Finding novel relationships gives us news places to look to try to understand how things are. I didn't know you you could tell gender from retina. If indeed we can, that leaves room to then all why is that biologically happening. We don't be the black box AI to explain. If it read a signal there, it's up to use user other methods to figure why that signal exists and what the implications are to our current understanding
> I didn't know you you could tell gender from retina.
This is determining sex from retinal scans - not gender. Thats what makes this interesting, and potentially inflammatory, because it highlights even further subtle physiological differences between the two majority human sexes.
How do you know? I didn't see anything in the experimental design that would distinguish between detecting sex vs gender. Sex and gender are fairly highly correlated and it doesn't look like they did any analysis to rule out that they weren't actually detecting gender and not sex. Of course that would be a much more surprising result.
That said, i don't think subtle physiological differences are really that inflamatory. For example, we already accept that men are more likely to be colour blind and a myrid of other minor differences. Usually these things are only controversial when someone posits a major physiological difference and then mostly because much of the time its someone with an axe to grind significantly overstating the evidence.
