Professor would soon get the point by studying my fingers

A team of evolutionary biologists in Liverpool has examined 200 people and developed the thesis that the finger length has a precise correlation with psychological traits. The team leader, John Manning, suggests that the dimensions of our fingers are determined by early growth in the womb and that these early influences mould our personalities in later life.

It's certainly true that my fingers would tell Professor Manning much about me, if only he could see what I was doing with them. They would reveal that I was rude, crude and scornful of his latest endeavour. He is an evolutionary biologist but a bloke in a pub could deduce the same. John Manning is not a bloke in a pub. He is a professor. We can only hope that the press report of his work has brutally vulgarised it because it sounds like an astonishing waste of public funds.

If your ring finger is longer than your index finger, Professor Manning says you will be good at football. If these digits are, as mine are, the same length you will be poor at sport and have had a low birth weight

In point of fact, I fenced for the school and weighed 10lb 12oz at birth. I don't often get a chance to boast about these things. That birth weight marked me out as a monster. Grendel weighed in no heavier when he was born. And the only reason I wasn't captain of fencing was because of my complete lack of leadership qualities (they discriminated viciously against Dadaists in those days).

No, this is tosh on a large scale, and not entirely harmless tosh. It is reminiscent of the phrenologists' work in the 19th century.

These baloney slicers claimed to be able to deduce personality from the shape of the skull. The art historian Mary Cowling has itemised how influential phrenology was in Victorian times and how it was used by the narrative artists of the day. Frith used the pseudo-science to tell stories in his paintings. In The Railway Station, for instance, we know the new marriage won't work out by the shape of the groom's head.

But it wasn't just artists who were influenced. Cesare Lombroso, the criminologist from Turin, claimed to be able to diagnose criminality from the shape of a child's ears. This knowledge could be used, he recommended, to steer children into appropriate occupations (Andrew Marr would have been sweeping chimneys).

Lombroso was taken on by prison governors as a consultant to advise whether prisoners eligible for parole should be released.

The criminologist would measure the criminals' skulls as they appeared in photographs and pronounce this one cured or that one nearly done.

We laugh about it now, but we haven't been laughing hard enough because here it comes again. There are cited links not only between finger length and assertiveness, spatial awareness, football skills and propensity of risk-taking, but also between finger length and breast cancer, autism, dyslexia and fertility.

If this is what constitutes scientific method these days, it's just as well Karl Popper is dead or indignation would have killed him. God knows, it's not always possible to figure out someone's personality by marrying them and living with them for 20 years, let alone by measuring the finger carrying their wedding ring.

Some things, like Parliament, are too serious to joke about

Book corner: This week Playing to the Gallery by Simon Hoggart.

Hoggart has been a parliamentary sketch writer off and on for 30 years, longer than most MPs have been in the Commons; he endures with amiable equanimity the here-today-gone-tomorrow riff-raff in the Palace of Westminster, even other sketch writers.

Each broadsheet keeps a sketch writer. Hoggart's distinction is that he's the funniest. That's not good. Some things are too serious to make jokes about and Parliament is one.

None the less, his latest collection is brilliant, notwithstanding the comic effects which disfigure many pages. The fatuity of Tony Blair's rhetoric comes up particularly well. "Before us lies a path strewn with the challenges of change," Hoggart quotes from a party conference speech. "At the end he told us we were on a journey, a journey worth making. But as well as a journey it was a fight, 'a fight worth fighting'. So the Labour Party were to resemble British football hooligans, who also believe that no journey is complete without a fight. 'We shall hurl the bar stool of opportunity through the plate glass window of privilege,' he didn't say but presumably meant."

Matthew Parris first spotted that Gordon Brown was using the word "investment" to mean "public spending". It was that one word which changed the terms of the debate and defeated the Tory position for tax cuts without entering into an argument about it.

Hoggart similarly noticed the slipperiness and cynicism behind the prime ministerial syntax. "He set a new record of 163 verb-free sentences, those phrases which – by omitting any doing words appear to offer a promise without making a commitment."

So, not wanting to leave you with a good impression of a rival's talents, let me quote his best joke. John Major's management of the government, he said, was like watching "Edward Scissorhands trying to make balloon animals". As football commentators used to say: You can't legislate against talent like that. Perhaps they'll try.

¿ The unbearable story of three aboriginal girls who escaped from their state school captivity and walked a thousand miles home is now a film, Rabbit-Proof Fence.

It is worth remembering that not all Australia's genocidal impulses, as they're now termed, came from Tasmanian murderers shooting any blackfellers they could find (there was a bounty for a while on Tasmanian Aborigines).

No, what we don't always realise is that the nicest, most concerned, most equal-rights sort of people thoroughly supported assimilation. It was the preferred liberal mode. Aboriginal peoples were assumed to be dying out by an inevitable, Darwinian process. The Maoris were in such population decline at the turn of the century that they weren't expected to be around in 100 years.

The language they spoke was considered to be a great impediment to getting on in the world. It was a duty to suppress it and teach children English. It was a powerful argument then, before "assimilation" became synonymous with "genocide".

As late as the 1950s there was a Maori marae just outside Auckland City. It was what liberals called a slum. No main drainage, no electricity. It was torched by the council and bulldozed so its residents could be rehoused up the hill in modern accommodation.

For health reasons, safety reasons. To give the residents the benefits of civilisation.

It's a historical perspective that should make us all wary of social engineers. When their big ideas move into action to suppress this and encourage that (something at the heart of the New Labour project), we should wonder, if we can, what people will think of our endeavours in 100 years' time.

What improvement in literacy?

A recap on the national literacy effort.

During the martyrdom of Santa Estella it has been repeated that the one solid victory of her time at education was the increase in primary literacy. It's big. It's enormous.

No, it's not. It's all a spectacular fraud.

Research commissioned by the Times Educational Supplement and executed by Professor Peter Tymms of Durham University reports that there has been absolutely no statistically significant improvement in children's literacy since 1997.

The Government claims literacy has soared. But the problem is the same as in the NHS, where political imperatives deformed clinical priorities. "Putting pressure on the QCA [Qualifications and Curriculum Authority] is precisely what is making national tests unreliable," the TES concludes.