OK, with guitar in hand, let's straighten out my sleepy-eyed mis-statement this morning.
The bottom line of the major scale is that the scale can be seen as two symmetrical halves, with interval steps (in frets) of:
2 2 1 - slide up 2 - 2 2 1
The Dorian minor scale is also symmetrical:
2 1 2 - slide up 2 - 2 1 2
The natural minor scale is not symmetrical, it's
2 1 2 - slide up 2 - 1 2 2
Melodic minor is the minor bottom half, major top half:
2 1 2 - slide up 2 - 2 2 1
Harmonic minor is just weird
2 1 2 - slide up 2 - 1 3 1
So all minor scales share the bottom half pattern, and you basically have every combination of the upper notes. In fact, if you put together the Dorian+natural+melodic+harmonic, you'd have the lower half being the 2 1 2 pattern, and the upper half contains every chromatic step between the 5th and the octave. To some extent, in a minor key, those can all be valid.
You can also look at the natural minor a different way, which ends up being somewhat symmetrical. If instead of trying to split the scale into 2 halves, we think of it as:
2 - 1 2 - 2 - 1 2 - 2
It starts to feel symmetrical again! I always feel like there's a connection between music, music theory and numerology
There are endless patterns there, all depending on how you look at them.