Humans tend to have two of many of their internal organs — two livers, two kidneys, two lungs, etc.
Humans even have two hemispheres in their brains.
This is based on the basic principle of bilateral symmetry that emerged a half-billion years ago that underlies the developmental blueprints of so many animals.
Not all animal species manifest bilateral symmetry.
Crabs, with their one big claw and the other tiny claw, are examples of bilateral asymmetry.
Starfish are examples of radial symmetry.
Indeed, even a bilaterally symmetric species like humans have only one stomach and one heart.
But bilateral symmetry is very common because it has its advantages.
One advantage is redundancy.
If one organ fails, there is a backup.
Redundancy is expensive and inconvenient.
Think about how lugging around a spare tire in a car can be a hassle.
Or, think about a military that seems to spend most of its time doing nothing.
The spare tire and a nation’s military can seem like an inefficient use of resources.
But there is a difference between efficiency — and the pursuit of greater efficiency is an imperative in normal periods of history — and survival in a future time of a crisis.
Redundancy is an insurance policy.
The fact that redundant systems are so common in the natural world points to the need for such inconvenient investments.
Aside from the redundancy of bilateral symmetry, there is a second issue with regard to dualities found in natural systems.
For example, the human brain often consist of dual systems.
However, these are complementary systems that work together, and are not examples of bilateral symmetry.
For example, regions of the brain devoted to math are distinct from areas dedicated to language.
These two systems do not work in tandem.
https://www.cifar.ca/cifarnews/2018/08/28/where-does-the-brain-do-math
“Where mathematical ability comes from is a long-standing question. Our research helps to show that advanced mathematical reasoning relies on dorsal parietal and frontal areas of the brain and totally spares brain regions involved in language skills,” Says Marie Amalric, a PhD student who co-authored the paper with Dehaene.
The same regions were used for all four domains of mathematics tested: analysis, topology, algebra and geometry.
The results suggest that ability in higher mathematics relies on the same basic circuits that everyone uses for our intuitions about space, time and number awareness. Although language processing may be used while learning mathematics, mathematical reasoning itself seems to happen in its own parts of the brain.
Within the regions of the brain dedicated to mathematical processing, there is a distinction between areas that focus on number tasks and areas devoted to calculation tasks.
Of course, these two types of areas work together in our processing of math problems.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929317300105
4. Conclusion
These meta-analyses investigate brain activity in children that underlies processing of number and calculation tasks. These are the first meta-analyses in children younger than 14 years distinguishing between number and calculation tasks. Based on these results we sketched a neuropsychological developmental model of mathematical cognition in stereotaxic-space. We find that mathematical performance in children emerges from known core-regions associated with number processing, such as parietal and frontal areas; but it also emerges from regions not previously recognized in a mental-arithmetic network, such as the insula, the claustrum, and the cingulate gyrus. The insula, in particular, may play a critical role in children’s mathematical calculation, because children need strong intrinsic motivation and affective goals to cause their effort in attention and complex processing. Future behavioural and neuroimaging work on children’s mathematical cognition should benefit from a refined topographical atlas of mathematical processes in healthy children.
Perhaps the logic of bilateral asymmetry and complimentary systems can be applied to national and international institutions.
Take, for example, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
They are sometimes described as having failed in much of their mission during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Much of the criticism of the WHO in particular takes the form of scapegoating by national leaders eager to distract the public from their own shortcomings during the crisis.
However, it does seem that the WHO tends to adopt the official perspective of powerful countries, even in matters unrelated to public health (e.g., the status of Taiwan).
To be fair, diplomacy is central to the WHO’s mission.
The WHO cannot function without the cooperation of governments.
Likewise, the CDC is somewhat discredited, especially because of its disingenuous policy on masks.
Only N95 respirators, which are in short supply, would adequately protect frontline healthcare workers.
In order to protect the supply of N95s, the CDC declared that masks in general were unnecessary.
Like university presidents, the WHO and the CDC are run by scientists and scholars who by necessity have pronounced political orientations and strong diplomatic skills.
However, it might be useful to create institutions parallel to the WHO and the CDC.
These new institutions would be strictly scientific and remain autonomous from government influence.
Perhaps universities at the national and international levels could create an independent network somewhat modeled on the internet.
There would be a ground-up, parallel and independent institution providing information and advice to the public distinct from the WHO and the CDC.
This way, for example, it would be more difficult for the national government to hijack critical information on a pandemic statistics.
