Re: First report on Conm

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à John Cowan <cowan@...>:
>
> >
> > More accurately: there is the fully right-handed majority, and then
> > there is a continuum of various degrees of left-handedness, from
> > people
> > who do most but not all things with their right hands, through full
> > ambidexterity, to obligatory sinistrals.  "All right-handed people
> are
> > alike; all left-handed people are different."
> >
>
> Typical right-handed propaganda. It's completely untrue. First, there's
> no
> right-handed majority. There's only a right-handed *plurality*. Second,
> you
> can't treat fully right-handed people differently from the rest. There
> are
> no "degrees of left-handedness", only "degrees of lateralisation", from
> the
> left to the right. The 15% of fully left-handed people are as fully
> left-handed
> as the 40% of right-handed people are fully right-handed. And in
> between, the
> 45% of ambidextruous people are just that, ambidextruous with more or
> less
> inclination towards left or right. There's no "norm" like you seem to
> imply.
> And I'm pretty sure if left-handed people hadn't been persecuted for
> centuries
> the amount would be much more balanced.
I'm hearing so much different figures on this that I can only conclude that
definitions vary wildly. The last bigger thing on this I read claimed that
something like 1-2% of the world's population was ambidextrous, 10-20% left-
handed and the rest right-handed. Oh, and it's authors'd probably
considered "ambidextrous people with more or less inclination toward left or
right" to be contradiction in terms.

How strongly right/left-handed count as "fully" to get your numbers? Would the
fact that I can operate my mobile phone with my left hand make me ambidextrous
by your definition? Infact, I can probably make most things I can with my
right hand with my left one, except writing and doing things requiring my full
right-handed strength, only like ten times slower and more inefficiently; I've
never met anyone who's thought that make me anything but perfectly right-
handed.

                                                             Andreas

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