So, you are the product of your parents' genetic material
Probably not something you particularly like to think about, but you grew out of the combination of your father's spermatozoon and your mother's ovum.

Note that I used the singular in both cases: that ovum was one of maybe 500 that your mother would mature and release during her lifetime, and then, if you'll excuse me for being graphic, your father spaffed somewhere in the region of 80 million sperm into your mother to go and seek out that one particular ovum. If they'd done the deed a couple of weeks earlier or later, or if a different sperm had swum a bit faster, you could have been a very different person from the one you are now.

Your parents met through a series of fortunate coincidences (fortunate for you, anyway). Maybe they were at college or university together, maybe they were colleagues, maybe they met through mutual friends. Depending on how you define "meeting people," and, I suppose, how gregarious you are, various estimates suggest you'll meet between 100,000 and 9,000,000 people in the course of your life. So it may not be such a massive coincidence that your parents met in the first place - but what are the chances that, out of all the people they've met in their lives, they should meet under such circumstances that they were able to get to know each other well enough to get jiggy with it?

Extrapolate this one to their parents, and their parents' parents, and so on ad infinitum/absurdum/nauseam (delete depending on how bored you are reading this), and these probabilities start to get fantastically small. And let's not forget that your grandparents and great-grandparents were lucky enough to survive through world wars. Hell, if your ancestors are predominantly British, there's a good chance one of your male ancestors had to survive the Battle of Hastings to enable your existence.

I mean, if you take it back far enough, isn't it remarkable enough that our species appeared in the first place? There are thought to have been quite a lot of proto-human species that preceded us - how come we got so lucky and the others all died out? There seems to be increasing evidence that we co-existed for a long time with Homo neanderthalis - "Neanderthal man" - before we dominated and they went extinct. Did our ancestors drive this stronger, hardier rival species to extinction, or did we just get really, really lucky with the environments we were both trying to thrive in?

We are, of course, living in what some call The Age of the Mammal, (or Cenozoic for the geologists) which has lasted for a good 65 million years. (Oh, but the first human-like ancestors only appeared about 5 million years ago.) Before that, the planet was dominated for a couple of hundred million years by gargantuan, upright-walking reptiles. Some small mammal had to evade velociraptors long enough to give birth to your next ancestor down the line. And that one's descendents would eventually have had to persevere through a massive extinction, when the planet tried to kill off life once again.

There are many more steps of life we have to trawl through, but let's skip straight back to the primordial soup...aren't we lucky that a particular combination of molecules was able to come together in such a way as to replicate itself? And to keep replicating itself? Aren't we lucky that the prevailing conditions allowed this to happen? Come to think of it, aren't we bloody lucky that of the various swirling masses of dust and gas blown out from the formation of our Sun, one spun down into a neat little ball which, fortunately, had a ferrous core whose magnetic field shielded its surface from most of the crap constantly blasting out of said Sun, and which developed conditions that would enable a self-replicating molecule to develop in the first place?

Feeling small yet?
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 8:51, 6 replies)

.
Cool post bro.
(username failed moderation, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:01, closed)

No.
Try harder.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:03, closed)

Ignore ^ him
Yes we are all part of the evolutionary process.
*squeeee*
To think that you, me, Shambles and AB share 'some' genes.
WOW!
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:07, closed)

It's amazing just how many genes we do share with them
And how many of these genes we also share with the last tomato you ate.
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:12, closed)

Scary thing is
we share similar genetic material with Simon Cowell too.
Dwell on that as you shit out last nights vindaloo.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:38, closed)

I am frequently reminded of Simon Cowell when I shit out the previous night's vindaloo

(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:39, closed)

*puts on stilts and stands next to Shambles*
This working any better?
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:10, closed)

Well at least you can look me in the eye.

( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:59, closed)

You
are a dog amongst men.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Fri 13 Jan 2012, 10:06, closed)

tl;dc

( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:11, closed)

My mind is BLOWN.

(Spleep Shit, or get off the internet., Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:12, closed)

Alright, alright, I get the message.
I realise it's not a particularly original thought - in fact it's quite a hackneyed one by now - but I still think it's quite interesting to think about. Maybe I just got a bit sentimental watching all that Frozen Planet at the end of last year.
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 9:39, closed)

All that effort
just to produce me.

I'm awesome
(cs1ca, Fri 13 Jan 2012, 15:30, closed)