#Hair swirl manual#
The fact that scissors, and other assorted manual tools and appliances, from dessert forks to chainsaws, are designed for the righty majority means they're harder to use lefty, resulting in considerable pressure to conform and use your right hand. Try using a pair of right-handed scissors with your left hand. Less violently, but no less effectively, there is convenience. There has been, and may continue to be, considerable pressure against maintaining the left hand as the dominant hand. In many cultures, the left is associated with evil. (My father-in-law swears these stories are true.) Why the environment? Think of the probably-not-apocryphal stories of the Catholic school nuns ruler-rapping the knuckles of anyone so sinister to write with their left hand. The dominance of your writing (and drawing) hand is a function of at least three things: Genetics to be sure, but also the environment, and, likely, random chance. One complication-determining handedness isn't straightforward.
Given how fundamental, and obvious, handedness is, we know surprisingly little about its genetics. What do we know about the genetics of being right- or left-handed, or even ambidextrous? And how does this help shape our understanding of biology in general? What is "handedness" anyway? Their rareness gave a certain mystique-and they got to use those funky chair-desks with the desktop on the "wrong" side. But why?įor as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by handedness-our almost ubiquitous tendency to favor one hand over the other-and maybe a little envious of the rare left-handers. Globally, about 90 percent of people are righties. It turns out this is true for all human populations, not only middle-America university classes. Later in my career, I did the same thing-counting lefties, not standing around naked-in the biology classes I taught.įunny thing, in any given class, around 10 percent of the students were lefties. (Don't judge, grad school doesn't pay well and beer isn't free.) In the long hours standing around, I would survey the room and count how many of the aspiring artists were left-handed. In graduate school, I earned beer money by modeling for life drawing classes in various art departments.
0 kommentar(er)
