YOU may have at one time or another referred to someone you regard highly as one in a million. Perhaps, you may also have ascribed such a state of uniqueness to yourself - setting aside for just one moment your personal outlook of humility. However, such hubris is actually selling yourself short because you and everyone else for that matter is really one in 70 trillion. Considering that today's world population is just over 7 billion, it would take ten thousand times the number of people today before the likelihood that there is another one exactly like you. In other words it is an outright impossibility. YOU are YOU, and only YOU, and there could never be another one like YOU.
It might seem melodramatic to think in those terms but someone actually did the math. I just finished reading Sean B. Carroll's book, "A Series of Fortunate Events". In it the author prefaced with what we are already familiar with. It is that we inherit half of our chromosomes from Mom and Dad, as they did from their own parents, ad infinitum backwards in time, if you will. We can surmise all the way to when the first chain of cell divisions occurred when life begun but we will not go that far.
We will skip the detailed processes of how 23 chromosomes from each of our parents combine and recombine. We will not go through the math either but suffice it to say, if I may condense the thought processes behind the calculation, that since the "number of possible combinations of 23 chromosomes" from one parent to you is 8,388,608 and another 8,388,608 from the other, then 8,388,608 X 8,388,608 = 70,368,744,177,664 "different babies" as potentially probable outcomes. And the odds would be the same even among twins and children from multiple births (triplets, etc.).
As phenomenally mind boggling those numbers are, there is something a lot more incredible. The conception of you and the path that it took the microorganism from whence you started to its survival in the womb for roughly nine months up to the moment of birth and henceforth from then to where you are now, was and still is fraught with all kinds of danger and assault from untold conditions from within, from outside, from other organisms, even from your own cells, or from any kind of imbalances in your physiological system. Even as you read this the assault on your system is constantly being waged between your body's defenses and the "bad" elements - living and inanimate - from everywhere to cause harm to your existence.
Long before we even consider the combination and recombination of the chromosomes from our parents, the path to their pairing is comparable to an epic journey.
Epic indeed if we consider that in human scale the journey would be comparable to a horde of up to 150 million swimmers crossing the Atlantic Ocean from London to New York. Only a few thousand will survive the crossing to possibly get a glimpse of the tip of the Statue of Liberty's torch from over the horizon. All will perish before reaching the U.S. international territorial waters except for maybe a hundred or so that will make it to the New York Harbor. Out of these ultra-Olympic-caliber swimmers, only one will be allowed to touch land and entry into Manhattan. At that precise moment all the rest of the swimmers will be left to tread water where their journey ends into oblivion. Only one "lucky" swimmer survived.
You might think that is a harsh melodrama but that is actually putting it lightly. The survival and successful entry of that lone swimmer is by all definition a miracle. And it doesn't end there because the next nine months will be just as unforgiving for the new organism before it can immerge to meet more challenges. Let us not forget that on the first day of the nine months a mere molecule was created viewable only through a microscope.
Even more miraculous is the fact that in that molecule was contained the entire information, the complete blueprint, needed to fashion that organism into a unique individual that is YOU. A one in 70 trillion miracle.
Everyone who is born to take that first gasp of outside air has already gone through the first set of hurdles for nine months that were no less challenging or unforgiving compared to what awaited you to make it through your first helpless year. You will remain dependently helpless except for the loving care of a mother and from everyone around to help bring you up. Each year that you make it through, birthday after birthday, to where you are today, whether you are seventeen, twenty one, forty seven or seventy, was and still is a yearly miracle.
Your development from a mere fertilized egg, the efforts it took to make it through the Fallopian tube to find a safe haven at a tiny spot along the wall of your mother's uterus was itself a Herculean task. That fertilized egg was unaided and on its own with nothing but a seemingly unconscious will to survive every moment, helped by nothing more than what was printed out of a microscopic parchment co-written by the combined efforts of 46 nearly invisible chromosomes.
Today, whatever your age is, you got up this morning oblivious to what your body's defenses must put up with to ward off every threat from all kinds of bad elements that enter your body with every gulp of air you take, or through countless points through your skin, your eyes and ears, and at every morsel of food or drink you consume.
The struggle continues. Living, or to be alive is a daily calendar of warfare between your body's defenses against anything and everything that will cause you to be ill or suffering, or worse. Worse is when some of these bad actors cause your own cells to stage a coup d'état against your other cells - a self inflicting treason that is cancer.
However, the miracle continues. From the moment you were made YOU, to the moment you woke up this morning, the number of miracles seem endless and enduring.
I mentioned reading Sean B. Carroll's book. He is not to be mistaken for the other Sean Carroll (sans the middle initial), a theoretical physicist, who is also a prolific author and science lecturer. After reading Sean B's book I do have one slight although profound disagreement with his premise. He believes that the making of you and all living things are merely fortunate events and product of pure chance. That lone swimmer that made it to fertilize the egg, the survival of the egg, its growth and ultimately its birth and growth to become you were all from random assignments of luck and happenstance.
I believe otherwise. Firmly. Look around you. Does it look like everything you see came about by chance. Obviously, or so it seems, you will find many examples of randomness all over. Now, ask yourself, "Are they really?" That will be for another musing. I think.
I leave you with something about whether life is particularly unique only to this part of the world or is the universe teeming with life of diverse make up and origin? That will be for another mental provocation.
Meanwhile, below is a quote from a scientist on SETI - the well funded organization that translates to "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
"Despite all our technological advancements and scientific prowess, we haven't yet found any evidence of life beyond Earth, let alone signs of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations resembling our own, human breed of intelligent life".
Do you feel lucky or were you a result of an incredible number of miracles?
No comments:
Post a Comment