Obviously it’s just the design of the human body, but is there any scientific explanation/reason we’re almost (and usually) symmetrical?
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Symmetry makes moving easier for starters. When you walk for example, your legs are almost always on the “opposite” side of the stride to each other. Your arms are also in sync with your opposite leg (left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg) to balance out your weight.
If we had 2 right arms and right legs for example, we’d always have more weight on our right side.
The two fold symmetry is not a general pattern in nature at all, but it is”used” by many different classes of animals, such as insects, or molluscs (sea shells, snails, octopusses for example) or worms but also includes all spine-carrying animals (from fishes to amphibians to the higher animals). This is by far the biggest branch in the animal tree, and is called bilatera, a latin word that suggest a mirror symmetry of the body. They got in common that the very early egg forms three kind of tissues: the skin, the middle part and the intestine that kinda pushes itself through the early pile of cells. This process of the intestine bending inwards and then fusing on the other side gives the developing animal a front and back upon which the mirror image is developed. Your mirror is defined by the first few cells you are composed of – actually the entering of the sperm defines the point on the egg where this axis will go. The symmetry is there from the very first moment you come to life…
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