From: dino@euclid.colorado.edu (dino) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban Subject: Re: doomed left handers Date: 8 Mar 1995 04:00:27 GMT Costing the net hundreds, if not *thousands* of dollars to send to machines everywhere, in article <3jh41s$jjq@agate.berkeley.edu> ssusin@econ.Berkeley.EDU (Scott Susin) cackles: >From the FAQ: > >>Fb.Left-handed people have shorter life spans than righties. > >Why is this listed as false? It could just as easily be listed >as Tb. > >This theory has been put forward by Stanley Coren in _The Left-Hander >Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness_. Coren >is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. > >I searched a medical database, and found that Coren has some critics, >but also supporters. I don't have either the time or the qualificationsAll quotes (indented) are from an article titled "Life for lefties: from annoying to downright risky" from December 1994 _Smithsonian_, cited under fair use or plagiarism, whatever. All pytos mine. ... "Lefties Die Nine years Earlier," world headlines gasped in 1991, when psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published their findings. Left-handers have a shorter life span, not because a world prone to right-handers makes lefties more accident-prone, but because the physiology of many left handers makes them more susceptible to disease. ... ... And here's my favorite pop theory behind left-handedness; I couldn't resist including it: Neurobiologist William H. Calvin suggested that early human mothers carried their babies in their left arms, close to the soothing rhythms of of the heart, leaving their right hands free for throwing rocks at rabbits. ... ... (comments on why left-handers must work so hard to overcome biases deleted) Coren claims that adjustments to a right-handed world ultimately kill many lefies; he also claims that lefties are five time as likely to die in accidents and injuries, as the right-handed world will not accomodate them. The article has no sources for these figures. Coren didn't start out aiming to be the Cassandra of the sinistral world. ... he first became intrigued with laterality while studying perception in the 1970s. Over the years he noticed something odd: although 13 percent of the population of 20-year olds were left-handed, only 5 percent of the 50-year olds were, and 1 percent of the octagenarians. Where were the old left-handers? Then the article then talks about how in 1988 how Coren and Diane Halpern, a psychologist at California State University in San Bernadino, analyzed the life spans of 2,271 baseball players, from *The Baseball Encyclopedia*. They found that, on average, right-handers live eight months longer than lefties, a small but notable difference. However, it was their 1991 study, which was reported in a five-paragraph letter to the *New England Journal of Medicine*, that made Coren and Halpern anathema among left-handers. They polled relatives of 2,000 people in Southern California who had died recently, asking if the deceased was left-handed. The researchers tabulated a mean age of death for right-handers at 75; for left-handers at 66 -- a difference of nine years! ... "Don't wait for Lefty," a _New York Times_ article announced, "He's dead." ... Other researchers dispute this, the article claims. They say that the sample was too small to be reliable, and anyone who has read _How to Lie with Statistics_ by Darrell Huff knows about this stuff: studies depend upon how many are polled, how the info is gathered, and how much time the study covers, and a couple zillion other things. No follow-ups on why Alf Landon should of beat FDR in the 1936 election, please. It continues: ... Marcel Salive, an epidemiologist at the National Institute on Aging, ran numbers from a six-year study of elderly Bostonians through the computer and came to the conclusion that death rates were almost the same for lefties and righties. The lack of aged lefties, Salive speculates, may well be due to switching in the early part of the century. (my note: forcing lefties to write right-handed, for example) "That's the first thing we thought of," Coren counters, noting that the percentage of lefties has proved constant throughout the centuries, despite cultural pressure to switch. But he admits the nine-year difference may be off base; a more recent British study of mortality rates among cricket players found a two year gap, a numer Coren says sounds reasonable. Coren and Salive can agree that the question of lefty life span deserves a closer look. But the question remains: how much do right-handed tools kill lefties? Later we have: ... Calls to the occupational Safety and Health Administration and a soup of other federal agencies charged with tracking health and safety turned up no evidence of maimed or dying lefties. On the other hand, officials admit that this may be because they never ask if accident victims are left-handed. The major labor unions, from the AFL-CIO to the United Auto Workers, also report no complaints from suffering sinsitrals. And on the "lefties are forced to use right-handed tools" routine: ... "We make a conscious effort to make tools ambidextrous," says Douglas Spranger, president of Human Factors Industrial Design Inc., a New York City firm that has invented hundreds of specialized hand tools, from sugical staplers to a new mascara wand for Lancome. "Left- handers are 15 percent of our target market. Every maufacturer is concerned with it. But, Spranger concedes, "We [designers] tend to favor the right-handed user. Notice the numerical keypad on your computer. It's not on the left." Elsewhere the article claims that lefties suffer from a higher incidence of specific health problems, including learning disabilities, depression, migraine, allergies and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritus and ulcerative colitus. It also has weird theories as to why which I won't quote. Conclusions? Maybe there is truth here, but as a math geek, I don't trust the statistics, or the social aspects that influence the results leading to such conclusions. I'm logging off to go throw some rocks at a few rabbits. dino "ambidextrous as a child, and forced into right-handedness" m. "... when the sharp-tongued Benjamin Disraeli, so the story goes, was ordered in the last century to withdraw his declaration that half of the cabinet were asses. `Mr. Speaker, I withdraw,' was Disraeli's response. `Half the cabinet are not asses.'" -- seen in the Boulder _Daily Camera_, 2-26-95