Re: Why is the majority of people right-handed. Does it depend on culture?

The reason or reasons for hand (and foot, and eye) dominance are unknown. But hand dominance is definitely innate and hereditary, and is not a culturally-determined trait. (Although people can force young children to adopt the other hand, as used to be done in schools to make all children write, cut, etc. with the right hand.) The majority of the people in all human societies are right-handed.

As for why right-handed people would choose to write right-to-left, why not? I can't think of any intrinsic advantage of going from left to right. In fact, of the four obvious choices (left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, and bottom-to-top) for a writing direction, only bottom-to-top seems inherently more unwieldy.

Incidentally, Chinese and Japanese can be written horizontally or vertically. When it is horizontal, it is left-to-right. When it's vertical, you read the page from right to left (i.e., you start in the top right corner of the page, read down that line to the bottom, then return to the top of the page and shift one line over to the left, then read down, etc.) Books written in this form open on the left, unlike books in, for example, English, which open on the right.

Joe Simpson
MD/PhD Student, Neurosciences
School of Medicine
St. Louis, Missouri, USA