The lesson of uneven ears

In which we talk about embracing variation

At this point in your life you probably know whether or not your head is screwed on tight - and straight. I mean this literally. This is something I thought about this again this morning during a haircut.

My body is not completely symmetrical and I’ll wage this is true for almost everyone. One of my ears appears to be slightly higher than the other, same is true for my eyes. There are other little abnormalities. One of my front teeth is a partially developed molar, though you can’t tell from looking at my smile. I have a deviated septum so my nose has a bit of a twist. And so on.¹

Symmetry is an aesthetic ideal and I’m almost obsessed with it. If I build a structure in a game like Minecraft² I always want to center it on some imaginary axis. As a kid, if I was drawing a picture of a spaceship I always wanted the left side to be exactly the same as the right side. Arranging pictures, furniture, etc. had to follow the same rules. In a perfect world, people would also have symmetrical features - the surface features of the left side of their bodies would exactly match their right sides.

The real world doesn’t work that way, though. Genes and life experience will inevitably cause minor (or major) deviations. Symmetry, at a detailed level, is almost impossible and this is isn’t a bad thing. Imagine breaking a nail on your left hand: would you have to then break the same nail on your right hand in a matching position.

It will always bug me a little bit that my eyes and ears don’t completely match each other but it’s pointless to waste much time worrying about this because I’m not going to change that. These differences are part of who I am and that’s fine.

To take this analogy to another level, we are all some kind of deviation from an imagined ideal or computed average. There is a lot of diversity in Homo sapiens: eye colour and shape; skin colour and texture; height, weight, body fat; hair; sexual characteristics, etc. And those are just our physical characteristics! Our thoughts and feelings have some common basis but there are almost 8 billion people on this planet of differing geographies, cultures, languages, interests, beliefs, etc. Whether you believe life was created according to some cosmic design or it has evolved over billions of years, it’s clear that we are not all duplicates of each other. We are a diverse species and that is one of our strengths. Complex organisms are different from each other because there are endless combinations of genes that produce a human being. It’s inescapable.

So maybe, just maybe, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to embrace the great diversity within ourselves and each other. It’s unavoidable and it’s an opportunity. What could we learn from each other if we were all the same? What new and interesting things would humans be prevented from doing if we didn’t have a diverse genetic playing field to work with?

If we didn’t have some level of conformity in our world, things would be a disaster. There are plenty of reasons why cars in most countries only drive on one side of the road: safety and efficiency are prime among them. Most countries generally find it effective to have common health and safety laws.³

But but but… there is so much room for diversity on your own body and throughout society while still keeping the trains running on time.⁴ And so then next time I see my uneven ears and eyes, I’m going to try to be thankful that I am a living example of both the inevitability and the opportunity of variation and I am just the tip of the iceberg. Because even middle aged Caucasian cis hetero men aren’t all exactly the same.

1. Actor Hugh Laurie once said in an interview that his body leans to one side because of years spent rowing: I’ve never touched an oar more than once but I think my body has a similar curve, probably from carrying bags of full of computers and notebooks before I switched to a backpack.

2. Old dudes like to build things, even if they are only made of pixels.

3. No, this is not a post advocating gun controls though I personally think they are a good thing.

4. At this point I would be happy with having trains running at all where I live but that’s a different post.