Not any more than palm reading is a science (it’s not.)
It could be considered an art I suppose, but science needs to be things that can be tested and produce repeatable results.
Well… stick with me here, this is just a devil’s advocate hypothetical.
Your hands are your primary method of interacting with the world. The creases, callouses, and other incidental features are reflections of the ways you most frequently use them.
Obviously you can’t divine the future, but you can gather information about a person. I dare say you could devise experiments to detect correlations between certain features of the hands, and features of the person: their profession, hobbies, grooming habits, clumsiness, etc.
I think a sincere scientific study could identify several hand features with moderately predictive correlations.
You’re right in that you could learn about someone based on their hands. It’s the subjective nature of the predictions that make palm reading unscientific. There have been studies to show that certain health issues manifest in our skin. Palm reading isn’t focused solely on those issues though. It tries to predict all kinds of things (wealth, relationships, misfortune, etc.) How would you create a control group for a study like that?
Still wouldn’t make it scientific. Nothing was tested. It was only observations and imagination.
You could all lay in the grass and agree that a cloud shape looks similar to something else. Doesn’t mean a thing.
Not any more than palm reading is a science (it’s not.) It could be considered an art I suppose, but science needs to be things that can be tested and produce repeatable results.
Well… stick with me here, this is just a devil’s advocate hypothetical.
Your hands are your primary method of interacting with the world. The creases, callouses, and other incidental features are reflections of the ways you most frequently use them.
Obviously you can’t divine the future, but you can gather information about a person. I dare say you could devise experiments to detect correlations between certain features of the hands, and features of the person: their profession, hobbies, grooming habits, clumsiness, etc.
I think a sincere scientific study could identify several hand features with moderately predictive correlations.
You’re right in that you could learn about someone based on their hands. It’s the subjective nature of the predictions that make palm reading unscientific. There have been studies to show that certain health issues manifest in our skin. Palm reading isn’t focused solely on those issues though. It tries to predict all kinds of things (wealth, relationships, misfortune, etc.) How would you create a control group for a study like that?
If me and 5 friends read your a-hole, I bet all of us would come to the same conclusion.
Still wouldn’t make it scientific. Nothing was tested. It was only observations and imagination. You could all lay in the grass and agree that a cloud shape looks similar to something else. Doesn’t mean a thing.