Have you stopped and watched people use their predominant hand? Wait. That one is signing his name left-handed. That pitcher is left-handed, and the batter changed from batting right-handed to left. Is there an advantage to batting on the same side as the pitcher?

Those were questions I asked myself as a young baseball player. We had only one left-hander, and he was an awesome pitcher. I was his catcher and lost a couple of my fingernails that summer. My family was right-handed except for one grandmother.

Then we had our first child, a boy, and knew immediately that he was a lefty. Teachers no longer tried to change the left-handers to the right side as they did in the 50s, so he proceeded on. He was to be a very good athlete. He was far ahead of the others in the Little League team I was coaching, so I made him a deal. Each time at bat, switch sides and become what was known as a switch hitter. He accomplished that much easier than I could have.

Then came golf. He started wanting left-handed clubs, of which we had none. Then stepped in my father, an excellent golfer who had gone to college on a golf scholarship.

“Jamie, you should play golf right-handed. Golf courses are laid out and developed by right-handers, and the courses will play much easier for you over the years.” My son never looked back and plays only right-handed. Great-grandfather’s advice.

Then came a sport that would be my son’s specialty. Pole vaulting. It really made no difference which side of the pole you went up on, but the techniques in launching oneself were crucial to improving one’s height. His high school coaches were right-handed, and that was a bit of a problem. A more serious problem was that while there were some excellent training films, all the vaulters in the videos were right-handed. That is when I learned that my son was more on the bright side. He figured out that if he brought down his mother’s big mirror from our bedroom, placed it by the TV, and watched the film in the mirror, all the vaulters became left-handed. His sport got him a college scholarship.

I decided to do some research on why there were more right-handers than left. The first statistic I read was that about 90% of humans are right-handed. The researchers have concluded that this dominance started when our human ancestors started walking on two legs.

This research also concluded that no other primate species showed a preference for one hand over the other. It has also been concluded that the upright two-leg walking caused the brain to increase in size. It was decided that this prominent right-handedness was developed in the womb. But there was no real reason to find a cause for this trait in humans.

In 2025, scientists assessed data on over 41 species of monkeys and apes, looking at all kinds of things like body mass, habitat, tool use, diet, and brain size. But they had no way of evaluating humans from the extinct human ancestors. They did conclude small-brained species from Indonesia seemed to have weaker hand preference.

Scientists now suspect that upright walking came first, enabling our ancestors to free their hands from the job of locomotion. For some reason, still unknown, as our brains grew larger and the human reorganized their needs for survival, a rightward bias became hardened.

About all they have concluded after these numerous studies is that the human is unique in a hand preference. This dominance in the right is not found in any other species of apes. In further studies, these researchers hope to understand the role of the human culture that continues to favor right-handedness and why left-handedness continues to persist at all.

Bottom line, it appears to be that there is some strong genetic reason for the choice of a prominent hand and that it coincides with the brain of that individual. I would think that the best option, even despite the lack of a solid reason, should be to continue with the prominent hand you first used after birth. The reason may not be known, but nature predicts.

This philosophy of letting a person decide the handedness choice was made quite clear to me when my former wife, a left-hander, at the time decided to take up golf. I explained that the courses were laid out by right-handers, just as my father had. I finished, and she replied, “Shut up!” So, teachers were correct: let them make their own choice.

· Dennis Marek can be contacted at llamalaw23@gmail.com.