Talk:Handedness
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The castle with the anti-clockwise spiral staircase mentioned in the article is Smailholm Tower near Kelso in the Borders of Scotland.
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[edit] Information superceded by research
The information contained in this article is human-biased. It turns out that preference for a hand/claw/paw is prevalent throughout the animal kingdom and is therefore "genetic" though testosterone dosage in the womb could be a part of that, I suppose. And deviances from the animal kingdom might result from natural selection. Anyway here is a raw pointer to an article. There are many others.Student7 03:57, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20031027/walrus.html
[edit] Shared material with left-handed
- Moved to Talk:Laterality#Merger proposal. Please go there to continue merger discussion.
[edit] Handedness of staircases in castle.
Assume
- The defenders are on the top floor going down.
- The attackers are on the bottom floor going down.
The spiral in the staircase should go the way that allows the defender's sword to swing into the centre pillar, for majority right-handers, a swing from right to left. This allows the defender to hit the attacker around the corner, almost. Let us call this a right hand spiral.
The same spiral in the staircase forces a right handed attacker's sword going uphill to swing from right to left away from the centre pillar, and into the outer wall, where it is reduced in attacking power.
This assumes that defenders and attackers are mostly righthanded. If possible, the attackers should use their left handers going upwards, if they have any, to lead the way.
If the defending force consists of lefthanders and they design the spiral of their castle staircases to go the other way, counter-intuitively and counter-productively, they make things easier for a right handed attacking force. A lefthanded spiral in a castle keep staircase suits a right handed attacking forces just fine.
Since attacking forces tend to outnumber defending forces, a left-handed defending force is still better off having right handed spirals in their Castle Keep staircase.
Attention Noe
I am not disputing the story about the Kerr family with lots of lefthanders, building their castles with lefthanded staircases, but I do think that their effort is futile.
The key difference between castles and say tennis courts, is that tennis courses are the same handedness either way, whereas a spiral staircase is one-hand going up and the opposite hand going down. This gives a rare left handed tennis player a consistant advantage, whereas with castle keep spiral staircases it depends ....
Tabletop 04:09, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I have changed the article back (more or less), to mention your reservations about the usefulness of Kerr's staircases. --Niels Ø 19:05, May 28, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Genetic evidence
A 2004 American Scientist article claims that handedness is genetic. [1] I don't know whether it is correct or not, but the inconsistency with the article should be resolved somehow.
Right Hand, Left Hand (Chris McManus) gives a considerable amount of information on left-handedness being genetic, and this view is supported by a wealth of evidence. I believe the original author's view that it is not on this is almost certainly incorrect.http://www.righthandlefthand.com/
- My understanding is that lefthandedness is believed to be induced by increased levels of testosterone present in the womb. If that's true then lefthandedness per-se would not be genetic - but the tendancy for there to be excess of the hormone might well be. It is known that twin boys (not necessarily identical twins) have an increased tendancy towards lefthandedness due to the 'double dose' of testosterone the two brothers are getting. The probability of bearing twins would have to be genetically linked to the mother - not to the child - so the child might wind up being lefthanded without ever inheriting this hypothetical "high probability of male twins" gene from the mother. If the foetus produces more testosterone than usual during early development then that might be a direct genetic link to the child. So I don't think we can possibly be talking about anything as simple as "this little bit of DNA makes you left-handed" - but genetics clearly does have something to do with it. As with many such things, it's got to be a balance between genetic predisposition (both of the child and the mother) and environmental factors so we probably won't get a clear answer to this question. SteveBaker 18:58, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Proposed merger
- Moved to Talk:Laterality#Merger proposal. Please go there to continue merger discussion.
[edit] Writing Systems
In the context of writing, the article declares the motion is right to left. What about Arabic or Hebrew? Writing systems may be handed, but this article tacitly assumes that all writing systems are right-handed, which is "just plain wrong".
The earliest writing systems seem to have been right to left, perhaps because they were invented by lefthanders (17% of the population). But later on, the majority of writing systems tended to be left to right, perhaps becuase righthanders (83% of the population) were now writing a lot, and preferred L-R perhaps because they avoided smudging the ink.
Cuneiform writing, which preceded paper or parchment, seems to me naturally to flow from right to left, because you're pushing with the right hand. Just my POV. Gzuckier 15:32, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
