In my opinion, science is the ability to ask questions which either can't be answered or which answers just raise new questions. The paper today is from the first kind. It asks "are gorillas right-handed or not?" and the result is: We don't know. In 1992, there were just 22 published studies about hand preferences in gorillas. Although, McGrew and Marchant analyzed and compared the study results, the number of studies was not enough to conclude if gorillas are left-, right- or ambi-preferent. Therefore, based on the knowledge from 1992, I can not answer you the question. But today... in the time where everybody can access the world-wide knowledge everytime with his smartphone, laptop or tablet... today it is different, isn't it? So many people had now so much time to observe gorillas and to share their observations with the rest of the world. So today we have to know the answer, right? No. Unfortunately wrong. You still find contradictory answers to this simple question. Some webpages claim gorillas to be right-handed (http://phys.org/news/2012-10-predominance-right-handed-uniquely-human-trait.html) and some others claim them to be ambi-prefered (http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/10/16/why-animals-dont-show-handedne/). So if you always asked yourself: is there any question which science can not answer?... here you have an example :-D "Are gorillas right-handed or not?"
W. C. McGrew and L. F. Marchant Human Evolution 8.1 (1993): 17-23.
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
März 2018
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