I recently listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme that suggested that there is an inherent chirality in the universe. Cite
One of the upshots of this is that if your right testicle hangs down further than your left then there is a good chance that your heart is on the right rather than the left side of your chest cavity.
I checked and unfortunately for me, my right testicle is lower than my left. Does anyone know how to check which side of my chest my heart is without a stethoscope? Also what is the statistical chance of this occuring if true? It sounds like rubbish to me, but I’m not knowledgeable in biology so it could be true. I have had my blood pressure taken on a number of occasions, surely the Doctor or nurse doing this would have noticed if my heart position were reversed.
Having the heart onthe right side (dextrocardia) or all the organs flipped left to right (situs inversus) is pretty uncommon. Few people with a lower right testicle would have these conditions. The right testicle connects with the inferior vena cava, the main vein carrying blood back to the heart, at a different level from the left testicle, which is connected to the renal vein (via the testicular vein). Differences in testicular level are due to the angle and level at which these different veins join the testicular blood supply.
Having a lower right testicle is most likely due to your particular blood supply (you’d be surprised how much they vary from person to person). There probably is nothing wrong – if there was, varicocole, hernia and testicular cancer are all more common than dextrocardia.
My right testicle hangs lower than the left as well, however, I’m sure my heart is on the left. I never knew about the right/left hanging issue and am now more curious.
In most guys, the left nut hangs down lower, and in a person with situs inversus, I presume the opposite would be true. But reversed testicles is much more common than full situs inversus.
Meanwhile, the chirality of the human body is completely unrelated to the chirality of the laws of physics. The chirality of organisms results from the chirality of the chemicals we’re made from, and those are just an artifact of the fluke which lead to life developing on the planet. Mirror-imaged versions of many organic chemicals have been produced in the lab, and they behave just like their normal versions. Life could have just as easily developed from right-handed molecules as from left-handed ones; it was a coin toss which one ended up winning.
There is actually an asymmetry in the fundamental laws of physics, but it only manifests at the subatomic level, and is both very small and very subtle. No detectable effect has ever been measured on the structure or function of molecules due to this asymmetry.
