Look for something about superstition. Help me!

Palm reading is a common activity of collecting money in our daily life. Because they don't even have the coat of science, people usually don't call them "pseudoscience", but just dismiss them as "superstition". But there is a group of scientists who specialize in palm reading and physiognomy. Is this science? The BBC released a three-part series "The Mystery of Gender", which showed us the unknown side of this research.

Professor Manning from university of central lancashire put forward a controversial point of view. He believes that if a person's ring finger is longer than his index finger, it can be inferred that when this person is still in his mother's body, the content of androgen in amniotic fluid is relatively high. This has a completely different meaning for men and women: if you are a man, it means that you will have a better heart and blood circulation system, and you will be better at running; If you are a woman, you have a "male brain". Research shows that the biggest difference between men and women in brain function lies in visual space. In the visual space test, the average score of men is 40% higher than that of women. So if you are a woman whose ring finger is longer than your index finger, you will perform much better in the visual space test than ordinary women-is that true?

Professor Manning designed an experiment, in which the subjects used excavators to do some very detailed operations, such as lifting buckets and pushing eggs into small boxes. Because the operator is far away from the operation target, it is a test of space sense and hand-eye coordination ability. As a result, men won an overwhelming victory, and only Grace won among women-and she was the only one of the five women who took the test that had a ring finger longer than the index finger. Besides, Grace's career in real life is impressive. She is an aircraft test engineer, and obviously she is familiar with this field that seems to be good for men.

Looking back at men-men whose ring fingers are longer than their index fingers, are they really better at running? Professor Manning designed another experiment. The six people who came to take the test are all excellent long-distance runners. Professor Manning had never known them before and knew nothing about their long-distance running performance and training status. He predicted their performance only by studying the relationship between their ring finger and index finger. He wrote his prediction on paper, sealed it and hung it on the chest of the corresponding player before the game started. After the game, six players stood up according to their rankings, opened the paper cards on their chests in turn, and saw Professor Manning's prediction. Surprisingly, except for the predictions of the third and fourth places, the results of others are completely consistent with the predictions! It's really a bit mysterious to predict sports performance simply by comparing the length of fingers! But scientists still didn't stop. They took physiognomy as their research goal and tried to "approve marriage" by physiognomy. Will they succeed this time?

The scientist's hypothesis is simple. They think that everyone will find a person who "likes" himself as his partner. The "image" here refers to the face, which is what we usually call husband and wife. Scientists use special software to judge the similarity of faces and point out who has a higher chance of success in matching. Of course, scientists don't simply think that everything is determined by "face". They also referred to other factors, asked subjects to fill out forms, tried to judge their personality, and made a more interesting study by the way: what do men and women pay more attention to each other?

Although the women interviewed generally emphasized that "money and status are not important" when asked the above questions, some experiments seem to give the opposite conclusion. Men are more direct and generally choose women with lower waist-hip ratio. Scientists point out that women with low waist-hip ratio are more likely to get pregnant, while men don't know when they can see through this.

According to the results of these studies, scientists packaged the people who participated in the test, but the results were not satisfactory. Even the most optimistic group of scientists thought each other "inappropriate" after several dates. The theoretical and experimental results are inconsistent, which declares the failure of the theory.

Now let's re-examine these studies. Is it scientific to predict sports performance with the ratio of ring finger to index finger and predict marriage with face?

Although it is also "reading palms" and "reading faces", what scientists do is far from what charlatans we see on the street do. It should be noted that no matter what the research contents and conclusions of scientists are, they always carry out "careful verification" on the premise of "bold assumptions". This is very different from those who claim that "faith is spirit". It is a scientific attitude to verify one's proposition through strictly designed experiments, which is also the essential difference between science and pseudoscience and superstition.

/mianx/shenxiang 1.htm This website is full of such things.