a Institute of Sports and Sports Science , University of Kassel , Kassel , Germany.
Laterality. 2015 May;20(3):270-86. doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2014.961471. Epub 2014 Sep 26.
The fighting hypothesis proposes that left-oriented athletes enjoy a negative frequency-dependent advantage in combat sports such as boxing. Supporting evidence, however, is restricted to cross-sectional frequency data from small samples. Here, we examined the incidence and fight records of 2,403 left- and right-oriented fighters who were listed in the annual ratings of professional boxing from 1924 to 2012. Unexpectedly, left-oriented boxers were overrepresented in no more than 7 of the 89 years considered, their percentages varied up to 30% and increased over the entire period, and frequencies varied substantially between weight divisions. In support of the fighting hypothesis, lose-win ratios indicated larger fighting strength in left- compared to right-oriented boxers, which, however, was not reflected in different proportions of wins and losses by knockout. Our findings are partly consistent with an assumed left-oriented fighters' advantage in combat sports. Such advantage could be explained by negative frequency-dependent selection mechanisms; however, our study also revealed potential limits of the fighting hypothesis such that alternative explanations cannot be fully excluded. We propose that interference by factors not related to performance could also limit the suitability of data from elite sporting competition for testing evolutionary models of human handedness.
战斗假说提出，在拳击等格斗运动中，左撇子运动员具有负频率依赖优势。然而，支持这一假说的证据仅限于来自小样本的横截面频率数据。在这里，我们研究了 1924 年至 2012 年期间每年职业拳击排名中列出的 2403 名左撇子和右撇子拳手的发生率和比赛记录。出乎意料的是，在考虑的 89 年中，左撇子拳手的比例不超过 7 年，他们的比例高达 30%，而且在整个期间有所增加，而且体重级别之间的频率差异很大。支持战斗假说的是，胜负比表明左撇子拳手比右撇子拳手的战斗能力更强，但这并没有反映在击倒造成的胜负比例上。我们的研究结果部分支持了格斗运动中左撇子运动员具有优势的假设。这种优势可以用负频率依赖选择机制来解释；然而，我们的研究也揭示了战斗假说的潜在局限性，因此不能完全排除替代解释。我们提出，与表现无关的因素的干扰也可能限制精英体育比赛数据用于检验人类利手进化模型的适用性。
