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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

In sexual selection, a type of evolutionary selection driven by mate choice rather than raw survival fitness, yes, that piece of Darwin's writing which was suppressed by Victorian ideology for about 100 years until being rediscovered in the 1960s, symmetry is an easy show of control over the physical enviroment.

By making more than one of identical somethings, you're showing that it was not through chance or accident that you developed this piece, but through deliberate growth and control, and you can prove it, because you've made two or more of them, and the viewer can easily check them against each other.

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Symmetry appears in creatures that spawn out sperm into the sea and let it land where it may, and many other very simple life forms with non-sexual reproduction, or reproduction where attraction isn't a factor, as in most plants. I'm sure symmetry may also add attractiveness as a kind of fitness display, but it's a much more fundamental thing since it's also present in life forms like plants which do evolve through sexual selection but without animalian fitness displays, and in non-sexually reproducing life forms.

A deeper way to think about this is that any phenomenon that pumps out entropy from the system by injecting work + heat tends to stand up like a sore thumb in the rather dull sponteneaty of nature. I don't mean entropy in the naive sense (order vs disorder), but as dispersal of energy (third law). Not sure what the cause of such locality is - perhaps we can call that intelligence?

Have you ever seen how symmetrical human faces look like? Do you consider them more attractive than regular, asymmetrical ones?

Aren't most human faces largely symmetrical, save for minor differences?

My point is that these minor differences actually make a really noticeable (and often kinda disturbing) difference which you can see by mirroring half of a human face on a photo, so I'm not sure if there's a real evolutionary pressure towards making it look as symmetrical as possible.

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