BOOK REVIEW of Manning, J. ( 2008), The Finger Book: Sex, Behaviour and Disease Revealed in the Fingers. Pp. 170 + xiii. London : Faber & Faber.

Reviewed by CHRIS BRAND. Available at Amazon

This book, by a British evolutionary psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire (formerly Preston Polytechnic), argues that there are links between ring-finger length (RFL), testosteronization in the womb, masculinity, personality, polygamy and race. It gets off to a slow start, but there is drama enough by the finish.

The ring finger is hairier in males than other digits, perhaps reflecting its being more under the influence of the sex hormone testosterone and its being assigned for the wedding ring. In any case, RFL, relative to index-finger length (the normal ratio in Whites is approximately 1:1), is greater in males and also in top athletes and sportsmen, autists, attention-deficit children and butch lesbians; and it correlates negatively with psychologists’ measures of agreeability, gentleness and femininity. Thus goes the first 90% of Manning’s (rather repetitive) book.

Of course there are some problems. It is not obvious why RFL should be measured from the point of the finger’s lowest skin crease with the palm rather than from the knuckle. The inter-observer reliability for RFL is not stated or even considered. There seems no special reason why testosterone should especially affect the growth of the ring finger. All the associations with RFL mentioned above are pretty slight (Manning does not give correlations but his occasional scattergrams indicate effect sizes of around .25). And other efforts to argue for links to RFL don’t really work at all: the promised link to left-handedness doesn’t materialize (though Manning might have tried ‘mixed-handedness’, often associated with mild personality difficulties), and the proposed link to schizophrenia is a mess (with too many complications arising from ‘testosterone inhibitors’ and genes determining the uptake of said inhibitors). But Manning has had no difficulty finding academic collaborators to undertake empirical work with him over the 15 years since the RFL links were first advertised to psychologists by Hans Eysenck’s ‘first lieutenant,’ Glenn Wilson; and there clearly is a case to answer. Perhaps Manning has homed in, coming from the biological side, on the ‘tough vs tender-mindedness’ dimension long identified by Eysenck and psychometrician-psychologist Raymond Cattell (and summarized as a dimension underpinned by spatio-mechanical practicality vs broad attention and sensitivity in Chapter 1 of my own book, The g Factor, 1996/2000).

Anyway, answered the case will have to be. For, after a few unconvincing excursions into the auto-immune problems (like asthma and eczema) resulting from testosterone which are to explain why Black people suffer AIDS (not because of sexual frequencies and techniques, apparently….) and have black skin, and an extraordinarily inconclusive account of male homosexuality (failing to take the obvious step of look for RFL/testosterone differences between sodomizers and the sodomized), Manning brings his book to a close with a splendidly engaging claim about race.

All but the most piously anti-racist readers who have got this far with the present review will know of the claims of Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and the London School that the main established psychological gradation between the human races is that running from East Asians through Caucasians to Negroes and characterized primarily as one of inherited general intelligence (cf. IQ) though also being linked to law-abidingness and sexual restraint. Well, Manning likewise has a broad dimensional claim to outline – set out finally in a graph on the penultimate page of his book.

Though not especially motivated to study race – and thus apparently never having read any London School work – the empirical studies which he has found or organized have yielded a clear and interesting picture, bringing together Blacks and East Asians (Zulus, Jamaicans, Chinese and Japanese) as high-RFL and distinguishing them from the typically low-RFL Europeans (Polish, Spanish, English and Hungarian – with Germans and Gypsies scoring a little higher, intermediate with Chinese levels). For just what this means (if it replicates), Manning’s readers are left to refer to the book’s earlier claims. But the finding of a marked and allegedly important similarity between Blacks and East Asians will amaze many – and not just Rushton and Lynn. This is particularly because, having started his book by tending to play up the advantages of early testosterone (good for the heart, supposedly), Manning ends by making the human shift to right-handedness (long called ‘the right-shift factor’ by the equally unmentioned Marian Annette) fundamental to language and civilization as we know it and attributing it to foetal oestrogen and thus linking it to short RFL.

While, in the year of the Peking Olympics, Chinese people might draw some encouragement from being linked with Blacks and their well-known athleticism, and even hope the similarity could assist mutual understanding in China’s growing African empire, it is hard to doubt that East Asian scholars, after their countries’ efforts to Westernize (with evident successes in the field of classical music), will not soon take umbrage at Manning’s story. Hopefully ‘revenge’ will take the happy form of empirical work; and Manning sounds the kind of person who would welcome any number of extra studies of his RFL baby.

But, while East Asians gird their evo-psychological loins, Manning should take a look at London School work, make sure he is happy in his challenge to it, and get ready to dispute with those who will demand his head as a ‘racist.’ – Not that the Europeans will mind too much, embarked as they already are on trying to impose their gentility, liberalism and feminism on immigrant Muslims (without much help from feminists). Poles will recall their country’s 18th-century idealism as it opted for a (totally unworkable) democracy requiring a 100% level of parliamentary consensus; Spain will recall its long history as the main champion of Holy Roman Catholicism (till the richer Austria and Germany took over); the English will recall their great queens (and Mrs Thatcher); and the Hungarians will know that their astronomical suicide rate reflects high romanticism among a handsome and gracious people. But to lift the origins of civilization from the ‘polygamous’ Chinese will take some doing.

PEECEE IS A RACISM

A fine summary and critique of the arrival of Political Correctness in Britain was provided in the Brussels Journal by A. Millar, 1 v, making the point that PeeCee was virtually racist in its demolition of the famed British sense of humour. {Interestingly, the House of Lords, when considering new legislation against "incitement to homophobic hatred" (Daily Telegraph, 23 iv), had expressly exempted "jokes or broader criticism about alternative lifestyles"; but apparently it had not been asked to extend the same exemption to "jokes or broader criticism" re race and religion.}


OBAMAMANIA BITES DUST

America's piously hysterical belief that it could solve its post-slavery racial problem of leftist-induced White guilt by electing a Christian family-man darkie as President took a knock as historian Daniel Pipes revealed that nignog half-caste contender Boring Osama had had a largely Muslim childhood (e.g. being registered at school as Islamic (See here); and then foundered altogether as Borat Hussein Osama's Chicago pastor took terminally to the media limelight.

During a question and answer session in front of 30 television cameras, the publicity-mad 66-year-old Bleck clergyman, `Rev.' Jeremiah Wright stood by claims that America was to blame for the 9/11 attacks, praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, regarded by many as an anti-Semite, and stood by his belief that the US government created AIDS to infect Black people.

Rejoicing in the Hitlery Clinton Democrat camp at this gift from the gods was doubtless unconstrained. Harvard's post-modern intellectuals were dismayed, but whether they would up sticks and join their dahlin' Blecks to form a breakaway state of NiggaMississippi remained unclear since these anti-IQ Whites were so full of shit that they could hardly move. At last, the sheer stupidity of Blacks like Rev. Wright had arrived to save loonily idealistic Whites from their self-induced guilt.

Contrary to Osama's claims that his influential mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a `conservative' figure,



Stanley reported her to have been a raving Marxist and multiculturalist and a gratuitous miscegenator.

The prominent African-American intellectual, Dr Thomas Sowell, wrote on the conservative TownHall.com website:

"An email from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years. There is not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analysed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation - nor any other significant legislation, for that matter ...His behaviour has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground, or the anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi."

BLECK FAILURES ADMITTED

Not a single African country had met the U.N.-announced and funded goals of 2001, admitted the wretched IQ-ignoracist bureaucrats including pathetic Secretary-General Banki MulticultiLoon (1 v).


FLICKERS OF FASCISM OOOPS FREEDOM

Activities such as collecting signatures against mosque building, telling Muslim schoolgirls to unveil their faces and letting pigs loose near mosques were reported from Northern Italy (especially Padua) by the Times (3 v). In England, a disastrous night for Labour and Muslim extremists* in local elections improved one's faith in fellow countrymen as 44% voted Conservative and >5% voted BNP (giving the BNP a seat** in the Greater London Assembly and making Boris Johnson Mayor of London thanks to their 131K second-preference votes); and even the Guardian admitted Labour had wasted taxpayers' money on top-down-run `services'***; but it was noticeable that not a single Conservative candidate got as far as using the words race, crime and IQ in the same paragraph, and the result brought no joy at all to columnists Simon Heffer (who could not get his boots on for `BoJo' Johnson) and Peter Hitchens (waiting for the Conservative Party to break up and thus permit the formation of a truly right-wing English/British Party - Daily Mail, 3 v). In America, Hillary Clinton declared Barack Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright's condemnation of America itself for 9/11 "offensive."

(Naturally, these miniscule steps toward freedom from multiculti nonsense were quite overshadowed as 5,000 enraged Pakistanis demonstrated in Karachi streets, burning effigies to protest against the Dutch film `Fitna' [see above]..)

* Fanatical Muesli groups in Britain had conducted a sustained and ferocious campaign against Boris, even implying he would ban the Koran (Canadian Free Press, 4 v).

** The seat was won by the BNP's London frontman councillor and artist (with a history of homo-erotic film-making) Richard Barnbrook despite determined media pressure to ignore him - except in so far as the News of the World (26 iv) and Daily Mail (28 iv) exposed him a few days previously as having run two girlfiends through 2007 (one being gorgeous top ballerina Simone Clarke and the other being biddable redhead Finnish nurse Annika Tavilampi) while divorcing an American wife and policewoman who had left him as he developed his BNP views.

*** "The Tories may not have refined their prescriptions for Britain, but they adeptly diagnose Labour's failings: Billions spent on the public sector were squandered because reform was not vigorous or consistent enough." - 4 v.


BLACK HARVARD PROFESSORINE DENIES RACE-GENE LINKS

Bringing the LUniversity of Harvard into the gutter, Asst. Prof. Donna Fullwiley [sic] of the Dept of Anthropology and African-American Studies announced her considered opinion that race was not determined by genetics (Harvard Magazine, v 08). Right on, Dotty Donna! Give the Full Wiley and get arse-licking feminists and socialists and kindred handicapped to go along with you in frothing for the sacking any remaining race realists till you all choke on your Prescottian vomit!


(NORTH) ITALY TO DEFY BLECK HORDES

Just as France's Sarko (almost understandably besotted by leggy leftish ex-supermodel Carla Bruni) proved a busted flush (intent only on funding mosques and deluding himself this would give him some control of them) and Spain's newly elected socialist Prime Minister Zapatero rejoiced in appointing a >50% female Cabinet (including a pregnant - if admittedly quite dishy - Ministress of Defence to preside over Spain's non-fighting army), Italy provided hope for race realists as the handsome 18-year-younger wife of the newly and comfortably elected P.M. Silvio Berlusconi, 71, backed the plans of the Northern League (in Italy's more advanced and civilized areas around Milan - less in thrall to either the R.C. Church or the Mafia) for substantial autonomy from Rome (with militant NL leader Umberto Bossi proposing to shoot illegal North African migrants in their boats).

In Rome, there were (apparently non-ironic) cries of `Il Duce!' as Celtic-cross-wearing Gianni Alemanno, 50, a firebrand former neo-fascist youth leader, took 54% of the vote in the mayoral election, crushing his rival, Francesco Rutelli, a deputy prime minister in the last, centre-left government, and promising to expel 20,000 up-to-no-good immigrants (whose violent crimes - including rapes -- had shocked Italians) and raze 85 "abusive nomad" encampments of Roma gypsies (Guardian, 28 iv).

The Guardian's Martin Jacques estimated all this as a "major shift to the right" for Italy and counselled Europe to beware. Mr Bossi said that immigrants had to be hunted down, and that, if reforms were not forthcoming, his followers would take up arms. "We have no fear of taking things to the piazzas. We have 300,000 martyrs ready to come down from the mountains. Our rifles are always smoking," he said. In a poll, 55% of Italians said Muslim immigration was problematic (Reuters, 29 iv) - Muslims made up at least 1M of Italy's 58M population.

From New York, `Taki' wrote in the Spectator, 26 iv:

"Some clown by the name of Jones writes against `the slippery sleazeball and the far Right' in a tabloid in England. He means Berlusconi and the Lega Norte, a party which is anti-immigration. When clowns are given the right of their opinions in major newspapers, it's time to emigrate. Italy is sinking under the weight of illegal immigration. It has open borders everywhere and they're pouring in. Berlusconi will try to do something which should have been done long ago. He's called a sleazeball as a result. The Lega Norte, like the Flemish Vlaams party in Belgium, does not wish to end up like the Dutch, held hostage to fanatic Islamists. What is so sleazy about that?"

The g Factor SELLS FOR over one hundred pounds

After years of suppression by the left establishment, my 1996 book had become a `collectors' item,' costing more than $200 {for its entirely unique insights into and explanations of the differential psychology of intelligence}: See here (3 copies available).


IQ BOOST CLAIMS UNDULY SENSATIONAL

As pop (para)psychologist Prof. Richard Wiseman, U. Hertfordshire, talked up for journalists Swiss-American research (by Susanne Jaeggi et al., U. Michigan) claiming IQ gains after two weeks of 30-minute-daily practice at memorizing squares appearing and disappearing on a computer screen, top psychogeneticist Robert Plomin stepped forward to urge calm, saying the gains were modest and quite in keeping with perfectly well known practice effects {documented in The g Factor, 1996/2000} (New Scientist, 28 iv).