I once saw a man wearing a t-shirt with a picture of several sperm on it, saying something like, "We beat the odds out of two million sperm. We're all winners."
And that, I think, is very true. Imagine (please don't throw up your dinner): if your sperm hadn't been the fastest, or your parents hadn't had sex at that particular moment, or had done it in a different position, or had used contraception, or had been thinking about something they found less or more sexy, or your mother had been lying a different way afterwards, you might not exist right now. And the same goes for your grandparents, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents...
It's not a savoury thought (or a sweet one), but you and I really are the product of ideal circumstances merging to bring us into existence. So however much we might feel like losers sometimes, just remember: we won.
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And on that optimistic note, I'm off to bed. Night night.
But each sperm wouldn't result in a wildly different person, so it's a slightly misleading analogy. If the runner-up had triumphed instead in your personal egg and sperm race, you wouldn't now be sitting there with ginger hair and freckles texting your mates with LOLs and smileys. You'd still be 'you', would you not? Actually, I'm not sure, but I was too scared to Google 'sperm'.
You make an interesting point though, and in spite of what I've said the odds against our existence are incredibly small. A 10p bet would return more money than exists in the world.
I would imagine you would end up like your brother or sister.... I have no idea how genetics works. This reminds me of the movie sliding doors, just how different would your life be if you made a tiny change to your past.
Phil: Hope you slept well, and didn't dream of parental conjugal rites.
Graham: I think that each sperm would indeed result in a different person, because they're all carrying different genes. You only get one gene for everything (eye colour, hair colour) from each of your parents, so there has to be some variation in each sperm.
Josh: But in Sliding Doors, she ended up in exactly the same place! I know what you mean though. Not sure you would end up like your brother or sister - Ias above, I think every sperm is different (and sacred)...
I'd say environment has far more impact than genes. An Ariane with green eyes instead of brown (or whatever colour they are) born into the same family, at the exact same time, would be pretty much identical. Unless your parents have a pathological hatred of green eyed babies, that is.
I'd go even further and say that environment (by which I mean all that is external) almost solely shapes who we are and what we do, to the point of questioning whether there is such a thing as free will.
This one had me in stitches.
I thought that at the end of Sliding Doors she used a different line in the lift? So it suggests that different things did happen?
"I think that each sperm would indeed result in a different person, because they're all carrying different genes. You only get one gene for everything (eye colour, hair colour) from each of your parents, so there has to be some variation in each sperm."
There's a great bit in Red Dwarf (God, talking about Red Dwarf on the internet, I'm such a nerd) where Lister meets an alternate him:
"We were shot from the same gun. It's just that one did breaststroke and the other crawl."
This one's to MarkC:
It's been shown in both humans and animals, time and time again, in countless pieces of biological AND psychological research, that environment and genetics play more or less a 50-50 role in outcome.
I think what Ariane is getting at here is that YOU would not exist if something different had happened. Another child may have been born, but it wouldn't have been YOU.
The very fact that YOU were born, makes you a winner.
So you mean I'd have been a different monkey? Maybe not as hairy?
*shudders*
That well-known genius and philanderer Richard Feynman used to illustrate physics lectures with the observation "The strangest thing happened to me on the way to work this morning. I was coming into the office car park and the car in front of me had the registration P123IQ. Imagine, of all the plates out there, the car in front of me had that one".
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