Talk:Right-handedness

Right Handed List

There should be a list of famous right-handers like there's one of lefties and ambis, otherwise it's unfair. --203.173.8.12 02:28, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Why is not a big deal to be right-handed, yet so many people make a hype about left-handedness? Right-handedness is assumed to be more common, but on Wikipedia (ironically enough) it looks like there are more left-handed people than right-handed. In the end, I guess being right-handed is less common than left-handed. Polarizing effect. -Lehla This is one of the stupidest statements I have ever heard, Lehla! How stupid can you be to say that. To provide a semi-complete list of all the right-handed people would take up terabytes of server space!

THAT MADE SENSE!!! --Deleted the famous list... absolutely stupid. There are so many people who are right handed (90+ percent of the population) that it makes no sense to have such a list.

Obviously - I assumed the post of 203.173.8.12 02:28, 12 September 2005 (UTC) was a joke. It's like having a list of heterosexuals, or a list of all the people who have not won academy awards or who have not been convicted of war crimes.

Why is the left-handed article longer than the right-handed one??? 154.20.186.68 03:59, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

dunno, i would have thought they both would be equal indepth of information and length.. if we checked the authors hand usage i bet most of them are left handers.. the way i read the left-handed article is as left handed people have superhuman powers like the mutants in the x-men and right handed people are the average joe with neaderthal like minds. maybe we should segregate left and right handers, maybe we should teach our children to hate and distrust people who use the opposite hand as themselves... haha stupid, people are stupid.. 75.15.247.159 21:46, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

But Why, Oh Why?!

The article states that 90% of people are right-handed, but doesn't go on to explain why this trait seems to be dominant...

Andreala 16:02, 23 January 2006 (UTC)hay

No Proof?

"Many people deem right-handed people to be "intellectually challenged" though there is no proof of this." If there is no proof of this statement, then I think it should be removed from the page. Also, this article really needs to be expanded! Have you seen the article of left-handed people?! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Altindiegirl (talk • contribs) 15:39, 14 July 2006

Article

I'll have a decent go at this tomorrow. The idea of fairness make me laugh. It's an encyclopedia article, not a game of snakes and ladders. It's a bit like saying if you're going to make a list of all the monarchs of England, you should make a list of all the people who have never been monarchs of England. If you have a list of left-handed, right-handed and cross-dominant people then you basically have a list of all the people in the world. Spectacularly pointless.

I'll try and dig up some research but basically there is almost zero chance of getting a common consensus.

Mglovesfun 00:09, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

German

I've found the link for a definition or Rechts (right) in german, but I can't understand it well enough to put it on this page : Here is the link you're looking for.
--Mglovesfun —Preceding undated comment added 15:01, 16 August 2006 .

• I don't know what the question was, but the presumably relevant portion is

  Bedeutungen:

  [1] Die gegensätzliche Richtung/ Seite zu links. Dieser Pfeil --> zeigt nach rechts.

  [2] Die politisch konservative Richtung charakterisierend.

and the translation is

Meanings:

1. The opposite direction (or side) from left. This arrow --> points to the right.
2. Characterstic of the politically conservative Richtung.

   (I would translate Richtung as direction, or perhaps orientation or even tendency.)

-Jerzy•t 09:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Theories explaining handedness

I notice that the theories explaining right-hand dominance are on the handedness page, the left-handed page and not the right-handed page. Because it's so well written, it's tempting to just copy and paste the whole thing here, but then you end up with the same section on three different pages. And yet, apart from omitting the whole section all together, what else can we do? If anything, a separate page of 'theories of handedness' might be better, to which all three articles could refer to

Mglovesfun 15:56, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

section redirected

see Talk:Left-handed#Theories_explaining_handedness —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mglovesfun (talk • contribs) 16:13, 16 August 2006

2007-02-9 Automated pywikipediabot message

--CopyToWiktionaryBot 04:09, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Right Handed?

If you are right handed then consider adding this to your page.

This user is right-handed.

DJSEDISTICAL 20:21, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Use in science

How about some info on use of the term in science/engineering, such as right-handed screws and right-handed coordinate systems? I came to this article from relative direction where the term right-handed coordinate system is used. Rb82 09:47, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

• Yeah, relative direction is pretty dreadful. North is at least a refreshing contrast, tho dreadful in its own way.
  For right-hand screws, see Helix#Types.
  For right-handed coordinate system, see Right-hand rule.
  --Jerzy•t 08:47, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
  

???

Why would you need a list of right handed people their are so many of ya, you wouldnt feel like reading it anyway!—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.200.170.16 (talk) 10:00, 16 May 2007

Warrior Theory

WTF? Sorry, but that sounds retarded to me. It is true that a good proportion of the male breeding population would have gone to war in early times, but this only explains the suppression of that gene at the time. Surely by the time that the world's leaders began using dedicated armies, this would have ceased to be such a strong effect? Or by the time gunpowder was invented? This doesn't seem to address the lack of left-handed people in the 21st century. Or else I'm being stupid and don't get it somehow Sir Elderberry 02:26, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

• At the time when Sir E wrote, there was

Theories explaining right-hand dominance

Main article: Handedness

• Warrior and his shield theory: This theory attempts to explain right-handedness by the position of a warrior's shield and his heart. Basically, since the heart is slightly nearer to the left side of the body, a right-handed warrior (who holds his shield with his left hand to free the right hand for a weapon) would be better able to protect his heart and therefore more likely to survive.

• Brain hemisphere division of labor: The premise of this theory is that since both speaking and handiwork require fine motor skills, having one hemisphere of the brain do both would be more efficient than having it divided up.

In the mean time, we have had the "Warrior and his shield theory" removed and the following section (which i just removed) added (or perhaps evolved out of the former) as a separate preceding section:

The Alexander Phalanx Right Hand Theory
One theory on why most people are right handed stretches back to the time of the phalanx, a strategic type of formation strategy in warfare where soldiers were filed in a line with a spear and shield. The effect this formation had revolutionized the way wars were fought in the earlier ages. The idea of the dominant right hand theory originates from the mass teachings of the phalanx formation. Soldiers were instructed to hold the fighting weapon in the right hand, therefore the mass amounts of people instructed in right hand weaponry stayed in teachings up to the present time where kids use their dominant hand to pick up things

....

Theories explaining right-hand dominance

Main article: Handedness

Brain hemisphere ...
....

I removed Alexander for two reasons: the reasoning is implausible, and there is no ref for it.

(IMO, it is likely the OR reasoning of an editor who took seriously the OR woolgathering of someone else who knows a lot abt Alexander but nothing about cerebral organization.
(They've also failed to hint at an implication of that theory: the amazing apparent neglect of the first travelers encountering Polynesians, Australians, and American native peoples to remark on their failure to measure up to Alexander's standards -- i mean to say, they go mostly right-handed despite insulation from phalanxed armies: it appears the tendency to right-dominance, tho malleable, is pretty culture-independent. Likewise the superstitious belief in what you have to be taught: half of what such beliefs do is just to provide effectively random but human stimulation to the kid, proving to them they've got a family. Moms think they "teach" kids to talk, but the kids are listening long before they can control their vocal tract, and learn just as easily from what's not addressed to them. The insinuation that kids are taught to pick up things is laughable, and anyone who's seen a baby too young to stand up, running on a treadmill, understands that.
(The Alexander theory is worth keeping on this talk page, tho in the absence of refs it has zero credibility, if only to encourage someone to try coming up with refs that'll shift them in a better direction.)

While i'm passing judgments:

• The left-heart theory relies on the slight asymmetry of the circulation to exert its influence thru the really minor fraction of even males in history who ever became skilled soldiers. (Don't forget that even a society that lives solely by conquering has to be fed by a much larger subject population engaged in food production.)
• The "Brain hemisphere division of labor" theory is a scrap that could be a potential part of something better, but failure to evoke the corpus callosum, and the apparent belief that all speech functions are left-brain in the majority, are signs of OR-typical weakness of reasoning and research.
• At Lateralization of brain function#Left vs. Right we have evidence of a hemispheric correlation but not of cause. I'm interested only in theories that mention whether non-primate, or non-mammalian, vertebrates show either "handedness" or hemispheric specialization. I expect that despite the valuable plasticity, the majority pattern was genetically established before out-of-Africa, and that the primary modern outcome of left-brain/right-hand (tho tempered by adaptability) most likely reflects the luck of the draw experienced by the single African "founder" of the mutation that we now observe as the most prominently expressed handedness and "brainedness"; what's most interesting is whether that founder was human or pre-human.

That's my amateur OR & speculation, offered not as proposed article content, but to discourage the kind of OR we've already been seeing. If you don't know the difference between a genotype and a phenotype, and between a disposition and a behavior, your OR is going to be even worse crap than mine.
--Jerzy•t 08:30, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

In the left/right footed and ocular sentence

Would someone please clarify this first sentence with regards to the statement alone being obvious and that it was probably supposed to say something about the foot? "Right handed people have been known to not be left handed".-- 65.116.202.2 (talk) 17:01, 16 November 2007 (UTC)Joe Haugen 11/16/07

Lead secn & relationship to other handedness-oriented articles

I've divided the lead secn into two 'graphs, and discarded material from the second of them.
The lead sent was clumsy and ignored the guidance -- quite feasible in this case -- that a good lead starts with a dict-def-like "is" sentence.
The remainder of the secn was overloaded with detail quite peripheral to the topic, namely other forms of handedness, which should be (and i think are) covered at Handedness, and in articles lk'd from it that parallel Right-handedness. One could in theory argue for consolidation of the related articles (see talk:Handedness#Lessen duplication?), but the medium for doing that is not increasing the overlap among those articles, which would lead toward multiple broad articles covering the same material with slight differences in emphasis. The topic of the accompanying article is right-handedness, and anyone with misgivings about that focus, or the edit i'm describing, should go to talk:Handedness#Lessen duplication? and make a case there for merging Right-handedness into Handedness.
--Jerzy•t 18:24, 5 May 2009 (UTC)