50 Years Ago

The third annual scientific meeting of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences ... was called to consider “The Hazards of the Road”, a subject to which, having regard to the increasing public danger deriving from motor traffic, the sciences appear to have devoted disproportionately little research ... [P]sychological tests on those involved in accidents ... tended to show personality traits such as aggressiveness, carelessness, impulsiveness and the like which are not present to the same degree in those persons who have been free from accidents ... Older people tend to make up for their longer reaction times by driving more slowly ... Although as a man grows older, into middle age or further, his reaction time is slowed, his eyesight is not quite what it used to be and his hearing is impaired, he nevertheless becomes a better driver.

From Nature 29 September 1962

100 Years Ago

When nature was fashioning man the forces of natural selection made one hand more apt to perform skilled movements than the other. Why precisely it was the right hand that was chosen in the majority of mankind we do not know ... The fact that a certain proportion of mankind is left-handed, and that such a tendency is transmitted to only some of the descendants of a left-handed person, might perhaps suggest that one half of mankind was originally left-handed and the other right-handed, and that the former condition was recessive in the Mendelian sense ... The superiority of one hand is as old as mankind, and is one of the factors incidental to the evolution of man.

From Nature 26 September 1912