"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result in you."
I found this piece of text from the reading to be extremely interesting because i never really thought that if even one small thing had happneed to any member in my family tree then i would not have been born. The smallest of decisisons could have greatly altered my entire existance. Mother drinking while pregnant, the college my parents whent to, my grandparents and how they met, my great grandfather surviving world war 2, the list goes on from before then. Anything that could have gone wrong didn't go wrong and anything that could have altered me in any way didn't happen. Just the mere fact of it, blows me away.
Yeah, that's a great point Marcus, it made me think of that too. How if even one small seemingly unimportant thing hadn't happened in our ancestry we wouldn't be here. But I also think it's interesting to think about what if something had happened in our history and we weren't how we are now, but someone different. What would the differences be? Would there be similarities? It's so mind boggling! Haha, great quote you picked out from the reading.
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