Why build a left-handed android? Why build an android with a hand preference at all?
A question that surfaces, infrequently but insistently, on the odd occasions I see him write, or paint, or eat. One assumes that an android capable of performing sixty trillion operations per second is capable of using either hand with equal dexterity, so why did he choose the left?
Despite all society's pressure to the contrary, the left-handed population has held steady at ten percent of the total human population since, by all evidence, the dawn of sentience. It stands to reason that handedness is somehow encoded, perhaps more deeply encoded than we realize, in our human-ness, because we are among a rare few Terran species to possess disproportionate handedness preference – all but one other known animal splits evenly at fifty-percent right, fifty-percent left – and not even our closest primate relatives show such predilections. It would stand to reason, then, that whatever propels us to consciousness also propels ninety percent of us to pick up a pencil or a fork with our right hands…and the other ten percent, Data included, with their left.
He plays the violin right-handed, of course; that's how they've taught it for centuries, and sometimes shoots his phaser that way, with as much accuracy as his left, so it isn't lack of ability that makes him use one over the other. Did he do it for the anomaly? Did he think it would make him more human, to share a rare human trait? Or was it ever his own choice; did Noonien Soong, eccentric that he was, have some ulterior motive, or even some private game? Was Lore left-handed as well? For that matter, was Soong himself?
It does a human child harm to switch their natural handedness, we learned this long ago, but we have never lost that benign neglect of the aberration. So subtle an aberration, in fact, that it never occurs to us to build things more easily accessible to them, and every time I see Data hook his hand to write with un-android clumsiness I wonder. The way too he flinches back from an old-style rifle on the holodeck; a conceit, since it could not hurt him, but were it real and were he a man of flesh instead of metal, the brass shell that ejected into his face would do him damage. A weapon carelessly designed to be used by a right-handed shooter, some technician more concerned for cost than for the ten percent of the population who had to duck every time they fired.
He has the perfect grace of a self-aware machine, the poise of a dancer and the solidity of a bulkhead, and it is precisely the lack of grace inherent in arranging his fingers to push a stylus across a page followed by an awkwardly cocked arm that makes it so glaring. Equally odd, – unnecessary? – the uncomfortable position he assumes eating between two people with whom he must contort himself to avoid knocking arms, or the clumsy way he must reach over his own fingers to pull a card from his fan at poker.
A queer choice, for one who surely does not give frequent thought to the flawless ease with which he performs so many tasks. Or, if not a choice on his part, a strange choice for Dr Soong, to mar an otherwise elegant creation with a trait that goes against the grain of much of his world. I find myself curious, though I have never asked Data himself. A piece of me, I think, would be disappointed to discover it was merely an experiment on his part.
One other thought occurs to me still more seldom, for I am not equipped to imagine its implications. Data is superior in performance to most human beings – is designed to be so. He was made, after a fashion, just as human children are made, and at some point in his early development he discovered a preference, whether innate or created, for one hand over the other, just as our children do. When one searches amongst the lists of the superior men and women of our own race, one finds that people like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Stephen Hawking, Hermann von Helmholtz, Marie Curie, countless presidents and kings, strings of leaders and scientists from all nations – they all had in common just one thing. Like the golden-eyed android, they were left-handed.
If Data's handedness is, by chance, neither personal choice nor deliberate design, was would this mean for him? And what would it mean for us?
AN: Some notes on handedness: All the lefties know it; Data is left-handed. So, for that matter, are Lore, B4, and Noonien and Arik Soong, since Brent Spiner is left-handed. You can see this in ST:TNG when Data paints or writes, or in "Enterprise," when Arik Soong writes. As far as real-life handedness, roughly ten percent of the world population is left-handed, although some countries still enforce right-handedness. Yes, it does hurt a child to "switch" them from their natural handedness; they usually acquire dyslexia, ADD, other minor learning difficulties, or even a stutter. And, surprisingly, our closest genetic relatives, the apes, and even other branches of primate, show no handedness preference (50-50). The other animal I referenced is, in fact, the polar bear, which is exclusively left-pawed. Review for me, fellow lefties.