There's a near-zero chance you were ever born--Reprint from The Humans by Matt Haig

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?”

(p. 197-198, The Humans, by Matt Haig. Simon &Schuster, 2013)