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Re: Is white racism nec. all bad?
Frank Forman (forman@ix.netcom.com)
21 Apr 1995 00:06:01 GMT
In <Pine.SUN.3.91.950420154022.13896D-100000@ciao.cc.columbia.edu>
Ralph L Holloway <rlh2@columbia.edu> writes:
>
>This question re: right-handed tool making was convincingly answered
by
>the researches of Nick Toth and his wife Kathy Schick. Can find it in
>their book Silent Stones Speak. As for the question of race
differences
>in right-left handedness and cerebral laterality, I know of no
evidence
>whatsoever that blacks and whites differ in these regards. R.
Holloway.
>
How intensively has this last question been investigated? And I'm
curious about *when* this laterality showed up in the archeological
records. You might be interested to know that I once spoke with a
German (now dead) whose job it was to translate patents from English
into German. He told me that both Arabs and Japanese wrote up their
patents in English and that he quite frequently found that the diagrams
would point to the left while the texts said right, and vice versa.
Also, _Psychology Today_ had a little article many years ago on
difficulties of training Arab and Israeli soldiers to shoot in the
proper direction, as compared with European and American soldiers. The
error rate for the latter was the least and for the Arabs the most. I
did some back calculations for the Israeli soldiers and, assuming that
half the Army was Sephardic and half Ashkenazi, estimated that
Ashkenasi Jews were about a third European, due to intermarriage over
the centuries. This broadly comported with physical anthropological
data, as gleaned, say, from Carleton Coon's _The Living Races of Man_
and from blood group data from A.E. Mourant's _The Blood Groups of the
Jews_ (approx. title). I would be greated interested in having far more
competent minds investigate such fascinating matters, which could well
lead support to the idea that psychological factors co-evolve with more
overtly physical ones.
Frank
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