Sinister tendencies
As successive myths about the causes and nature of left-handedness have fallen to scientific study, the suspicion has grown that it provides some evolutionary advantage. But what?
Over the years left-handed people have had a uniformly bad press. Right is right (and correct), and left is sinistral, suspect and perverse. Left-handers have been accused, down the ages, of everything from deviousness to mental deficiency and witchcraft, and the mere fact of their left-handedness can still arouse hostility in any right-handers attempting to teach them manual tasks.
Is left-handedness just a fluke, a by-product of some change in our…
