Link between length of Life Line & Longevity

I don't have access to the actual study, but it is cited by five others. Look at some titles: "Measurement Problems", "Munchausen Syndromes - Hoaxes, Parodies, and Tall Tales in Science and Medicine" and "Improving Doctors Understanding of Statistics". An excerpt from a fourth one ("Shopping for colleges when what we know ain't"):
As a way of illustrating just how profound an effect self-selection can have on our inferences, let us now consider three separate circumstances involving inferences from nonrandomly gathered data. In the first two of these the obvious inferences are wrong, and in the third we show an ingenious solution that allows what appears to be a correct inference.
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They give some examples, and briefly mention the paper you've found:

Other examples of situations in which this anomaly arises abound. [...] In 100 autopsies, a significant relationship was found between age at death and the length of the lifeline on the palm (Newrick, Affie, and Corrall 1990). Actually what they discovered was that wrinkles and old age go together.
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I can only assume that the other papers say similar things.
 
It is not very clear above, but what they mean is that as you get older, your wrinkles become more pronounced. Therefore, there is a (not very surprising) correlation between the length of the life line at death and age.

Not a hoax, just a small mistake.

The correct method, I think, would be to record the length of the life line at a fixed age (say, 20 years) and also the age of death. I would guess that there is no correlation.
 
That would take some extremely patient scientists who didn't have to worry about the "publish or perish" contingency.
 
Thanks for the feedback! I found another article, which includes the following:

"Furthermore, palmists’ claims to be able to divine longevity from this furrow is equally spurious according to British pathologists, who examined the hands of 100 cadavers in a hospital mortuary, which revealed that "the lifeline appeared to have no bearing on how long the patient lived."
source website: http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/PaPalmistry93.htm

Opposite from the PubMed article, but then it wasn't peer reviewed. :D:D
 
I've had a look at my life line and it would seem that I shall live
to 135 years 6 months 2 days 3 hours . Sorry I can't be more precise .
Actually my life line joins another line and goes right up to the end of my index finger but on the other hand it's shorter . This must mean that my left hand is going to live longer than my right . Also my right hand is more intelligent than my left which is so much more creative .
 
homer said:
I've had a look at my life line and it would seem that I shall live
to 135 years 6 months 2 days 3 hours . Sorry I can't be more precise .
Actually my life line joins another line and goes right up to the end of my index finger but on the other hand it's shorter . This must mean that my left hand is going to live longer than my right . Also my right hand is more intelligent than my left which is so much more creative .
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According to my lifeline, I've been dead for about 9 years.
 
luchog said:
According to my lifeline, I've been dead for about 9 years.
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Sorry to hear that . However here we seem to have definitive evidence of life after death . Is this the first post from the other side . Woooo.
 
homer said:
Sorry to hear that . However here we seem to have definitive evidence of life after death . Is this the first post from the other side . Woooo.
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Eh, it's not so bad. The afterlife is quite a lot like Seattle. There's good beer here; and great food. Unfortunately, I do still have to put up with a crappy corporate job, scene politics, frequent rain, and idiots who drive like they think traffic laws don't apply to them. Lots of hot goth chicks, though.
 
:D I was talking with a friend who was into reading palms, and she told me about some guy that did not have a heart line! I don't know if that meant he did not have a heart, but my guess would be he actually DID have a heart. Somewhere. Maybe not having a heart lines means something else.

She told me I would be a really famous artist when I was 70. :eek: SEVENTY????? What's the matter with RIGHT NOW??? :confused: I have been trying to bend my palm in a different place ever since...... :D
 
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