In every generation, some of us have children. Others, for various reasons, don’t. (Historically, most women do, and most men don’t.)
In good times, it is relatively easy to bring offspring to adulthood, and populations swell. In hard times it can be very difficult indeed, and only a few manage. When times are bad enough, lineages fail, and entire species become extinct. This fate has befallen, to within a rounding-off error, every species that has ever existed. It almost happened to us too; the entire h. sapiens population is thought to have dwindled to only a few thousand individuals as recently as 75,000 years ago.
What this means, then, is that each of us — every living creature — stands at the end of an unbroken sequence of incalculably lucky winners. This winning streak extends back through all the centuries of recorded history, through hundreds of thousands of years of unremembered human experience, through millions of years of hominid ancestry, through the earliest, shrew-like primates, through synapsid reptiles — back, back through pre-reptilian amphibians, through lobe-finned fish, back through the earliest chordates, half a billion years ago — and on and on, in a continuous chain of life spanning more than three billion years. And at any time throughout those uncountable eons, that infinitely fragile linkage leading to you, or me, or the squirrel in my back yard, or a fly buzzing in a swamp in Cameroon, could have been broken — by a predator’s snap, a falling branch, a cold spell, a hot spell, a drought, a flood, a fire, a virus, hunger, thirst, a successful rival, a dagger, a bullet, or any other of the illimitably many ways there are, in a violent and uncaring world, to die childless. It would have been the easiest thing, indeed the likeliest thing, for that absurdly, impossibly extended thread to have been severed.
But it wasn’t. And here we are.
Think of that!
12 Comments
This sounds almost as if it references the “miracle speech” from the movie version of “Watchmen.” I haven’t read the original graphic novel in years, so I no longer remember Dr. Manhattan’s speech on the printed page, but I’m pretty sure the movie version is identical or nearly identical to Alan Moore’s text. Dr. Manhattan marvels that the astronomically low chances of the woman standing before him being who she is are as miraculous as a stochastic occurrence like air turning into gold. Here, I suppose, “miracle” is being used loosely to mean “very improbable, but still possible, event.”
More obliquely, your post also reminds me of Teela Brown from Larry Niven’s Ringworld: a human woman bred by an alien race to be lucky. Niven calls her trait “psychic luck” in the novel, and never quite makes it clear how, exactly, the circumstances of her birth contribute to her possessing this trait. Teela was the product of some sort of lottery system, but since each of us alive today is, in a sense, the astronomically improbable product of a cosmic lottery system, I’m not sure that the aliens actually added anything to Teela’s primordial improbability.
Hi Kevin,
I’ve never read Watchmen, but I almost did use the word “miraculous” in there somewhere.
I read Ringworld, though, many years ago, and now that you remind me I do recall Teela Brown’s being bred for luck.
I have a friend who named his daughter Teela after that character.
How did we all get here? Don’t over analyze it. We’re all here cuz we’re not all there.
“please, please, don’t get my mom started on the “from Ooze to Oliver” speech”! That Oliver son did extra chores FOREVER!
I am so glad you blog,
Jeanie
Thanks, Jeanie!
“From ooze to Oliver” — I like that.
From ooze to Oliver?
For some reason, I’m reminded of a would-be bank robber who went into a bank and handed the teller a note that read: “Give me all your money and don’t try anything funny. I’ve got an oozy.”
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
“And tell that teller over there to hand over Oliver cash.”
Also, there is some considerable (dry) humour to be had from reading reports of “an unbroken sequence of incalculably lucky winners” and “This winning streak extends back through all the centuries of recorded history” by writers (ahem!) who, were one to predict six winners in a row at a horse race, would automatically suspect some outside influence. Suggest such a possibility, I put it no higher, in this context and one can expect derision of the highest order. As one of Stoppard’s characters in “Shakespeare in Love” kept repeating endlessly, “It’s a mystery”.
Hi David,
I guess that “ahem” was directed my way, given my attitude toward claims of supernatural influences…
Bear in mind that you could easily produce, on demand, someone lucky enough to have called twenty-five coin-flips in a row: a national coin-flip-calling playoff would generate such an “unlikely” winner every time.
Likewise, if any living things persist at the end of three billion years of evolution, they are necessarily the “lucky” ones.
But now we’ve gone and taken all the fun out of the post…
“someone lucky enough to have called twenty-five coin-flips in a row”
Again, I return to my favourite modern playwright, Tom Stoppard, and the opening pages of his masterpiece “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in which the eponymous ‘heroes’ do very much better than that with an ‘honest’ coin continually coming down heads much more often than 25 times and is thus the cause of some typical Stoppardian wit and whimsical philosophising.
These ‘universal odds’ you mention, Malcolm, are part of the reason I remain firmly astride the fence of agnosticism, uncomfortable and faintly ridiculous though the posture is.
Well, 25 is about the best you could do in a medium-sized nation such as yours. If we got the whole world involved in our coin-flip contest, we could guarantee about 32 correct calls.
After that you’re on your own…
Ha! Kevin, I’m happy to see that you nailed exactly what I came in here to mention in the very first comment, as I too was reminded of Teela Brown the moment I read “the end of an unbroken sequence of incalculably lucky winners.” However, it’s unfortunate (pardon my wording) that this Ringworld concept will remain solely as that, and we all can’t enjoy a good day at the racetrack.