talk to me about how you can tell the dating preferences of a society based on the ratio of their fingers um it sounds bizarre doesn't it but it seems to work quite well and and this was established um both in in animals and in in humans it works quite well in primates but it seems that the genes that control the length of the fingers and particularly the second and the fourth digits so your index finger and your uh ring finger are determined uh by uh or are influenced during development by testosterone load uh in in
the womb so the fetal uh the load that the fetus is of testosterone from the mother that the fetus is exposed to um the higher that is um the uh shorter the index finger is so more testosterone is shorter index finger yes shorter index finger means that um you are on the whole more likely to be promiscuous and they and it's kind of indicative of high testosterone levels them both internally to you so some male babies because they're obviously switching over uh from being a kind of generic um non-sex so so female body form is
the default yeah i remember i don't i got to interject there there is a um i think it's called gone girl which was a movie kind of a thriller movie a few years ago i'm pretty sure that the line was in that and the the female protagonist in it is very manipulative and she uses this line that would have slipped under the radar for a lot of people but she points at the guy and she says the male form is an aberration and that's so cool right because it's the reason that men have got nipples
right you need to be born with all of the elements all of the individual bits that could make a woman and then you you turn from a kind of nothingness that could be a woman into a man and then that was why she said she pointed at him and she says the male form is an aberration yeah well this is also what's known um as the race to be male because it depends on how fast the fetus grows so it's a combination of having a y chromosome and how how how much fat the baby lays
lays down and that switches the brain over from this kind of generic female brain into a male brain which is clearly missing lots of bits that should be there as a result okay so what you were saying before the finger length that isn't the determinant of the dating preference that is simply a manifestation of testosterone levels testosterone is so you're saying shorter index finger more testosterone it would appear more testosterone also correlated with shorter monogamous partnerships normally it would be either totally promiscuous mating systems or mating systems in which males compete with each other for
to monopolize groups of females so what sometimes there's a harem-based um social system where you have one male so and a number of females in their offspring so species like gibbons which are obligately monogamous very occasionally they might have two maybe even three females exceptionally in their little group uh but you know 98 of gibbon groups in the wild are strictly monogamous and the pair stays together for effectively for life very long index fingers no no they're very equal right and if you look at monogamous species sorry polygamous species of primates they then tend to
have both both sexes will have index fingers which are shorter than uh the ring finger but the more promiscuous sex will have relatively shorter um index finger uh compared to the female so the males who tend to be the more promiscuous sex or even in um promiscuous species will have uh uh a more deviant um uh finger ratio than the female as well and you see that in humans as well women's tens of thousands of people right now looking at their hands yes i know and working out whether or not they're whether or not their
digits justify their desire to cheat or to go out and have sex with somebody tonight yes well well you have to be a little bit careful because the padding of the flesh and the muscles around the finger bases disguises the point where you should be measuring from right so you you need to find the joint between the um finger the bottom finger bone and the top end of the first hand bone if you like um and and and the differences are very very small they would be hard to tell by eye although i have seen
some males with spectacularly short index fingers which is just blindingly obvious and you take one look at them in their behavior and you go yes you're an absolute bastard basically not not just not just in the world of of romance but in the world of work you know just yeah testosterone coursing through them yes yes i mean just fizzing what's happening people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe peace [Music] you
