Saturday, December 22, 2012

High prenatal androgens cause boys to tilt their heads up when having their photos taken... or, Are square jaws a masculine trait? - Part 2

I was just looking at the abstract for the article "Second-to-fourth digit ratio and facial shape in boys: the lower the digit ratio, the more robust the face" by Meindl, Windhager, et al., and also looking at the accompanying photos which can be seen in an earlier post or here. And although I don't have access to the article, so cannot be sure, based on what I can see I'd say that the methods were faulty and the results should just be thrown out. The photographs were not taken consistently, which means they have no baseline to work from. No baseline means crap data.

In the first image below, the boy's head is tilted down and his ears line up at his eyebrows. In the middle photo, his ears line up below the eyebrows, and in the last photo his ears line up with his eyes. The difference can be seen by looking at his nose, too.

Here's a clue. It's not prenatal androgens.






What does this mean? It means I should start moonlighting writing scholarly articles for Proceedings of the Royal Society :) The image below shows the photographic evidence from the 2012 article, but with Angelina Jolie's face where the little boy face should go.

Photo showing that when Angelina's head is tilted down (look at the ears in the 1st photo), she suddenly has a more feminine, V-shaped face. And when her head is tilted up, a masculine, squarer jaw. But this is NOT due to prenatal androgens. It's just how things work, which is why taking photographs consistently is important. For more info, look up foreshortening.

Also, I returned to check the 2005 article and it doesn't include ears in the images so I cannot guess the accuracy of its findings. Under the 'Methods' section it says it just asked the men to look straight ahead. But its drawings don't have the telltale signs of inconsistency shown in the 2012 article. For example:
  1. In the first image (shown above), the boys nose is pointy, in the last it isn't.
  2. In the first image, the eyebrows are straignter (much like Angelina's) and the last image they are more arched (like Angelina's). 
  3. In the first image the mouth is curved up, in the middle straight across, and in the last one curved down (again, like Angelina's)..
These are effects caused by tilting the head, and none of them appear to the degree they do in the image from the 2005 study shown below.


So, in a nutshell, the 2012 article's results cannot be trusted (just my opinion, of course). The 2005 article appears legit though, which would mean that higher levels of prenatal androgens result in a squarer, broader face whereas lower prenatal androgens result in a pointier chin and a face that is less square overall (longer than it is wide).

To be continued....

4 comments:

  1. I was looking into something similar. The child on the left, looks younger, which could be attributed to baby-faceness (face lower on the head, big eyes). I had a friend that suggested it could have to do with sexual dimorphism; that the more feminine rotation could have to do with sexual dimorphism. Men are taller than women; so women are viewed from above by men and men are viewed from below by women. I'm not sure which one would precede the other though.

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  2. I wouldn't know about that. Interesting theory though.

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  3. Love the irony in the post title...

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