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Comment by acetofenone | Hacker News Reader

As far as I understand, the imbalance of the two hands is due to the collaborative nature of a species (if I teach you something is easyer if we use the same hand). There are advantages of using the other hand as dominant, in fact in competitive environment like ping pong we see a 50-50 split between left and right hands. This is because the left hand has the advantage of being rare and so the majority is not trained to compete against the minority, while left hand people mostly compete against right handed. If two lefties face each other they are equally disadvantaged, that's why in the end a 50 left 50 right distribution emerges.

Also fun fact, kangaroos have this same 90-10 split: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150618-ka...

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Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”. It’s how the word also became the word for directions as well.

> Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”.

It's a bit more varied, even in the Indo-European family. What does tend to happen is that the words for handedness get positive (right) or negative (left) associations in idioms, but additional meanings are not universal. In French, "droit" additionally means right (as human right), but not "correct" (yes it does have a bunch of adjacent meanings). In German, "recht" gets to mean "law" or "justice", shared by some Slavic languages ("pravo") -- but not all of them, which have the word "desno", without any association with rights/justice/correctness. The Latin "dexter" gave us "dexterity" and "dexterous", but also nothing alluding to justice. Et cetera.

As an aside, "left" originating from "left over" sounds like folk ethymology to me. Dictionaries point to "weak" as the original meaning.

Latin languages also have the words sinister, izquierdo (which seems to come from esku-okerr - crooked hand) for left.

The tendency to associate the right with positive and the left with negative is pretty much ubiquitous in Western civilization up until fairly recently.

I have a fairly exotic viewpoint on this. The left/right asymmetry (for the lack of a better term) is a small part of a larger asymmetry that's difficult to explain (at least to my satisfaction): up is better than down, light is better than dark, positive is better than negative, higher human faculties are better than lower desires, right is better than left. In my mind, none of these should inherently have a good/bad association. Is a valley worse than a hill? Is a positive electric charge better than a negative one? But, for some reason we have this cultural, linguistic baggage where what seem like highly abstract objects are rooted in a very basic world of good and bad.

I find this fascinating.

I would go as far as to add the male/female asymmetry to this: seemingly senseless, yet historically present. I'd say the rabbit hole truly starts when you get into Western esotherics and see how they associate right, up, light, male, order, knowledge as if they're different expressions of the same thing, and analogously for left, down, dark, etc.

> up is better than down

Makes sense; up gives you a better vantage point, so its easier to see danger. Not to mention that it gives you a fighting advantage; your attacker would have to run uphill to get to you, tiring them out.

> light is better than dark

Humans rely heavily on our sight, and we tend to operate in the daytime. If you were a nocturnal animal, I'm sure you would consider dark to be better than light.

> positive is better than negative

Getting something is better than giving it away.

> I would go as far as to add the male/female asymmetry to this: seemingly senseless, yet historically present

What do you mean by this?

As a native non Indo European language speaker, aware of the many differences to Indo European languages, it is noteworthy that this however is similar in both. Oikea ja vasen, right and left. Oikea ja väärä, right and wrong.

In clothing you have the right side and the reverse side while here it's oikea ja nurja. Again similarities but nurja has this twisted and dark connotation. Or upside down = nurinperin.

Noteworthy that Latin "dexter" (right) pairs with "sinister" (left).

Sinister Dexter Adroit Gauche Left handed compliment Right hand man

Does that go for all languages, or western and mostly germanic languages?

Edit: or maybe indo-european and semitic to be more broad.

Honestly I am not sure, it’s an interesting theory that matches our evolved right handedness as the “right” way to do something, and the other as left. Maybe left handed people were seen as different? And it seeped into language. There is a lot of ifs with and assumptions with this theory.

Interesting. Does this then become informative about the level of cooperation vs competition in the population?

In ping-pong where it is pure competition it stabilises at 50:50. In everyday life where we largely collaborate it settles around 90:10.

Would be interesting to see if there are variations over populations in time or space with differing levels of competition/conflict. Ofc these would need to persist long enough for the populations to adjust.

P.S. This is probably just another plausible sounding evo-psych bs theory. Idk why people give AI such a hard time for hallucinations. We are just the same. I guess we generally just apply more filters before expressing ourselves publicly. The problem with AI content is that humans take it at face value and publish without scrutiny.

Evolutionary temporal variation is addressed in the article. Although that could just say that without bipedalism, the pressure to use the hands to climb forces equal use over the available hands.

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