Left-handedness isn’t good for you — it’s “associated with fitness-lowering traits” — but being a southpaw yields a certain advantage in many sports — and in fighting, which is why it has persisted so long, the evolutionary story goes.
So, researchers decided to look at left-handedness in the Ultimate Fighting Championship:
The finding that left-handers are overrepresented in many combat sports is interpreted as evidence for this hypothesis. However, few studies have examined sports that show good similarity with realistic fights and analysed winning chances in relation to handedness of both fighters. We examined both, in a sample of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a fierce fighting sport hardly constrained by rules. Left-handers were strongly overrepresented as compared to the general male population but no advantage for left-handers when facing right-handers was found, providing only partial evidence for the fighting hypothesis.
I would say that finding left-handers overrepresented is rather strong evidence that being left-handed is helpful, since anyone fighting competitively is in the top fraction of one percent of fighters.
Conversely, not winning more often suggests very little, once the pool of competitors has already been selected for fighting ability — and matched up by fighting ability.
My eldest daughter is a leftie fencer, and the story we get in fencing is that left-handedness is considered an advantage when a young fencer but as the experience of your opponents builds the advantage diminishes.
The early advantage gives lefties better performance, more motivation and maybe more coaching when young. This leads to an over-representation of lefties at all ages, but as far as performance goes the margin diminishes with age.
Alternate interpretation Grasspunk is that being a lefty allows someone with less talent to compete on a even footing with someone with more talent.
When young the gap between the best fencers and the lefties is smaller so the lefties dominate but as fencers get older the less talented ones are weeded out leaving a fencing talent difference that is partially negated by left handedness.
Why aren’t all the best fencers left handed then? Because the best fencers in the world have probably never fenced at all – it’s a fairly esoteric sport.
GP,
My experience as a left-handed fencer exactly.
Early on, I was among the best, but by the time it got down to reaction times and thinking about the next 8 places the blade was going to be, I was only average (if that).
Would have kicked ass on bronze-age conscripts, though. 20-ft lunge through the eye? I could do it with a short sword. Back in the day. Big survival advantage.