Homocon

While lefties are from 10 to 13 percent of the human population at present (depending on whom you ask), left-handedness makes up around a third of the chimpanzee population -- and digging even deeper, Arizona State University chemists John Cronin and Sandra Pizzarello published this finding in the February 14th, 1997 issue of Science magazine: "(I)n Earth organisms, amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, are all left-handed" (though scientists have also discovered that sugars are all right-handed, which might suggest that while lefties are important as a foundation to our very existence, righties are the frosting on the cake . . . but then, we always knew that righties were sweeter, didn't we?).

Sorry, I couldn't resist . . .

But just as all twenty of the amino acids which comprise living things are left-handed while the human species is predominantly right-handed, there are scientists suggesting that our continuing evolution is introducing a rising percentage of left-handed humans into the mix to correlate with what we are at the molecular level. Russian doctor Alexander Dubov claims that "the number of left-handed babies that were born in 2005 doubled the amount of left-handed children which saw the light in 1990", leading him to conclude that "mankind is changing slowly," while Pyotr Chereda, a Russian scientist of anomalous phenomena (telepathy, remote viewing and other claptrap, so take it for what it's worth), believes that right and left-handers are virtually different types of people with their own special mindsets and perceptions of the world. "They get along with each other perfectly, but there is a hidden evolutionary struggle taking place between them, which reminds (me of) the struggle between primeval humans -- Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men." Chereda concludes that "the left handers will eventually win the fight owing to their anomalous abilities."

Although it sounds rather Star Trekish, Anna Salleh at ABC Science Online tends to agree: "If we include the number of people who throw a ball, strike a match or use a pair of scissors with their left-hand, the searchers say the world looks more of a left-handed place."

Chris McManus, the author of Right Hand, Left Hand, is also convinced that the proportion of left-handers in human society is rising, and that this may bode well for the human species as a whole, for while left-handers are disproportionately represented in the mental disabilities and physical maladies department, they also disproportionately occupy the genius spectrum, such as Einstein, Newton and Franklin.

What this may mean for the human species as a whole is anybody's guess, but Glyn Humphreys from Birmingham University's school of psychology puts it this way: "In right-handed people, the right hemisphere sees the whole picture, whereas the left hemisphere attends to the details. However, we have found that in left-handed people, this is completely reversed . . . not only our language function, but even the way in which we see the world can depend upon our handedness."

Could this mean that warp drives and time travel are right around the corner?

ADDENDUM:
Canadian researchers back in 2000 attempted to correlate a link between left-handedness and homosexuality, offering the thesis that the tendency toward an increased level of left-handedness was markedly greater among gay men and women than in the population at large (and especially so among lesbians), but had to eventually conclude that though the increased numbers were reliable, they were so small in absolute magnitude as to make it impossible to conclude that handedness and homosexuality had anything to do with each other. There was a brief flurry of speculation that perhaps handedness is determined before birth and this might suggest that human sexuality might also be determined before birth, but a survey of identical twins quickly dismisses such a conclusion, yet not without raising the alternative possibility that a combination of heredity, environment and prenatal stresses (along with the age of the mother, as women over 40 are 128% more likely to bear a left-handed child than a woman in her twenties) may produce both left-handedness and/or homosexuality.

"Handedness is controlled by a whole lot of pathways in the brain," says Stanley Coren, the author of The Left-Handed Syndrome. "If any one of these pathways is mucked up during gestation, then handedness becomes a cosmic dice game . . . we believe this accounts for about half of all left-handers."

OFF TOPIC
This is mind-numbingly bizarre.