Yeah for my side!

[theotherguy]

Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Mon Sep 17, 2:45 PM ET

Lefties have been bouncing back in recent decades, following a decline in the beginning of the 20th century, a new study shows.
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While lefties currently make up about 11 percent of the population, earlier studies found only 3 percent of those born in 1900 were left-handed. These claims led Ian Christopher McManus of the University College London and his colleagues to learn more about this change.

"Left-handedness is important because more than 10 percent of people have their brains organized in a qualitatively different way to other people," McManus said. "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."

To tease out the cause of the lefties' decline in Victorian times, the researchers looked at a series of films made between 1897 and 1913 by early filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, whose body of work forms the largest collection of early non-fiction films in the world.

McManus and his team identified 391 arm-wavers in the films and compared the number of lefties and righties in the old movie to a more modern "control group" formed by searching for "waving" with Google Images.

About 15 percent of the people in the old films waved with their left hand, compared to 24 percent of lefty wavers in the Google search, the study, published in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Current Biology, found.

The researchers compared these results to previous studies of handedness in writing and found that left-handed waving is more common than left-handed writing.

After correcting for this bias, the researchers found that "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," McManus said.

The lefties in the Victorian films were typically older, which rules out the possibility of higher rates of mortality among lefties.

The most likely reason that lefties dropped in numbers at the turn of the 20th century was possible social influence brought about by universal education and the industrial revolution. These two factors would have forced lefties into the spotlight as they learned to write in the classroom or clumsily used machines built for right-handers.

"That would have exacerbated the stigma that any visible minority can experience, and the result could have been that left-handers found it more difficult to find marriage partners, marrying later, and hence having fewer children so that fewer of the relevant genes went into the gene pool," McManus told LiveScience. "And we do have evidence that around the turn of the 20th century left-handers had fewer children than right-handers."

Nice to see "my people" making a come back. I knew it was only a matter of time once the anitleftites started getting educated on the fact that we are all pink on the inside.

[Pie]

And squishy. Don't forget that.

[xoxoxoBruce]

You've got it backward.

[monster]

I heard that on NPR and I was wondering this: Maybe the numbers aren't changing, but the increase in acceptability of left-handedness not only reduces the number of natural lefties who become righties in order to comply, but also increases the number of ambis who "decide" to favor their left? I'm pretty ambi, but have been officially a righty since I broke my left wrist as a kid. My two boys are ambi and confused. There is no pressure on them to be right handed as there might have been in the old days. i just tested the waving thing on them -one refused and one waved with both!

[Flint]

@theotherguy: "they're all pink on the inside" refers to the female...uh... pink... on the inside...thing.

[Griff]

*friggin leftists*

[theotherguy]

Originally Posted by Flint

@theotherguy: "they're all pink on the inside" refers to the female...uh... pink... on the inside...thing.

That was part of the joke as was the fact that it also is used in race conversations. If I gots to splain it...

Here I thought you could get layered humor.

[Flint]

@theotherguy: Are you a guy? . . . Are you "pink on the inside" ???

...it also is used in race conversations...

To compare the genitalia of women of different races -- "it's all pink on the inside" ...

[HungLikeJesus]

I was at a work meeting and five us ended up at lunch together. Of the five, three were left handed. Immediately after lunch I calculated the odds of that happening. Anybody want to guess at the answer? (The calculation involves the binomial theorem.)

[theotherguy]

Originally Posted by Flint

@theotherguy: Are you a guy? . . . Are you "pink on the inside" ???

To compare the genitalia of women of different races -- "it's all pink on the inside" ...

Easy there big boy.

btw: Yes, I am pink on the inside. Aren't you in a medical field of some sort?

Cock.

[Cicero]

My mum shoved the crayon in the other hand all the time...claiming: "It's a right handed world."
No.....now it's an ambi-world.
We all have to type and eat a sandwich at the same time. Thanks Ma!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Left handed... my god man, what are you thinking?
If this keeps up people will be shudder driving on the left side of the road.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by HungLikeJesus

I was at a work meeting and five us ended up at lunch together. Of the five, three were left handed. Immediately after lunch I calculated the odds of that happening. Anybody want to guess at the answer? (The calculation involves the binomial theorem.)

3/5?

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by BigV

3/5?

I might be wrong, but I get 1.05%

Probability of being left-handed = 11%,
Probability of exactly 3 out of 5 being left-handed (randomly chosen) =
(0.11^3)*(0.89^2)*(5!)/(3!*2!) = 0.0105

Of course, there are problems with the logic (e.g. how do you define left-handed?).

[BigV]

I get:

five people, two hands each.

each one r handed or l handed

3 out of 5 are l handed.

== 3/5


Of course, there are problems with the logic (e.g. how do you define the probability of being left handed? one person, two hands, pick one, 50/50. One definition. ps, I like your description of problem better. )