Finglonger?

http://www.hulu.com/embed/FRYmzNN1AJ93kbAlSh_K_Q

I have to imagine that everyone’s heard of the various studies and reports that claim that men tend to have longer ring fingers than index fingers, then go on to link any number of other traits and factors–athletic ability, sexuality, spatial reasoning, stock market success, autism–to digit length ratio. The Wikipedia page has some relatively plausible information about why the correlation might exist–at least between gender and digit ratio–but also notes that there’s a large overlap in the ratio distributions between genders.

Frankly, there’s not much in modern pop culture notions of science that sets my bullshit detector ringing quite like this stuff. It stinks of phrenology and palmistry, though I haven’t yet found anyone claiming a causal link between digit ratio and any of these other things (except that supposedly the ratio is evidence of prenatal exposure levels to masculinizing hormones). And despite this, I haven’t been able to find much of anything–support or skepticism–in the usual skeptical sources. There are a couple of threads on the JREF forums that bat it around a little, but no one seems to have anything solid one way or another on the subject. The one thing that seems to pop up every time I find this topic is a chorus of comments from people for whom the supposed correlation fails; anecdotal, uncontrolled, and self-selected though such a population is, it does suggest to me that the correlation might be less strong than the popular understanding suggests.

So I put the question to you, dear readers: Know of any solid research definitively supporting or debunking the digit ratio connection stuff? In addition, what do you think about it?