The Finger Book

Description

What could fingers and sex possibly have in common? What does the shape of a child?s fingers reveal about future musical talent? And why should professional footballers have longer fingers than other men? This book is about a simple measurement of the human hand: the ?finger ratio?, or the length of the ring finger relative to the index finger. John Manning uses a tiny difference between the sexes ? that men tend to have a greater finger ratio than women ? to examine a dizzying group of questions about human behaviour, from sexuality, to musical ability, to predisposition to disease. Provocative, intriguing and balanced, John Manning?s cutting-edge research poses many fruitful and unusual questions about what makes us as we are.

John Manning's research findings have been published in newspapers across the globe. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire and has been described as 'one of the most creative and exciting people working today on human biology from an evolutionary perspective.'