Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 13, 1992 TAG: 9202130040
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
LEFTIES JUST GOT UP ON THE WRONG SIDE OF LIFE
Q: Why do left-handed people die nine years younger than righties?A: When we first heard this factoid, we immediately wondered: Are scissors designed for right-handed people that dangerous? Are lefties somehow finding a way to fall victim to can openers? Automobile stick shifts? Gravy ladles?
You can imagine the most horrible freak accidents! ("What happened, officer, was that Marge here accidentally ladled the gravy directly into the blow drier, and . . .")
The lefties-die-younger story broke last year when two researchers announced that a JOEL ACHENBACH review of California death certificates revealed that lefties die at age 66, on average, while righties last to 75. Such a huge disparity in life expectancy hasn't been universally accepted by other scientists, but neither had the study been refuted.
"We were concerned that our colleagues were going to look at us as though we just descended from flying saucers with deely-boppers on our heads," recalls one of the researchers, Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
There are two reasons lefties die younger, he said:
1. Accidents. "Left-handers are five times more likely to die of accidental injuries," says Coren. Auto accidents are a major cause.
2. Left-handedness is often a side-effect of some other "neuropathology." Babies from difficult pregnancies or stressed births are more likely to be left-handed. Lefties tend to mature more slowly and suffer from learning disabilities. Most importantly, lefties often have sluggish or dysfunctional immune systems. We can't help but note that President Bush, our most famous left-hander, has been diagnosed as having Graves' Disease, which is exactly the sort of immune system problem that lefties are more likely to suffer from.
That said, southpaws shouldn't feel bad, said Dr. Steven Schachter, a neurologist at Harvard University. Left-handers, he said, are better at spacial perception than right-handers, have superior physical skills and are unusually creative: "They're actually overrepresented at both ends of the IQ scale," he said.
Dave Barry, the famous sinistral funnyman, told us that lefties die younger intentionally, because they're smarter: "They just realize at some point in their life that the whole world is pointless anyway, while right-handed people keep plodding along waiting for something meaningful."
Q: Why did Civil War soldiers stand shoulder-to-shoulder as they advanced on the enemy, even though this made them easy targets for rifle fire and was obviously a dumb idea?
A: War-fighting tactics are always outraced by man-killing technology. Generals, trained in the history of combat, go into the field and with great calculation refight some previous war - the result being that their men are ground to pieces by some new device for maiming and butchering.
The Civil War commanders ordered their men to maintain "close-order" formations, as though they were in a rugby scrum. The generals probably were remembering the paintings they'd seen of the Battle of Waterloo and whatnot, the ones with the neat rows of brightly uniformed soldiers in the distance and, in the foreground, scenes of unimaginable chaos, violence and individual gallantry. For the Napoleonic Wars, it made sense for troops to stay close together. Soldiers could be under the voice command of a single leader.
There was also a psychological component: War was scary as heck, and you liked having someone right next to you. The regiment could move as a single organism, a machine of lethal impact.
The key to this working was that muskets were fairly pathetic. The smoothbore musket had limited range and poor accuracy. It took a long time to reload. A line of soldiers could advance to within a couple of hundred yards of the enemy and still be safe. The basic tactic was to charge the enemy, withstand a relatively pitiful volley of musket fire, and then go to work with the bayonets, slicing and dicing.
During the Civil War, however, rifles accurate at long distances made the traditional close-order formation almost suicidal. (The secret to better accuracy and distance was "rifling" the bore of the gun, using grooves to impart a spin to the bullet; This trick was known for many years, but not until the mid-1800s were bullets designed to expand in the bore and take the rifling.) About 80 percent of the casualties in the Civil War were inflicted by rifle fire, according to James McPherson, author of "Battle Cry of Freedom."
So why didn't the commanders wise up immediately? One reason was that the improved rifles were in short supply early in the conflict, because the prewar U.S. Army had only about 16,000 soldiers and commensurately few firearms. Another possible reason was that the war, in its early stages, was often fought in wilderness, rather than in the open, where the folly of close-order formations would have been more apparent. "In retrospect to us it looks crazy that they didn't discover this right away, but in actual practice it wasn't so obvious," McPherson says.
As late as World War I, it was still common for commanders to order their troops to charge enemy fortifications across open ground. Impractical, yes, but oh so valorous. Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.