You are such a Bilaterian

Ok, extreme geeky science content today so bear with me and try to follow along.

So, my son had a cold the other day and, as always, his nose was all stuffy. As he was standing there blowing his nose talking to me in the cutest little Muppet voice, I was thinking of how lucky we are to have a backup breathing airway.
For example, spiders don't have noses and breathe through trachae on the underside of their abdomen.

Which then got me to thinking about how biologically redundant we are, or at least that's what I thought. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two cars, two kids, two mortgages, you get the idea.

Well, in my quest to discover exactly why we have all this redundancy I ran across a term I had never heard before. Bilateria

The Bilateria, having bilateral symmetry, are a subregnum (a major group) of animals, including the majority of phyla;

Interesting, the plot thickens. Obviously I'm no biologist but the article was interesting none the less and lead me to a few other fascinating things, such as the earliest known Bilaterian:

Vernanimalcula!

If I ever have a third child I'm definitely lobbying for that name. Imagine the teachers and announcers trying to pronounce that every day. "Playing out of Coral Gables, Florida, middle linebacker...Vernanimalcula."

Anyway, I digress. Finally, after exhausting my Wikipedia surfing , even I was starting to get bored and I thought, "hey isn't there a famous painting of some symmetrical dude?"

I am referring of course to the Vitruvian Man depicted above.

But to make it even more interesting did you know there's an actual science dedicated to the study of human measurements.

Anthropometry (Greek ανθρωπος, man, and μετρον, measure, literally meaning "measurement of humans"), in physical anthropology, refers to the measurement of living human individuals for the purposes of understanding human physical variation.

Today, anthropometry plays an important role in industrial design, clothing design, ergonomics, and architecture, where statistical data about the distribution of body dimensions in the population are used to optimize products.

However, changes in life styles, nutrition and ethnic composition of populations lead to changes in the distribution of body dimensions (e.g., the obesity epidemic), and require regular updating of anthropometric data collections.

Ok, that's all I have for you today, and if you read this far give yourself a Gold Star for your geekness.