Here's a short reprint of a lovely passage from Matt Haig's book, The Humans. My brother, Bill, turned me on to Matt Haig only recently. Now that I have activated my library card, I'm catching up on his books. For your consideration:
“I looked at Isobel and I saw a miracle. It was ridiculous,
I know. but a human, in its own small way, was a kind of miraculous
achievement, in mathematical terms.
For a start, it wasn’t very likely that Isobel’s mother and
father would have met. And even if they had met, the chances of their having a
baby would have been pretty slim, given the numerous agonies surrounding the
human dating process.
Her mother would have had about a hundred thousand eggs ovulating
inside her, and her father would have had five trillion sperm during that same
length of time. But even then, even that
one-in-five-hundred-million-million-million chance of existing was a terrible
understatement and did the coincidence of a human life nowhere near justice.
You see, when you looked at a human’s face, you had to
comprehend the luck that brought that person there. Isobel Martin had a total
of 150,000 generations before her, and that only includes the humans. That was
150,000 increasingly unlikely copulations resulting in increasingly unlikely
children. That was a one-in-quadrillion chance multiplied by another
quadrillion for every generation.
Or around twenty thousand times more than the number of the
atoms in the universe. But even that
was only the start of it, because humans had only been around for three million
Earth years, certainly a very short time compared to the three-and-a-half-billion
years since life first appeared on this planet.
Therefore, mathematically, rounding things up, there was no
chance at all that Isobel Martin could have existed. A zero in ten-to-the-power-of-forever
chance. And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by
it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big
thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither
could humans. So,if they believed in themselves—the logic must go—why not
believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?”
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