The Southpaw Manifesto

The Southpaw Manifesto tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1 2007-05-01T22:46:57Z Movable Type 3.34 4 Imminent Scientists Discuss Handed-ness on this Podcast tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.35 2007-05-01T22:45:01Z 2007-05-01T22:46:57Z

reprinted from CBC Canada They’ve been vilified throughout history as gauche, sinister and wrong-headed. So what is the truth about lefties? It turns out there is little consensus among scientists about what causes handedness or what it means to be a southpaw. Some researchers believe the trait comes down to genetics. Others propose that environmental factors or brain trauma at birth might be at the root of the behaviour. We spoke to some of the few scientists digging into the causes and effects of being a lefty in a right-handed world: Dr. Pamela Bryden is a professor of kinesiology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She's found that lefties were definitely more flexible and adaptable when she measured their abilities to perform tasks with their non-dominant hand. Dr. Amar Klar is a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland. Dr. Klar decided to study left-handedness by heading to a shopping mall to study the hair whorls on the tops of shoppers' heads. That study led him to believe that most people inherit a single dominant gene for right-handedness, but without that gene, a person has a 50 per cent chance of being a left-hander. Dr. Chris McManus is a professor of psychology at University College London and author of Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures. He believes there is a gene for right-handedness. But he thinks an evolutionary quirk occurred tens of thousands of years ago that caused a gene mutation, which Dr. McManus calls the "chance gene". It cancels the bias to the right, so those who inherit it have a 50-50-chance of ending up lefties. Dr. Ira Perelle is a professor in the department of psychology at Mercy College in New York. He believes there are at least three possible causes for left-handedness, including the possibility that at a very young age, a child can learn the behaviour.]]> Right-handed Cartoonists Drawing with their Left Hand tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.34 2007-05-01T22:25:10Z 2007-05-01T22:30:12Z

It is amazing what people will do if they have a little spare time. Take me for example I like to make waffles and eat them wearing lederhosen ... uhhh .. nevermind). Justin and Drew are cartoonists that thought it...

favorite ]]> Foreign Words for Left and Left Handed tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.33 2007-04-28T04:22:07Z 2007-05-01T21:52:08Z

Language word for "left" word for "left handed" Arabicshemaal Arabicyasaaraysar Armeniantzakh Australiamollie dooker Bantushotomashoto Catalanesquerra Chinesezuoren Czechlevýlevoruký Danishvenstre-håndet Danishkejthåndet Danishavethåndet Dutchlinkshandig Finnishvasenvasenkätinen Finnishvasuri Frenchgauche Germanlinkslinkshandig Greekskaios Gujaratibaayobaayee baaju Hausaagu hunu agu Hindiulta haanth Hindidaya Hindi baayaaNbaayee taraf Hungarianbalbalkez Indonesiantidak ditemukan di kamus Irishciotóg Italiansinistramancini Japanese hidarisajin Latinsinister Latviankreiss Lithuaniankairyskairiarankis Norwegiankjevhendt Norwegianvenstrevenstre hånd Persianchup Polishlewolewica Portugueseesquerdocanhoto Punjabikhabakhaba Romanianstângastângaci Russianlevyi Serbianlevolevoruk (f. levoruka) Sinhalesevam Slovaklavák Spanishisquierdachueco Spanishzurdo Spanishsiniestro Swedishvänstervänsterhänt Tigrinyatsagumacheli Turkishsolsolak

]]> Head in Hand tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.32 2007-04-28T04:09:36Z 2007-04-28T04:35:49Z

reprinted from the American Scientist Handedness is closely tied to the way hair spins on the scalp Christopher R. Brodie Is handedness genetic? The question is centuries old and has been the subject of hundreds of scientific papers. Now, the verdict is finally in, and the answer is yes. But there is an unexpected twist to the story: It seems that the same gene that creates lefties also determines which way hair whorls around. Amar Klar, the head of developmental genetics at the National Cancer Institute campus in Frederick, Maryland, explained the link between handedness and the way hair spins on the scalp in the September 2003 issue of Genetics. It seems a single gene with two alleles controls both traits. The dominant allele dictates right-handedness—and a clockwise hair spiral. ]]> So having even a single copy yields a right-handed (or dexter) bias, as is the case for most people. Having only the recessive version, rather than causing left-handedness (or, as Klar would say, "non-right-handedness," to include the ambidextrous), does not direct any preference at all and results in a 50:50 mix of righties and nonrighties. In addition to generating southpaws half the time, two copies of the so-called "random-recessive" allele lead to a (separate) 50:50 chance of having their heads spin counterclockwise. So if you've got a counterclockwise pattern on your dome (only appearing in 8 percent of the population), you're certain to have two copies of the random-recessive allele, but you have only a 50 percent chance of being a lefty. Likewise, people who are predisposed to be sinister (from Latin, meaning "on the left") are definitely carrying two recessives, but only half of these people will sport a counterclockwise whorl. click for full image and caption The random-recessive model explains the two big conundrums about genetic theories of handedness: Half of the children of a pair of left-handed parents are right-handed, and, even more confusing, 18 percent of identical twins are discordant for hand preference. How could the trait be genetic if two people with the same genes showed different handedness? It's no wonder that psychologists adopted the view that handedness is (at least partially) a learned behavior. Instead of looking at handedness-discordant twin pairs as an unfortunate thorn in the side of genetic theories, Klar availed himself of the natural experiment and continued to follow the progeny of such twins. The surprising result was that the right-handed twin was just as likely to have left-handed children as was his or her left-handed double, and both dexter and sinister members of the discordant pair had the same likelihood of siring a young southpaw as did other lefties in the general population. According to Klar, his is the only analysis of handedness-discordant twins that has examined the hand preference of their offspring. The bizarre connection with the direction of hair coiling is likely to be a result of events during embryogenesis. Both neural tissue and skin come from ectoderm, one of the first differentiated layers of cells that begin to appear during development. Other asymmetric anatomical features—such as placement of the heart and liver—are products of different layers, the mesoderm and endoderm. This fact might explain why the heart is invariably on the left, but neurologically derived hand preference and hair whorl are less constant. Klar is a pioneer in the abstruse field of mating-type switching in yeast, and he admits that his studies of handedness started as "sort of my hobby." Not surprisingly, he is somewhat iconoclastic in his new field. In the face of numerous genetic theories that proffer complex hypothetical mechanisms, he responds, "I'm a yeast geneticist. I don't use the term 'penetrance.'" He continues, "when you read the literature [on handedness], it leaves a sour taste in your mouth. You get more confused than when you started." So how did he get from the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe to the murky and inflamed realm of nature-versus-nurture polemic? Klar's catholic interests center around a common theme of asymmetry. More than a decade ago, Klar showed that in fission yeast, daughter cells assume different fates depending on which DNA strand they inherit—even though the strands are complementary and were long presumed to carry identical information. Under the exhortations of his Cold Spring Harbor mentor, James Watson, he studied the differences between the "Watson" and "Crick" strands, which became known as the "strand segregation model," and started thinking about other forms of asymmetry. In addition to handedness research, he has published papers about the biological demonstrations of the mathematical Fibonacci series in plants and the laterality of various brain functions. It is no coincidence that humans are the only animals with genetic hand preference and a unique facility for language. Although 97 percent of right-handers have speech centers in the left hemisphere, the value for left-handers is between 50 and 70 percent. This lack of explicit asymmetry, although associated with many positive attributes, may predispose nonright-handers to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: The incidence of left handedness among people with these psychoses is three times higher than among the general population. Ultimately, it is this possibility that drives Klar's research into hand preference. Well, that and the urgings of Jim Watson, a lefty, who has been "constantly nagging me to map the handedness gene." By identifying the relevant locus, Klar hopes to gain insight into the "final cause of schizophrenia." He may be on the right track. In 2002, he characterized a large family with a unique mutation that in exactly half of its carriers—but no other family members—led to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. This suggests that the mutation might help explain both asymmetry and schizophrenia. Now that deserves a hand.—Chris Brodie Purdue scientists discover why we’re all lefties deep down tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.31 2007-04-28T04:06:20Z 2007-04-28T04:35:10Z

reprinted from the Purdue News August 5, 2003 WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – It may be a right-handed world, but recent Purdue University research indicates that the first building blocks of life were lefties – and suggests why, on a molecular level, all living things remain southpaws to this day. In findings that may shed light on the earliest days of evolutionary history, R. Graham Cooks and a team of Purdue chemists have reported experiments that suggest why all 20 of the amino acids that comprise living things exhibit "left-handed chirality," which refers to the direction these basic biological molecules twist–and how a single amino acid might be the reason. ]]> Amino acids can be oriented either to the left or the right and possess the same chemical properties regardless of their chirality. But somewhere along the line, living things evolved using only amino acids of the left-handed variety. Scientists have puzzled over the reason for many years, but Cooks’ group seems to have found the answer: A single amino acid called serine set the standard eons ago, forcing all other biological molecules to follow suit. "We believe that serine was the first biological molecule to make a chiral choice, possibly one of the root steps in chemical evolution itself," said Cooks, Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s School of Science. "Left-handed serine was able to form clusters with strong bonds, and left-handed serine clusters are able to link to other left-handed amino acids. So once serine took the left fork in the road, only the lefties in the primordial soup got to partner up for the dance of life." Proteins – larger biomolecules – followed the lead taken by serine, Cooks said. The study also suggests that the chirality of other biomolecules, such as sugars, was determined by serine as well. Cooks’ research, co-authored with Sergio Nanita and Zoltan Takats, doctoral students who are members of Cooks' research group, appears as the cover article in the current issue of the German journal Angewandte Chemie, considered a leading chemistry publication. Just as books with thousands of words can be written using only 26 letters, the thousands of proteins that form all living things are built out of different combinations of 20 amino acids, which are among the simplest of biological molecules. All molecules exhibit various chemical properties – reactivity, solubility in water and so forth – but one property that is not as familiar outside chemistry departments is the notion of chirality. Hold a molecule with left-handed chirality up to a mirror, and you see its right-handed sibling, a molecule that generally possesses the same other properties as its lefty variant. But serine, one of the 20 letters in the amino acid "alphabet," is a stickler for chirality in the other molecules with which it associates. "Most amino acids can form weak bonds with one another regardless of chirality," Cooks said. "Serine is more particular: it forms tightly bound clusters of eight molecules. The clusters, called octamers, are formed of either all right-handed or all left-handed molecules – no mixing allowed." Though it may seem choosy, serine also is tenacious and loyal in its own way. Once formed, the octamers can form strong bonds with other amino acids of the same chirality. They also can form bonds with sugars that have the opposite chirality: a left-handed serine octamer might bond with several other lefty amino acids and some right-handed sugars as well. This bonding might well have occurred early in a sequence of chemical steps that ultimately led to protein in its many forms. "We believe that in the primordial soup, left-handed serine was sort of the bouncer at life’s dance club," Cooks said. "If you weren’t a left-handed amino acid, you couldn’t get in to partner up and dance. Because of serine’s ability to form these strong bonds, it essentially forced all other amino acids to twist its way." The discovery potentially clears up one mystery – where in life’s development the choice between left-handed and right-handed chirality was made. But another mystery still remains: If molecules possess virtually the same properties regardless of chirality, why did left-handed serine become the kingpin molecule? Why didn’t right-handed serine win out? "We are not sure whether left-handed serine’s dominance in the earliest period of life’s prehistory was arbitrary," Cooks said. "But serine can switch its chirality under mild conditions. If somehow polarized light, for example, or a swirling motion in water were present at a critical moment, some of the right-handed clusters could have become left-handed. This could have cascaded into other prebiotic reactions and set the pace for a billion years of evolution." Cooks admits that these theories cannot be proven completely, and will concentrate his next efforts on determining whether such conditions could have caused left-handed serine to become dominant. For the moment, he said, he is attracted by the simplicity of the concept. "There has been a great deal of speculation on how left-handed chirality developed in living organisms, but no agreement about how it happened or how the initial choices were passed on," he said. "The serine theory gives us a simple, coherent picture of one key process – chiral transmission – involved in the origin of life." This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Cooks is associated with several research centers located at or affiliated with Purdue, including the Bindley Biosciences Center, the Indiana Instrumentation Institute, Inproteo (formerly the Indiana Proteomics Consortium) and the Center for Sensing Science and Technology The Naked Scientists Interview with Author of Right Hand-Left Hand tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.30 2007-04-28T04:02:32Z 2007-05-01T21:40:19Z

Interviewer - Now Chris, you wrote a book, 'Right Hand, Left Hand', which won you a whole heap of prizes because it's something people are absolutely fascinated by. Why do these left-handers exist? Chris M - The simple answer is because of genes. Some of us have one set of genes while others of us have another. It's the same reason that some people have blue eyes or blond hair. And therefore, some people just have their brains the other way round. That's the simple answer. The really difficult question to answer is why did that ever happen? Why did we become mostly right handed in the first place and why did others become left handed? That's a good evolutionary story as there have to be advantages to being right handed and advantages to being left handed. They're difficult questions. Interviewer - Lots of people say that sportspeople are better if they are left handed. Is that true? Chris M - It's true for some sports. It's not true for playing golf for instance. It doesn't mater which hand you use to hit a tiny ball into a hole that's very far away. You're equally good if you're right or left handed. However, left handed tennis players have a strategic advantage. The reason is is that right handers aren't as used to playing left handers as left handers are to playing right handers, and therefore the left handers benefit from it. Interviewer - If we were to look back in the past, how do we know if left handedness was equally common then as it is now? Chris M - It's quite difficult, but behaviour does get recorded. If you look at old paintings or old sculptures, then there's good evidence that about 90% of people were left handed back until about 5000 years ago when people started making paintings. Before that it gets more difficult. We can look at the iceman found up in a glacier in the Alps a few years ago. He died about eight or ten thousand years ago. He was carrying arrows, and you can tell by the way those arrows were wound and the way the feathers were put on that two had been wound by right handers and one had been wound by a left hander. So you can use all sorts of tricks like that. You can look at stone tools which are two million years old, and interestingly when you pick up a stone and hit it with another one, a right hander does it differently to a left hander. Interviewer - Were around 10% of cavemen left handed and 90% right handed then? Chris M - We think so 200 000 years ago but we're not sure two million years ago. That's the big question. Interviewer - Now during our piece on the Science Festival, young Rosie said that she'd been over to the archeology department and used a blow pipe to make an imprint of her hand on a wall. There was a wonderful experiment done by some scientists in Montpellier in France looking at this question in cave paintings. Tell us a little bit more about that. Chris M - Essentially what you find is negative prints of hands on the wall of the cave. What they seem to have done is to fill one hand with charcoal from out of the fire, put the other hand against the wall and then blown the black powder all against the wall. They've then removed their hand and left an outline of their hand. About three quarters of these hands are left hands, and the other quarter are right hands. The really tricky question is what is the ratio of left and right handedness? Most people use their right hand to hold the dust and blow it onto their left hand. Not everybody does that. So they got modern students in Montpellier doing this, and they found that about three quarters of the time they put a left hand up; the other quarter a right hand. Since nowadays about 10% of people are left handed, we can be mostly certain that about 10% of people then were left handed. Interviewer - A couple of weeks ago we published a story about work at the University of Limerick about racehorses. They found that certain horses have a preferred direction. The males seemed to prefer going left, and the females seemed to prefer going right. This was true whether they were deviating around an obstacle or rolling over. Do you think it's true that animals have a preferred hand or foot? Chris M - There are lots of stories about this. The general story is that individual animals are generally a certain handed, footed or paw-edness, but exactly half of them are left handed and half of them are right handed. I would say that you could try this with your cat at home. Get a tin of cat food, leave about half an inch of food in the bottom and watch which paw it uses to get it out. They're pretty well consistent, but about half of them use the right and half of them use the left. Interviewer - Tell us about the Muppets and about Titanic. Chris M - The Muppet story is an interesting one. Muppets are left handed. Jim Henson who created the Muppets was left handed, and so the standard story you find on all of the websites is that this was the left handers revenge. He wanted to create a world where most people were left handed and only a few people were right handed. Needless to say, it's not true. The real story is much more interesting. It's very difficult being a puppeteer. The most difficult thing about being a puppeteer is controlling the head, because you have to get all of the movements of the head right. So puppeteers use the right hand, the most skilled hand, for moving the head. The second most difficult thing is controlling the hands, so they use their left hand to do that. So most Muppets are left handed. It was nothing to do with Jim Henson being left handed at all. Interviewer - Now what about the film Titanic, because all the people in it who are waving from the docks are all waving with the wrong hand. Chris M - What happened with the Titanic is that they didn't have enough money to build a whole boat, so they built half a boat. The problem was that they needed to see people from both sides of the boat. So they filmed them on just one side of the boat but flipped the images over in the camera. They taught all the main characters to do things with their left hand and had the insignias on hats in mirror writing, but unfortunately they couldn't train the five thousand extras on the dockside to wave with their left hand. They waved with their right hand but it looked as though they were waving with their left hand Left-handers win in hand-to-hand combat tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.29 2007-04-28T03:58:35Z 2007-04-28T04:00:48Z

reprinted from the New Scientist NewScientist.com news service Will Knight Left-handed people may be better equipped for close range mortal combat than those who rely on their right hands, according to researchers. Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond of the University of Montpellier in France examined the number of left-handed people in unindustrialised cultures as well as the homicide levels within each culture. ]]> They discovered a correlation between levels of violence and the proportion of the left-handed population – the more violent a culture, the higher the relative proportion of left-handers. The cause for this, the researchers suggest, is that left-handers are more likely to survive hand-to-hand combat. The news could provide comfort for those who routinely struggle with right-handed scissors and can-openers, but some experts are unconvinced by the link. Left-handed people are more prone to some health problems, suggesting the trait ought to disappear naturally over many generations through natural selection. But left-handers continue to make up a small proportion of the human population, hinting there could also be some evolutionary advantage to being left-handed. And the ratio of left-handers to right-handers is higher in successful sportspeople than it is in the general population, suggesting there is definite advantage to favouring the left hand or foot in competitive games, such as tennis. Homicidal tendencies "Because of the advantage in sports we thought there could be a similar advantage in fights," Faurie told New Scientist. The theory is that right-handed competitors are less accustomed to facing left-handers, making them a more difficult proposition. Faurie and Raymond studied several unindustrialised societies with varying rates of homicide, using their own fieldwork and ethnographic literature. They excluded industrialised cultures due to a lack of data and because, they argue, use of firearms is unaffected by handedness. At one end of the scale, their sample included the Dioula of Burkina Faso, where just 3.4% of the population is left-handed and there are only 0.013 murders per 1000 inhabitants each year. At the other end of their sample spectrum, they studied records of the Eipo of Indonesia, where 27% of the population is left-handed and the homicide rate is considerably greater - three murders per 1000 people each year. The strong correlation between the proportion of left-handers and the number of homicides in each culture suggests that left-handers are more likely to survive a fight, they say. "It could be one of the reasons left-handedness has survived," Faurie says. "Though there may be other reasons too." Brain differences Daniel Nettle, an expert in human evolutionary history at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, is intrigued. "The results quite surprised me," he says. "But I can't think of any reason why they might be an artefact [of the study design], so it looks like an interesting finding." However, Chris McManus at University College London, who has researched handedness, is more sceptical about the link. "I'm far from convinced," he told New Scientist. "I don't think it is anything as simple as this." McManus says the sample data is too small provide firm evidence of a connection between handedness and fighting prowess and says data from western societies should also have been included. He believes the success of left-handers may be largely due to differences in the brain. "It may be that sometimes their brains assemble themselves in combinations that work better for certain tasks," he says. Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb/2004/2926) Male Lefties Have More of the Right Stuff tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.28 2007-04-28T03:51:12Z 2007-05-01T21:36:33Z

reprinted from the Pew Research Center by Richard Morin August 9, 2006 Left-handed men who attended at least a year in college go on to earn significantly more than their right-handed classmates -- one more reason they'll be celebrating International Left-Handers Day this Sunday. "Among the college-educated men in our sample, those who report being left-handed earn 13 percent more than those who report being right-handed," report economists Christopher S. Ruebeck of Lafayette College and his research partners Joseph E. Harrington, Jr. and Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And lefties, stay in school: Those who finished all four years of college earned, on average, a whopping 21 percent more than similarly educated right-handed men. Curiously, the researchers found no wage differential between left- and right-handed women. They also found that lefties were more likely to be found in certain kinds of jobs. "For example, 53 percent of those who are left-handed are in professional occupations, compared to 38 percent of those who are right-handed," they reported. They based their conclusions on an analysis of data from the federally-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative survey of approximately 5,000 men and women first interviewed in 1993 when they ranged in age from 14 to 21 years old. Their analysis was based on a 1993 follow-up survey, when respondents were ages 28 to 35. Left-handers comprised about 10 percent of their sample, just as they comprise about 10% of the population as a whole. While evidence of a wage gap was unequivocal, explanations for the disparity were more elusive. The authors suggested that greater innate ability, perhaps due to differences in biology and brain function are two possibilities. But they do not know why they didn't see a similar effect among women. "Gender discrimination may be obscuring the effects for higher-educated left-handed females," Ruebeck wrote in an e-mail. "The biological literature also suggests differences in cognitive style across handedness in males that do not exist in females. If these differences are responsible for left-handers' higher wages, then we would not expect to find the same result in females." The study is the latest to suggest there's something special about lefties. Other researchers have found that left-handers are over-represented in some disciplines on university faculties, as well as among gifted students, artists and musicians. And as any pro baseball player will tell you, there are entirely too many southpaws pitching in the big leagues. ]]> The Left Handers Club and Day (August 13th) tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.26 2007-04-20T18:16:35Z 2007-04-20T18:24:36Z

The Left Handers Club was founded in 1990 by Lauren Milsom and 2 years later she/they promoted the first Left Handers Day on August 13 In addition they claim to have Modified potentially dangerous hand-held power tools by a major...

Modified potentially dangerous hand-held power tools by a major manufacturer

Introduced left-handed cheque books by all major banks in the U.K.

Produced the only training video for teachers & parents of left-handed children to show the best way to assist them in attaining the vital basic skills of handwriting, cutting etc. without difficulty or discomfort.

Good for these guys. I am going to have to find out more about the founder(s) of the club/day. ]]> Why left-handers still feel left out tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.25 2007-04-20T18:07:56Z 2007-04-20T18:09:30Z

Angelique Chrisafis, Arts correspondent Guardian Thursday June 6, 2002 Over the centuries they have been beaten on the knuckles, locked up, ridiculed and prevented from reproducing in case they spawned freaks. Now left-handers are facing another affront. A psychology professor told the Guardian Hay festival yesterday that society will never stop being biologically and culturally dominated by right-handers at the psychological expense of those who hold their pencil in their left hand. reprinted from the Guardian]]> The sinister tale of left handers tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.24 2007-04-19T16:45:28Z 2007-04-19T16:46:57Z

reprinted from the BBC There's a lot of things you won't know about the runner Paula Radcliffe, but I'm confident that until this week you wouldn't have had a clue that she was left handed! How then do I know? Have I been secretly dating the queen of long distance running? Well no, but I noticed in this week's sports coverage that she is concerned that her left handed preference is going to put her at significant disadvantage in a forthcoming road race. The 'feeding stations' are going to be set up for right handers which could potentially put her off her stride as her preference would be to pick up drinks in her left hand. ]]> It's a tough life The vast majority of us have no concept of these sorts of difficulties because we live in a world where things are set up to favour right handers. However, pick up a pair of left handed scissors and you'll soon get the point. Left handers have always had the rough end of the stick though. Go back to the Roman times - their word for left, sinistra, has been adopted in our language to identify unusual or strange occurrences. A number of scientific studies have suggested that left handers are more accident prone as they are forced to adopt systems that are geared towards the other side. One study on baseball players (because it was easy to know what hand they used as this had been recorded) suggested that left handers die earlier than their right handed counterparts. Infant's tale My first experience, and what started my interest in the subject, came at infant school when I sat next to a good friend of mine who was left handed. We both discovered that there was only one way we could sit beside each other without a fight, and that was with me on his right side and him on my left. Quite simple really, but I remained fascinated by the subject and a number of years ago I went along to the Lawn Tennis Association to examine the records of top tennis players. What I discovered was at that time approximately 12% of the top 100 tennis players were left handed, but that there were three left handers in the top men's game and two in the women's. Hardly scientific I grant, but it does beg the question whether, far from being a disadvantage, left handedness might in certain circumstances give you the edge. And how would you react if I told you that of the last six presidents of the United States, four have been left handed! A coincidence perhaps? However, slightly lower on the evolutionary scale I spoke to London Zoo to ask whether monkeys had right or left handed preferences and I discovered that they tend to use both left and right, and hands and feet, interchangeably. Now, if we could just teach the president to do that! Left-handed people dont die young(er) tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.23 2007-04-19T16:16:50Z 2007-04-19T16:18:20Z

reprinted from the BBC In times past, left-handed people were thought to be the children of the devil, but a scientific study published this week suggests that sinistrals are not as cursed as was once thought. Some studies have indicated that left handers are more likely to die prematurely than their right handed counterparts. It was thought that left handers may be more prone to accidents because their sense of spatial awareness is not as acute as right handers. But new research in the Lancet suggests that left handers are at no greater risk of dying earlier. Investigators sent a questionnaire inquiring about handedness to people aged between 15 and 70 years. They received 6,097 correctly completed responses. ]]> Nine years later they attempted to trace the respondents. Research revealed that 5,662 were still alive, 387 had died, and 48 could not be traced. However further analysis revealed that handedness was not related to longevity. The researchers, led by Dr Simon Ellis, from the Department of Neurology, North Staffordshire, concluded: "Handedness did not make a significant contribution to the outcome of death." Left-handers' bowel disease danger tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.22 2007-04-19T16:14:56Z 2007-04-19T16:16:16Z

reprinted from the BBC People who are left-handed are twice as likely as right-handers to suffer from bowel disease, claim scientists. A study of more than 20,000 people in the UK found that the risk of inflammatory bowel disease - usually Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis - doubled in left-handed people. Although the prevalence of left-handedness in the general population is around one in ten, 21% of the people found to have inflammatory bowel disease were left-handed. The research, by a team at the Royal Free Hospital and University College Medical School in London, comes after earlier studies showed left-handers are at increased risk of other conditions such as asthma and diabetes. ]]> Symptoms Ulcerative colitis is a condition characterised by inflammation of the colon - large intestine - and rectum. Common symptoms of Crohn's disease, which is most common in 15 to 25 year olds, include recurrent abdominal pains, fever, nausea, vomiting, weight loss and diarrhoea. Dr Danielle Morris, a research fellow in gastroenterology and epidemiology who led the study, told BBC News Online: "These results might be important because left-handedness has been associated with asthma and diabetes which are thought to be of an auto-immune cause. It might be important in finding out why. "The reasons are uncertain and speculative. Development of the brain and left-handedness is partly genetic and there is a genetic pre-disposition to inflammatory bowel disease. "It is probably more likely they might have a common environmental factor, such as infection in early life." The academic department of medicine, where she is based, has been trying to track down early risk factors for inflammatory bowel disease and the results of the study, being presented to a British Society of Gastroenterology conference in Birmingham, may help in the search. But she added: "At the moment, it is an interesting but unexplained finding." Left-handers top cricket stats tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.21 2007-04-19T16:12:52Z 2007-04-19T16:45:17Z

reprinted from the BBC Cricket's left-handed batsmen really do have an advantage at the crease, according to an analysis of the stats. Scientists who studied the World Cup found these players hit more runs, batted longer and tended to lose their wickets only because they slogged out. But the explanation for this better performance is not so straightforward. The researchers think the bowler's experience of left-handers is crucial because the advantage is less evident at the highest levels of the sport. ]]> Hand to hand Lower league bowlers may not have the experience to deal so readily with a player taking up the alternative stance and get hammered to the boundary more often. "It's strategic in the sense that left-handers only have the advantage when they are rare," says Dr Rob Brooks, from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. "The more competitive the game is, the more left-handers there are and as a consequence of that the advantage decreases." The Australian top order at the World Cup was packed with left-handers The explanation is subtle but very important. If it was simply that left-handed batsmen were better than right-handers, then the alternative stance would completely dominate the top echelons of the sport. What is more, it is only in the interactive sports such as cricket, tennis, fencing and boxing that the numbers of left-handers making the top grade are higher than would be expected from their frequency in the general population (10-13% of individuals are left-handed). Similar success is not witnessed in more general sports where players do not come face to face, argue Dr Brooks and colleagues in a paper published in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society, the UK's academy of science. The team studied the group matches from the World Cup. They found that out of the 177 players who went to the crease, 42 - that is 24% of the total - were left-handed. The left-handers were found to score an average of 20 runs per innings compared with 11 for right-handers. They also stayed out in the middle for longer - for an average of 25 versus 15 balls. Evolution study "The frequency of left-handers in the top three places in the batting order was 47%, falling to 12% among the last three batsmen, suggesting that left-handed batsmen enjoy an advantage in one-day international cricket," they write in their paper. Interestingly, the team tested the often-quoted assumption of commentators that a combination of a left-hander and a right-hander at the crease is the most difficult to bowl at. Dr Brooks says: "Their rationale is that it breaks up the bowler's ability to bowl a particular line and length, but if you look at all the partnerships there were in the World Cup - including two left-handers or two right-handers together - there is no evidence that this particular combination is any more successful." As biologists, the team is interested in this kind of study because it allows them to examine why certain traits in a population spread only so far among individuals - even when those traits may confer an evolutionary advantage. "It is not too long ago that a really important determinant of your evolutionary fitness and your success - certainly as a male - was tied up in your ability to fight, and this could be a very good explanation as to why we still have 10-13% left-handers in the population." Left-handedness common in Ice Age tag:www.southpawmanifesto.com,2007:/blog//1.20 2007-04-19T16:10:51Z 2007-04-19T16:12:30Z

reprinted from the BBC By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor The fraction of left-handed people today is about the same as it was during the Ice Age, according to data from prehistoric handprints. They were found in caves painted during the Upper Palaeolithic period, between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. Left-handedness may have conferred prehistoric man advantages, such as in combat, say the researchers. ]]> The research is published in the February issue of the journal Biology Letters. Evolutionary advantages When Stone Age man produced their remarkable cave paintings they often left handprints on the walls produced by blowing pigments from one hand through a tube held by the other hand. Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond at the University of Montpellier, France, deduced the prehistoric cave painters' handedness by spraying paint against cave walls to see which hand they pressed against the wall, and therefore did not use for drawing. Looking at 507 handprints from 26 caves in France and Spain, they deduced that 23% of them were right-handed, which indicated that they were made by left-handers. In the general population today about 12% are left-handed, though populations vary considerably, between 3 and 30%. Because handedness has a genetic component the researchers wondered why the proportion of left-handers should have remained so constant over 30,000 years - the age of the oldest cave studied. They suggest that because left-handedness is relatively rare it provides certain advantages over those who are right-handed, such as in solo and group fighting. The researchers say their findings add to the evidence that the evolutionary forces that cause right- and left-handedness are independent of culture.