Abstract
Negative frequency-dependent effects rather than innate predispositions may provide left-handers with an advantage in one-on-one fighting situations. Support mainly comes from cross-sectional studies which found significantly enhanced left-hander frequencies among elite athletes exclusively in interactive sports such as baseball, cricket, fencing and tennis. Since professional athletes’ training regimes continuously improve, however, an important unsolved question is whether the left-handers’ advantage in individual sports like tennis persists over time. To this end, we longitudinally tracked left-hander frequencies in year-end world rankings (men: 1973–2011, ladies: 1975–2011) and at Grand Slam tournaments (1968–2011) in male and female tennis professionals. Here we show that the positive impact of left-handed performance on high achievement in elite tennis was moderate and decreased in male professionals over time and was almost absent in female professionals. For both sexes, left-hander frequencies among year-end top 10 players linearly decreased over the period considered. Moreover, left-handedness was, however, no longer seems associated with higher probability of attaining high year-end world ranking position in male professionals. In contrast, cross-sectional data on left-hander frequencies in male and female amateur players suggest that a left-handers’ advantage may still occur on lower performance levels. Collectively, our data is in accordance with the frequency-dependent hypothesis since reduced experience with left-handers in tennis is likely to be compensated by players’ professionalism.
Highlights
The polymorphism in human handedness just as the relative rarity of left-handers compared to right-handers persists since thousands of years [1,2]
A unsolved question is how the handedness polymorphism could be maintained despite left-handedness potentially being linked with negative traits such as a higher risk to suffer from health disorders [6]
Analogous to survival strategies observed in the animal kingdom [7,8], left-handers might have benefited from a fitness advantage in one-on-one fighting situations due to being rarer compared to right-handers, which, in turn, helped compensate for some of the costs inherent to left-handedness [9]
Summary
The polymorphism in human handedness just as the relative rarity of left-handers compared to right-handers persists since thousands of years [1,2]. Analogous to survival strategies observed in the animal kingdom [7,8], left-handers might have benefited from a fitness advantage in one-on-one fighting situations due to being rarer compared to right-handers, which, in turn, helped compensate for some of the costs inherent to left-handedness [9] In support of this view, a significant excess of left-handed athletes, in male competition [3,10], was found repeatedly in the high echelons of sports that are characterized by direct interactions between contestants (e.g. 20% to 40.6% in baseball) [3,11,12]; not in sports that are non-interactive (e.g. darts) [13]. Athletes’ continuous performance improvements due to increased deliberate practice activities during expertise development [24], higher intensity and quality of training regimes [25] as well as the availability of statistics on competitors’ past performances may help professionals circumvent the detrimental negative frequency-dependent effects nowadays We expected that this would be reflected in an interim excess of left-handers among elite performers only. Ethics approval was not considered necessary and not obtained for this study since we examined data on public figures which is freely available online [27]
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