That's men for you - Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: Testosterone is the male sex hormone without which we chaps would not be chaps. It sometimes gets a bad press and is blamed for turning us into the equivalent of bulls in china shops - but it appears from new research that testosterone can be good for business.
A Canadian researcher, Roderick White, and his colleagues took saliva swabs from more than 100 male business students. When they measured their testosterone levels, the researchers found that the one-third or so of students who had previously run their own businesses had higher testosterone levels than classmates who had never run a business.
All of which suggests that your thrusting entrepreneur is, indeed, thrusting.
Want to know if you are one of these lucky chaps? Just take a look at your fingers. The longer your ring finger is relative to your index finger, the higher your level of testosterone.
Whether my own ring finger is longer than my index finger depends on the way I hold my hand. With a bit of work I can get the ring finger a little longer than the index finger but I am not sure that counts.
So if you're dining with a lady who's holding your hand and gazing lovingly at it, be warned that she may just be trying to figure out whether you've got lots of testosterone and might make a good businessman.
I'm afraid it's not all positive. While your testosterone may make you more likely to be an entrepreneur, it also makes it easier for pretty females to distract you.
Bram Van den Bergh is a Dutch researcher who studies the effect of attractiveness on decision-making, lucky chap.
Bram got his subjects to play a game in twos. In each pair, one man had the task of offering to divide a sum of money between himself and the other man. The other man then had to decide whether the offer was fair and whether to accept it.
What he found was that men who had been shown pictures of pretty women before the game were more likely to accept an unfair offer than those who had been shown landscapes and such like.
It gets worse. Some men before the game had been asked to assess the quality of a bra. Others had been asked to assess the quality of a T-shirt.
You guessed it. The ones asked to assess the quality of a bra were more likely to accept an unfair deal later on.
Bram found that the men with the longest ring fingers, ie with the highest testosterone levels, were the ones most likely to be affected in this way.
Hold on. Aren't there are lots of thrusting, entrepreneurial women out there as well? Well, don't they behave in exactly the same way if shown pictures of gorgeous male hunks? Alas, no.
Despite the best efforts of Bram and his colleagues, who are working very hard on our behalf, it has proven impossible so far to discover a visual stimulus which makes women accept unfair offers.
There is, of course, an evolutionary explanation for all this. Well, let's face it, there's got to be if we are to uphold the pride of the male of the species.
The evolutionary explanation, bless it, is that men have evolved to seek out ways to pass on their genes. So the sight of a pretty woman switches on the lights in a man's brain, and in other places too, not because he thinks of nothing but sex but because he is playing his role in the noble task of the perpetuation of the species.
Just explain that to the next woman who scoffs at you over testosterone and what it does to us. I'm sure she'll be impressed.
Meanwhile, next time you are working on a business deal try not to look at pretty women beforehand. Keep your eyes on your shoes, the table, the ceiling, the wall, anything but the beauties seeking to turn you into an idiot. You'll be better off in the long run.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.