Re: Is white racism nec. all bad?

Lane Singer (lsd@ix.netcom.com)
22 Apr 1995 18:02:00 GMT

In <3n6st9$1q7@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> forman@ix.netcom.com (Frank Forman) writes:

[right vs left: handedness and brainedness]

>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, please find better sources than Coon. He's hopelessly out
of date. There are many genetic studies of the ancestry of various
groups that have been published over the last ten to twenty years,
if that's what you're interested in.

I would like to point out that ability to determine right from
left is something that can be inculcated in a child's psyche
by training at a very early age, and thus the quick reaction time
is determined by whether or not one has had this training. It is
not physiological, unless there is some sort of brain disorder
such as dyslexia, which, as far as I know, is quite common
among northern Europeans.

--

Lane Singer