Scientists are fascinated by left-handedness. They know that being a lefty is genetic, so there?s no use trying to change. Scientists have discovered a gene which seems to make it more likely that you’ll among the 11% of people who are lefties.
In LiveScience.com, Andrea Thompson reports that lefties currently make up about 11% percent of the population, but earlier studies showed that only 3% of people born in 1900 were left-handed. Is this because they were forced to write with their left hand? Or are lefties having more children and passing on their genes more than righties?
Researcher Ian Christopher McManus says, “Left-handedness is important because more than 10% of people have their brains organized in a qualitatively different way to other people. That has to be interesting. When the rate of a [variable trait] changes, then there have to be causes, and they are interesting as well.”
McManus and his team watched films made between 1897 and 1913 by early filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, in order to estimate the number or left-and right-handers in them, and compared their results with modern films. They found that about 15% of people in the old films wave with their left hand, compared to 24% of people in modern film footage. They then discovered that left-handed waving is more common than left-handed writing, so they corrected their statistics.
According to McManus, “the earlier Victorian rates of left-handedness are broadly equivalent to modern rates, whereas rates then decline, with the lowest values for those born between about 1890 and 1910.” What caused left-handedness to decline?strict teachers or genetics?
Stay tuned to this website to find out more (especially if you’re a leftie like Whitley!)
Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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