What Are the Odds?

It's a commonplace that every one of us is improbable and accidental -- a fluke of all flukes. The odds against you or me or any particular person being born, of coming into life, are infinitesimal -- a positron's dimension (if positrons have dimension) shy of nothing, of zero.

Why is any birth so unlikely?  To begin, while every sperm is sacred (as we're told on good authority), every sperm is also unique. There are 200 million or more of the little whipper-snappers in the normal ounce or so of human male ejaculate -- each one a quirky unique assemblage of genes. Both your and my individual existence depends on one particular sperm lashing itself into a lather to be the first to break the tape. If the sperm with your name on it had foundered, and the dark horse sperm in the next lane had penetrated the egg, you yourself wouldn't have been conceived, wouldn't have existed. An entirely other human being would have suckled at the breast, cried in the crib, perched in the high chair. If you're a boy, your "other" might have been a girl, and vice versa.

So we are all many-millions-to-one long shots. But multiply the odds against you yourself being welcomed to the world by the even more remote odds against the conceptions of your four grandparents. Your grandmas and grandpapas exist only because in each case two people out of all the potential great-grandparent-generation cohort on earth chanced to meet and find a particular opportunity on a particular day and particular spot of time to copulate so that those remote grandsires could launch their own flotilla of swimmers upriver. How many accidents had to occur to compile the particular DNA which comprises your own identity and individuality? 

Then we must add factors such as the strife and wars and migrations and diseases that united or separated our great-grandfolks and their great-great grandfolks and yea, even unto our Olduvai forebears and to the pliopithecoids who preceded them, and then back through the early mammals and to the dark backward and abysm of time. Gosh, it makes you wonder how anything at all ever happens to happen in this random chancy aleatory world -- and yet remarkable things (such as you and I being born) continue to occur. And a good thing, too.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

It makes a good lesson to teach college students that each one is an accident; there are always a few who insist that they were planned, but they have to be reminded that if one part of the mattress had been firmer or softer, if the temperature in the room had been a bit higher or lower, if the room had been a car, if the car had been a Ford, Benjie, not a Dodge, if someone had shifted just a tad, if a phone had started to ring, if any significant part of the love making had been even slightly altered, a different sperm would have fertilized that egg, and then 9 months later, when Suzie emerged from the womb, would the parents say, "But where is Arbutus?"