By AMANDA ONION

Feb. 17, 2005 — It's not easy being a lefty.

Statistics show left-handed people are more likely to be schizophrenic, alcoholic, delinquent, dyslexic, and have Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, as well as mental disabilities. They're also more likely to die young and get into accidents. So if evolutionary theory dictates survival of the fittest, why do lefties still exist?

Famous Left-Handed Athletes

According to new theories, what left-handed people (and other animals) may lack in fitness, they make up by being different.

Reporter:Geoff Burchfield
Producer:Andrew Holland

On Air: Thursday 30 April, 1998 at 8pm.

Narration

Left-handers have always been misunderstood and feared.

v/o “Clan of the Kerr’s”

But the Kerrs were aye the deadliest foes
That e’er to Englishmen were known
For they were all bred lefthanded men
And ‘fence against them there was none

Narration

That ballad tells of a Scottish clan that were said to be entirely left-handed. It’s one example of the belief that left-handers are bad, mad or just dumb. In many languages the word for “left” carries a slur. The olde English word “lyft” also means “worthless”. In French it’s “gauche” or “clumsy”. And in Italian it’s “sinistra”. The name says it all. Traditionally left-handers have been dealt with harshly in the classroom.

reprinted from the BBC

Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.

The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.

Reprinted from the BBC

Left-handed and right-handed people view the world differently, scientists have shown.
Psychologists found they use opposite sides of their brains when looking at, and making sense of, an image.

It is already known that handedness is associated with differences in the way we make sense of language, and possibly in spatial orientation.

Details of the study, by the University of Birmingham, are published in Nature Neuroscience.

reprinted from the BBC

The hand you prefer to use as a 10-week-old foetus is the hand you will favour for the rest of your life, research suggests. A team from Belfast's Queen's University studied foetuses in the womb, and after birth.

Their findings challenge the widely held view that a child does not develop left or right-handedness until it is at least three years old.

The research is reported by New Scientist magazine.

Reprinted from the BBC

If you find yourself in a fight, you'd better hope it's not against a left-hander - scientists have found they often have the upper hand.
Opponents simply do not expect a left-hook.

The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases.

But University of Montpellier experts, writing in Proceedings B, say it could be because they do well in combat.

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.

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.

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 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.