"Model" as a word needs to be defined before it is used. ie it has numerous different meanings beyond that of female who wears clothes so as to display them to other people.
Let me think of some kinds: conceptual model which contains an idea or ideas that the speaker is highlighting (An example is a map or a child's toy); Explanatory model like Wranghams idea for human pacification. (These can range from pure speculation to something that can be used for comparison with empirical data like a climate simulation); Predictive model which is an extrapolation of existing data (Can be statistical or mechanism based. Their accuracy relies on the future being similar to the past, or more typically having means to transform between them).
Do you object to this being an explanatory model under discussion? Is it hard to see that that's the way I was using the term? And more to the point, are you aware that after you've taken my pun away, I have no image and no joke on a politically incorrect post with four likes?
In short, heliocentrism had several obvious problems, not least of which was that all the empirical evidence pointed *away* from heliocentrism and towards geocentrism; the then-contemporary arguments for heliocentrism were *entirely* mystical.
Indeed, the *empirical* proof for heliocentrism didn't arrive until the mid 18th century, although there was strong evidence pointing towards heliocentrism with things like the phases of Venus (discovered in the 1650s).
My apologies for taking so long to get back to you! In my defense I've been running around town the last two days wearing the same dirty t-shirt that says "WINNER."
Although geocentrism is likely far more ancient than Aristotle, he still predated Ptolemy, which is why I'm using Aristotelianism as a kind of synecdoche for prescientific ideas in general. I don't mean to cast aspersions on Aristotle at all; Aristotle was brilliant. Ptolemy, on the other hand, was born after Aristarchos and really should have had access to Aristarchos' heliocentric model - though I didn't know this until now, wikipedia tells me Aristarchos even had the planets in their correct order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism
My greatest objection to the website you gave is where they say, "Before you laugh at your ancestors, TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like dunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You've got eyeballs and armillaries, and that's pretty much it."
My family doesn't celebrate ordinary American holidays. But every equinox and solstice we pull out the globe and ask about the meaning of the seasons. Usually more than once a year, the retrograde motion of Mars comes up as well - naked eye stargazing is a minor obsession of mine. Heliocentrism explains both the surprising retrograde motion of the superior planets and the strange path of the ecliptic, while geocentrism doesn't. (Heliocentrism even explains why Mercury and Venus are never seen far from the sun.)
The rest of what the page says doesn't really treat Heliocentrism respectfully; for example figure 4 is "Not to scale, dudes!" but if it were, it would be clear why there's no noticeable deflection for an object dropped from even a high tower. I may not have been a heliocentrist, but if I were a contemporary of Ptolemy and lived in civilized surroundings, chances are, I'd have rejected geocentrism.
Browsing through the wikipedia article on Aristarchos, it's pretty clear to me that Aristarchos proposes heliocentrism because the sun is nobler than the earth and should be at the center.
I'd be interested in your proof of heliocentrism using eyeballs and armillaries, though.
Ptolemy may not have had proof that geocentrism was wrong. But by the time he was alive in the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy should have had enough evidence to prefer heliocentrism.
Early on, in the time of Aristotle, this wasn't the case. Geocentrism is simple, and has everything falling towards or orbiting the middle of the Earth. That's pretty good. In contrast, heliocentrism has some things falling towards and orbiting the Earth, and some things orbiting the sun, while the earth itself spins instead of the celestial sphere with the fixed stars. Whether we're specifically invoking something like Occam's Razor or not, this messiness is a problem. So it's no surprise that geocentrism was accepted first.
But geocentrism can't explain the paths of the sun, moon, Mars, and Jupiter. Even extremely ancient peoples knew about these issues - Stonehenge is the best known surviving calendar, but there were many others made of wood that we've detected from post holes, and celebrations commonly coincided with seasonal phenomena.
If the sun and moon go around the Earth, it just happens that the sun is high in summer, and the full moon is high in winter. If Mars and Jupiter go around the Earth, it just happens that their motion is retrograde when far from the sun. These are definitely problems for geocentrism.
The clincher arrived in the Hellenistic period. Before then, people thought the Evening Star and the Morning Star were two different things (Phospheros and Hesperos). But around the time of Christ, they now realize those two phenomena are one: the planet Venus. And Venus is clearly attending the Sun in very regular cycles, just like Mercury. So the simplicity of geocentrism now vanishes: even under geocentrism, you have things that orbit Sol, and things that orbit the Earth. Geocentrism by then had the weight of popular opinion, but if you are wise enough to look at the issue objectively, the only question is, which things orbit which?
Geocentrism no longer has simplicity on its side, and it leaves much unexplained. But a rotating, heliocentric Earth allows the sun *and* the fixed stars to remain stationary. It explains Mars and Jupiter in retrograde, when Earth passes them. It explains why the sun gets high in summer and low in winter, while rising and setting every day: the rotation of the Earth creates day and night cycles, and the revolution of the Earth brings the sun around to the north side during summer and the south side in winter.
But heliocentrism does bring with it a mounting disquiet for man and his place in the universe. For heliocentrism requires our own ground to move, space to be incomprehensibly vast, and stars to be enormous distances away from us to prevent any detectable parallax. Might the stars themselves be as large as our own sun, with strange planets, peoples, and unknown gods of their own, spinning eternally through the nighted gulfs of unplumbed space? And what hidden things may wait there, lurking in the black and silent void which lies forever above us, watching and waiting just beyond the blinding curtain of light thrown protectively across our eyes by a warm and merciful sun?
The problems with geocentrism are well known, even to Ptolemy. Heliocentrism has, however, no particular *physical* reason to be accepted (and, indeed, Copernicus' initial system *still had epicycles*.
You might also want to look into Tychonic astronomy, which had a better fit to actual observations than contemporary systems.
Again, a more complete reading of Mr. Flynn's work would be helpful, even though you don't like his sense of humor.
I don't understand why the lack of a deeper physical explanation is a problem. The idea that the Earth rotates is itself a physical explanation for day and night cycles; the earth revolving around the sun in a path slightly tilted from the axis of rotation is a physical explanation for the seasons, and for the changing position of the sun against the stars. If I were a contemporary of Ptolemy, I'd definitely be satisfied with that without knowing that universal gravitation tied the system together.
I'm also not sure why I'd want to read more of Mr. Flynn's work with any greater care, given that I really don't like his article. On the other hand, I'll definitely consider any argument that you want to make yourself!
1. Is the theory really that domesticated animals get lighter all-over? In his 2019 book Wrangham mostly writes about white spots of fur, in for example horses and cats, and explain that as an effect of neural crest cell development processes that also affect the brain.
(In practical life, we all know that black cats can be tame, both those with and without white spots. On the other hand, there tends to be something psychologically special with red cats.)
2. Is the self-domestication talk really a theory/a model, or is it only a hypothesis? Richard Wrangham writes about neural crest cell development as a possible cause of the physical traits associated with domestication in animals. I know little about fetal development on the cellular level. But it sounds like an area where scientific progress could me made. If such progress is made and more things are understood about the biochemical processes of domestication, then the hypotheses of Wrangham and others will either become more or less relevant.
For that reason, I can't entirely see why one or another hypothesis needs to be discarded on this level. Cellular development and evolution are messy subjects. One hypothesis might score more logical points than another, but why not keep all of them until there is a better understanding of the processes that are supposed to lie behind the visible phenomena? Aristotelian physics blocked a lot of more useful thoughts. But I don't see that kind of blocking power in the model of primate self-domestication.
Be aware that people have been using English words like "lay," "can," and "theory" in ways that raised my blood pressure since the turn of the century. I'm trying to just nod along and age gracefully rather than becoming a crotchety old man. Theory = hypothesis = model = idea = whatever you want the words to mean.
> Cellular development and evolution are messy subjects.
If that were the only problem, I might grant that things were basically not too bad with Wrangham's model. But now add to that the fact that domestication still has a distinct meaning (in the way that "lay" and "lie" sadly no longer do):
1. to bring into use in one's own country : to bring into domestic use : adopt
2. to adapt (an animal or plant) over time from a wild or natural state especially by selective breeding to life in close association with and to the benefit of humans
3. to cause to become adapted to life in a household : to make fit for domestic life
I don't think these fit what Wrangham is talking about. Let him propose a model of hominin self-pacification, and watch as all the problems evaporate. We *are* pacified relative to chimpanzees; maybe we did do it to ourselves by killing off the meanies.
> Aristotelian physics blocked a lot of more useful thoughts. But I don't see that kind of blocking power in the model of primate self-domestication.
OK, I see where you are coming from here, yes. But that still doesn't mean I have to like Wrangham's model *myself,* seeing that it generates hypotheses which are then falsified. But if you don't like the idea of refining it into a more modest and respectable Model of Hominin Self-Pacification, well... maybe you could save it in your grand Room of Thoughts? https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-order-of-thoughts
(Just don't put it next to group selection, that one is a genuinely good idea as it is)
> there tends to be something psychologically special with red cats
Yes, although you are right that humans were not literally domesticated, I think that there is still a possibility that the same biological processes lie behind the domestication of dogs and the pacification of humans. Only biology can prove or disprove it. I put that idea on the shelf for when biologists can/want to develop it. In the meantime, I see nothing wrong in refining it. Biologists can test the refined theory too, I hope.
I think the big question here is the return of phrenology. Wrangham doesn't say it if course, because he is a respectable person, but was he trying to do is essentially to bring phrenology back to life. For example, he suggested that the Neanderthals were less peaceful than Homo sapiens sapiens because of how they looked. That is a brave suggestion. If it gets backed up with more solid science, it could have very important implications for archaeology.
>>Wait - what?
N=4 or even 5, I'm sure! Haven't you noticed that cats with ginger fur color tend to be tame in another way than cats of other colors? They are not "catty" the same way as normal cat, but care more about human affairs. They also tend to be unafraid and lack nerves. We once had a ginger colored cat who we nick-named Math Cat, because when the children sat outdoors and had their math books on the ground, that cat always joined them and stepped around and looked in the books. We have never had any other cat that cares for math.
The internet seems to agree with me regarding ginger colored cats: There's something with them. I seriously wonder why people don't breed on them and create a race. Here it says that ginger color is more common on the male side. Maybe that makes breeding difficult.
Sorry for the delay in responding! Though it may have seemed that I was abducted by aliens, I promise I was merely overworked and miserable.
> I think the big question here is the return of phrenology. Wrangham...suggested that the Neanderthals were less peaceful than Homo sapiens sapiens because of how they looked. That is a brave suggestion.
There's actually a lot of what you describe as phrenology floating around in modern psychology. For instance, human face width correlates with aggression:
> Haven't you noticed that cats with ginger fur color tend to be tame in another way than cats of other colors?
Well no. But partly this may have to do with the fact that I never do math out of books - a proper physicist does his equations on whiteboards, and red cats are unlikely to be very good finding purchase on vertical surfaces. Indeed among communities of physicists there would seem to be a reproductive advantage for long-haired white cats capable of using the white backgrounds for camouflage while sticking to them via static electricity.
More seriously, Mrs. Apple Pie does tell me that it's widely known in the horse world that greys are calmer than other colors. And in *humans* it's been found that redheads are more sensitive to pain. (I throw links at you out of habit, without expecting you to read them, but this one is fairly readable:) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44254-023-00017-3
Very interesting! If I weren't so movement-restricted I would have run for the calipers instantly. I indeed look a bit broadfaced and am a bit aggressive and Anders has a narrower face than most people and is less aggressive than average (although at least one of our children inherited my facial shape and Anders' moods).
My favorite is the digit ratio theory. I once measured the digit 2 and digit 4 of all family members who volunteered for it. I mostly found out that I'm an outlier myself (D4 5 mm longer than D2) but the others were fairly normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio
"Model" as a word needs to be defined before it is used. ie it has numerous different meanings beyond that of female who wears clothes so as to display them to other people.
Let me think of some kinds: conceptual model which contains an idea or ideas that the speaker is highlighting (An example is a map or a child's toy); Explanatory model like Wranghams idea for human pacification. (These can range from pure speculation to something that can be used for comparison with empirical data like a climate simulation); Predictive model which is an extrapolation of existing data (Can be statistical or mechanism based. Their accuracy relies on the future being similar to the past, or more typically having means to transform between them).
Chances are there are others.
Do you object to this being an explanatory model under discussion? Is it hard to see that that's the way I was using the term? And more to the point, are you aware that after you've taken my pun away, I have no image and no joke on a politically incorrect post with four likes?
Ummm . . . . ahhhh, my mind was wandering, . . . . maybe?
Before we go ragging on Ptolemy (not Aristotle), you should look through Michael Flynn's _The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown_. (https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html)
In short, heliocentrism had several obvious problems, not least of which was that all the empirical evidence pointed *away* from heliocentrism and towards geocentrism; the then-contemporary arguments for heliocentrism were *entirely* mystical.
Indeed, the *empirical* proof for heliocentrism didn't arrive until the mid 18th century, although there was strong evidence pointing towards heliocentrism with things like the phases of Venus (discovered in the 1650s).
My apologies for taking so long to get back to you! In my defense I've been running around town the last two days wearing the same dirty t-shirt that says "WINNER."
Although geocentrism is likely far more ancient than Aristotle, he still predated Ptolemy, which is why I'm using Aristotelianism as a kind of synecdoche for prescientific ideas in general. I don't mean to cast aspersions on Aristotle at all; Aristotle was brilliant. Ptolemy, on the other hand, was born after Aristarchos and really should have had access to Aristarchos' heliocentric model - though I didn't know this until now, wikipedia tells me Aristarchos even had the planets in their correct order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism
My greatest objection to the website you gave is where they say, "Before you laugh at your ancestors, TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like dunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You've got eyeballs and armillaries, and that's pretty much it."
My family doesn't celebrate ordinary American holidays. But every equinox and solstice we pull out the globe and ask about the meaning of the seasons. Usually more than once a year, the retrograde motion of Mars comes up as well - naked eye stargazing is a minor obsession of mine. Heliocentrism explains both the surprising retrograde motion of the superior planets and the strange path of the ecliptic, while geocentrism doesn't. (Heliocentrism even explains why Mercury and Venus are never seen far from the sun.)
The rest of what the page says doesn't really treat Heliocentrism respectfully; for example figure 4 is "Not to scale, dudes!" but if it were, it would be clear why there's no noticeable deflection for an object dropped from even a high tower. I may not have been a heliocentrist, but if I were a contemporary of Ptolemy and lived in civilized surroundings, chances are, I'd have rejected geocentrism.
Browsing through the wikipedia article on Aristarchos, it's pretty clear to me that Aristarchos proposes heliocentrism because the sun is nobler than the earth and should be at the center.
I'd be interested in your proof of heliocentrism using eyeballs and armillaries, though.
Ptolemy may not have had proof that geocentrism was wrong. But by the time he was alive in the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy should have had enough evidence to prefer heliocentrism.
Early on, in the time of Aristotle, this wasn't the case. Geocentrism is simple, and has everything falling towards or orbiting the middle of the Earth. That's pretty good. In contrast, heliocentrism has some things falling towards and orbiting the Earth, and some things orbiting the sun, while the earth itself spins instead of the celestial sphere with the fixed stars. Whether we're specifically invoking something like Occam's Razor or not, this messiness is a problem. So it's no surprise that geocentrism was accepted first.
But geocentrism can't explain the paths of the sun, moon, Mars, and Jupiter. Even extremely ancient peoples knew about these issues - Stonehenge is the best known surviving calendar, but there were many others made of wood that we've detected from post holes, and celebrations commonly coincided with seasonal phenomena.
If the sun and moon go around the Earth, it just happens that the sun is high in summer, and the full moon is high in winter. If Mars and Jupiter go around the Earth, it just happens that their motion is retrograde when far from the sun. These are definitely problems for geocentrism.
The clincher arrived in the Hellenistic period. Before then, people thought the Evening Star and the Morning Star were two different things (Phospheros and Hesperos). But around the time of Christ, they now realize those two phenomena are one: the planet Venus. And Venus is clearly attending the Sun in very regular cycles, just like Mercury. So the simplicity of geocentrism now vanishes: even under geocentrism, you have things that orbit Sol, and things that orbit the Earth. Geocentrism by then had the weight of popular opinion, but if you are wise enough to look at the issue objectively, the only question is, which things orbit which?
Geocentrism no longer has simplicity on its side, and it leaves much unexplained. But a rotating, heliocentric Earth allows the sun *and* the fixed stars to remain stationary. It explains Mars and Jupiter in retrograde, when Earth passes them. It explains why the sun gets high in summer and low in winter, while rising and setting every day: the rotation of the Earth creates day and night cycles, and the revolution of the Earth brings the sun around to the north side during summer and the south side in winter.
But heliocentrism does bring with it a mounting disquiet for man and his place in the universe. For heliocentrism requires our own ground to move, space to be incomprehensibly vast, and stars to be enormous distances away from us to prevent any detectable parallax. Might the stars themselves be as large as our own sun, with strange planets, peoples, and unknown gods of their own, spinning eternally through the nighted gulfs of unplumbed space? And what hidden things may wait there, lurking in the black and silent void which lies forever above us, watching and waiting just beyond the blinding curtain of light thrown protectively across our eyes by a warm and merciful sun?
The problems with geocentrism are well known, even to Ptolemy. Heliocentrism has, however, no particular *physical* reason to be accepted (and, indeed, Copernicus' initial system *still had epicycles*.
You might also want to look into Tychonic astronomy, which had a better fit to actual observations than contemporary systems.
Again, a more complete reading of Mr. Flynn's work would be helpful, even though you don't like his sense of humor.
I don't understand why the lack of a deeper physical explanation is a problem. The idea that the Earth rotates is itself a physical explanation for day and night cycles; the earth revolving around the sun in a path slightly tilted from the axis of rotation is a physical explanation for the seasons, and for the changing position of the sun against the stars. If I were a contemporary of Ptolemy, I'd definitely be satisfied with that without knowing that universal gravitation tied the system together.
I'm also not sure why I'd want to read more of Mr. Flynn's work with any greater care, given that I really don't like his article. On the other hand, I'll definitely consider any argument that you want to make yourself!
I can tell right off the bat that you're smuggling in post-Copernican assumptions. Like "universal gravity".
So: Refute the argument of the winds, using nothing more than eyeballs and armillaries. I'll wait.
Since it's you, I shall look through this Ptolemaic Smackdown you link before telling you that you are a wrong person.
Two objections:
1. Is the theory really that domesticated animals get lighter all-over? In his 2019 book Wrangham mostly writes about white spots of fur, in for example horses and cats, and explain that as an effect of neural crest cell development processes that also affect the brain.
(In practical life, we all know that black cats can be tame, both those with and without white spots. On the other hand, there tends to be something psychologically special with red cats.)
2. Is the self-domestication talk really a theory/a model, or is it only a hypothesis? Richard Wrangham writes about neural crest cell development as a possible cause of the physical traits associated with domestication in animals. I know little about fetal development on the cellular level. But it sounds like an area where scientific progress could me made. If such progress is made and more things are understood about the biochemical processes of domestication, then the hypotheses of Wrangham and others will either become more or less relevant.
For that reason, I can't entirely see why one or another hypothesis needs to be discarded on this level. Cellular development and evolution are messy subjects. One hypothesis might score more logical points than another, but why not keep all of them until there is a better understanding of the processes that are supposed to lie behind the visible phenomena? Aristotelian physics blocked a lot of more useful thoughts. But I don't see that kind of blocking power in the model of primate self-domestication.
Be aware that people have been using English words like "lay," "can," and "theory" in ways that raised my blood pressure since the turn of the century. I'm trying to just nod along and age gracefully rather than becoming a crotchety old man. Theory = hypothesis = model = idea = whatever you want the words to mean.
> Cellular development and evolution are messy subjects.
If that were the only problem, I might grant that things were basically not too bad with Wrangham's model. But now add to that the fact that domestication still has a distinct meaning (in the way that "lay" and "lie" sadly no longer do):
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/domesticate
1. to bring into use in one's own country : to bring into domestic use : adopt
2. to adapt (an animal or plant) over time from a wild or natural state especially by selective breeding to life in close association with and to the benefit of humans
3. to cause to become adapted to life in a household : to make fit for domestic life
I don't think these fit what Wrangham is talking about. Let him propose a model of hominin self-pacification, and watch as all the problems evaporate. We *are* pacified relative to chimpanzees; maybe we did do it to ourselves by killing off the meanies.
> Aristotelian physics blocked a lot of more useful thoughts. But I don't see that kind of blocking power in the model of primate self-domestication.
OK, I see where you are coming from here, yes. But that still doesn't mean I have to like Wrangham's model *myself,* seeing that it generates hypotheses which are then falsified. But if you don't like the idea of refining it into a more modest and respectable Model of Hominin Self-Pacification, well... maybe you could save it in your grand Room of Thoughts? https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-order-of-thoughts
(Just don't put it next to group selection, that one is a genuinely good idea as it is)
> there tends to be something psychologically special with red cats
Wait - what?
Yes, although you are right that humans were not literally domesticated, I think that there is still a possibility that the same biological processes lie behind the domestication of dogs and the pacification of humans. Only biology can prove or disprove it. I put that idea on the shelf for when biologists can/want to develop it. In the meantime, I see nothing wrong in refining it. Biologists can test the refined theory too, I hope.
I think the big question here is the return of phrenology. Wrangham doesn't say it if course, because he is a respectable person, but was he trying to do is essentially to bring phrenology back to life. For example, he suggested that the Neanderthals were less peaceful than Homo sapiens sapiens because of how they looked. That is a brave suggestion. If it gets backed up with more solid science, it could have very important implications for archaeology.
>>Wait - what?
N=4 or even 5, I'm sure! Haven't you noticed that cats with ginger fur color tend to be tame in another way than cats of other colors? They are not "catty" the same way as normal cat, but care more about human affairs. They also tend to be unafraid and lack nerves. We once had a ginger colored cat who we nick-named Math Cat, because when the children sat outdoors and had their math books on the ground, that cat always joined them and stepped around and looked in the books. We have never had any other cat that cares for math.
The internet seems to agree with me regarding ginger colored cats: There's something with them. I seriously wonder why people don't breed on them and create a race. Here it says that ginger color is more common on the male side. Maybe that makes breeding difficult.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-heart/202009/why-orange-cats-are-so-special-according-science
Sorry for the delay in responding! Though it may have seemed that I was abducted by aliens, I promise I was merely overworked and miserable.
> I think the big question here is the return of phrenology. Wrangham...suggested that the Neanderthals were less peaceful than Homo sapiens sapiens because of how they looked. That is a brave suggestion.
There's actually a lot of what you describe as phrenology floating around in modern psychology. For instance, human face width correlates with aggression:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2008.0873
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0729
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352668/
> Haven't you noticed that cats with ginger fur color tend to be tame in another way than cats of other colors?
Well no. But partly this may have to do with the fact that I never do math out of books - a proper physicist does his equations on whiteboards, and red cats are unlikely to be very good finding purchase on vertical surfaces. Indeed among communities of physicists there would seem to be a reproductive advantage for long-haired white cats capable of using the white backgrounds for camouflage while sticking to them via static electricity.
More seriously, Mrs. Apple Pie does tell me that it's widely known in the horse world that greys are calmer than other colors. And in *humans* it's been found that redheads are more sensitive to pain. (I throw links at you out of habit, without expecting you to read them, but this one is fairly readable:) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44254-023-00017-3
Very interesting! If I weren't so movement-restricted I would have run for the calipers instantly. I indeed look a bit broadfaced and am a bit aggressive and Anders has a narrower face than most people and is less aggressive than average (although at least one of our children inherited my facial shape and Anders' moods).
My favorite is the digit ratio theory. I once measured the digit 2 and digit 4 of all family members who volunteered for it. I mostly found out that I'm an outlier myself (D4 5 mm longer than D2) but the others were fairly normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio