The Right Hand

The Right Hand by Daniel Wilson

Daniel Wilson’s The Right Hand examines the human hand as the chief instrument of touch, will, labour, art, language, and civilisation, then investigates why most people preferentially use the right hand. The hand is distinguished from other sensory organs because it actively selects and tests objects, enables the blind to perceive and read, expresses emotion through gesture, and translates imagination into practical and artistic work. Though apes possess grasping limbs and humans retain limited prehensile capacity in their feet, the human hand is uniquely suited to delicate manipulation, tool-making, and creative design. The work argues that humanity’s special advantage lies not merely in having two hands, but in making one hand the habitual servant of conscious will while the other becomes its assistant. Right-handedness has consequently shaped tools, warfare, writing, ceremony, social etiquette, language, and symbolism. The right hand is associated across many traditions with honour, faith, authority, blessing, friendship, skill, and beneficent action; the left is frequently burdened with meanings of inferiority, impurity, or ill omen. Yet the author insists that left-handedness is not moral or intellectual defect, but a genuine and often highly dexterous variation. Wilson surveys evidence from gesture-language, handprints and symbols among American peoples, ancient art, biblical accounts, classical customs, philology, writing systems, Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture, and prehistoric tools. He argues that right-handedness was widespread among ancient and modern peoples, including peoples described as savage or uncivilised, and was already predominant among paleolithic tool-makers. Profile drawings may reveal the draughtsman’s preferred hand, while the direction of flake marks on stone implements can indicate whether a flint-worker used the right or left hand. Such evidence suggests that prehistoric left-handers existed, but that right-handed workers were more common. The account rejects the claim that right-handedness is simply a social habit created by shields, tools, writing, nursing practices, or convention. Education and co-operation strongly reinforce the use of the right hand, especially because implements and etiquette are designed for it, but they do not adequately explain its broad historical prevalence or the persistence of strong left-handedness despite correction. Children may use both hands freely at first, but observations of infancy show that a preference can emerge early, particularly in vigorous reaching. Wilson concludes that many people have only a weak natural bias and readily conform to prevailing training, whereas a smaller number are strongly right- or left-handed from early life. Left-handed persons, he maintains, are commonly made ambidextrous because society obliges them to train the right hand for writing and conventional tasks, while they retain greater native power or delicacy in the left. Personal examples, inherited patterns, and the cases of left-handed artists and skilled workers are offered to show that repression does not extinguish an innate preference. Such people may write with the right hand yet instinctively use the left for drawing, carving, throwing, striking, fine work, or exertion. Their ability to cultivate both hands can give them an advantage in art, surgery, fencing, carpentry, music, and other pursuits. Wilson reviews proposed bodily explanations: unequal circulation, the position of the heart and viscera, the origin of arteries, the centre of gravity, muscular development, and the arrangement of the lungs and liver. He finds theories based on transposed organs or mechanical balance insufficient, since people with unusual internal anatomy may still be right-handed and strongly left-handed people need not have reversed viscera. He also disputes claims that one hand is consistently more sensitive to temperature, reporting experiments that found no reliable relation. He ultimately locates the most probable source of handedness in unequal development of the cerebral hemispheres. Since each hemisphere chiefly controls the opposite side of the body, superior development of the left hemisphere would favour right-handedness, while superior development of the right hemisphere would favour left-handedness. The connection between handedness, writing, speech, paralysis, and aphasia is presented as supporting this view. In a post-mortem examination of Thomas Neilly, an inveterately left-handed former soldier, Wilson finds the right cerebral hemisphere distinctly heavier than the left, regarding the result as confirmation that marked left-handedness corresponds to exceptional development of the opposite side of the brain. The work ends by advocating the early cultivation of both hands. It argues that natural preference should not be forcibly suppressed, particularly in left-handed children, but that everyone should develop the neglected hand. Human beings are fundamentally bimanous, and broader training of both hands would increase practical capacity while preserving each individual’s innate dexterity.

By Daniel Wilson · First published 2011 · Genre: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Human Biology · 9 chapters · 43,392 words

First lines

The hand is one of the most distinctive characteristics of man. Without its special organisation he would be for all practical purposes inferior to many other animals. It is the executive portion of the upper limb whereby the limits of his capacity as "the tool-user" are determined. As such, it is the active agent of the primary sense of touch, the organ of the will, the instrument which works harmoniously with brain and heart, and by means of which imagination and idealism are translated into fact. Without it man's intellectual superiority would be to a large extent abortive. In its combination of strength with delicacy, it is an index of character in all its variations in man and woman from childhood to old age. It is an exponent of the refinement of high civilisation, no less than the organ of all dexterity and force of the skilled inventor and mechanician. In the art of the true painter, as in works of Titian and Vandyke, the portraiture of the hand is no less replete with individuality than the face.

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right-handedness · left-handedness · human hand · touch and perception · manual dexterity · ambidexterity · cerebral hemispheres · brain lateralization · human evolution · comparative anatomy · tool-making · gesture language

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