered where he had seen the 2/4 finger ratio, so he took advantage of his position to measure the 2/4 finger ratio of a group of local people's right hands in Liverpool. The results show that the average value of women is 1 and that of men is 0.98, which is really a very small difference.

Professor Manning also measured the testosterone content of male customers and found that the lower the proportion of 2/4 fingers, the higher the testosterone content. This result seems to explain that the reason for the difference in the ratio of 2/4 fingers is androgen. He also measured the proportion of children's 2/4 fingers, and found that the proportion of two-year-old children's 2/4 fingers can already see the gender difference, indicating that the influence of testosterone must have begun in the womb.

1998, Professor Manning wrote a paper about this discovery, which immediately caused a sensation after its publication. Humans are keen on fortune telling. Cranial and facial fortune-telling was once very popular in Europe, but the Japanese invented blood type fortune-telling and it was also popular for some time. These are the physiological characteristics of the human body, which sounds more reliable than a birthday. Unfortunately, follow-up studies have proved that these fortune-telling methods are not reliable, and public interest has gradually disappeared.