You – my fourth[i] miracle of life.
Meditation 2007:2 from the Capri Philosophical Park.
My beloved,
That you were a miracle my heart told me the first moment I saw you.
Had I been Paris and had four goddesses in front of me, I then said to myself, I wouldn’t have hesitated a second to give you the apple. In you all the best of the three others, and much more, was shining through.
So it was. And so it is. But it has taken me half a century to understand that you are not only one, but two miracles in one. The second is a bit more complicated and demands some figures. I wonder if anybody else ever tried to do this calculus?
I am thinking about your father, a warmly cultured and infinitely kind man. What was behind him?
Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, but six million years ago his forefathers were still brothers to the chimpanzees. Since we split from them, some 250,000 generations have passed, as I mentioned in an earlier meditation. Having calculated that, something truly scaring struck me: the possibility that you, my love, would never have been given life.
To check this, I turned to my friend, Stefan Arver, a leading Swedish expert in the field. He gave me a few, very round figures to play with. They may not fully correct, but the size of them is enough to drive home two conclusions.
Knowing how precarious all forms of life are, nature has given most of them a lot of “redundancy” when it comes to make children. That is, for instance, why we can eat a lot of good caviar in the better restaurants. The sturgeon pair needs only two surviving caviar sperms to reproduce themselves, but for that purpose nature has given it millions and millions of eggs and sperms.
In the same way, man has been given a great redundancy of sperms. Every day, yes, every day, he produces well over one hundred million of them. Which in a year gives, say, over 40 billion. And this he has done in some 20 years during his life from 15 to 35 years. Life wasn’t any longer than 35 years until rather recently. 40 billion times 250,000 makes 10,000,000 or ten million billion sperms, a number so high that we cannot grasp it.
Then, in a similar way I am thinking of your mother, a most beautiful, clever, pleasant and warm lady. Having been told that young girls, after half a century, often come to look like their mothers, I wanted you even more. Some small rationality entered the emotional storm.
But, to the same question: what was behind her?
It is somewhat easier to calculate that. Let’s say that a woman who lives to 35 years of age has about a dozen eggs, ripe for fertilization, per year for 20 years.
That gives us 240 eggs in one generation. And in the 250,000 generations of great great grandmothers behind your mother, they have jointly produced some 60 million such eggs.
Let us now say that in each generations some ten children were born, most of them to a very early death, but, anyway, they were born. This gives ten children per 250,000 generations or 2.5 million children born.
I am now coming close to two conclusions, explaining why you, my dear wife, are a miracle also in a second way.
Two and a half million in over ten million billion individual sperms is so little that it can hardly be counted. Start to count zeroes and you will find out! For every sperm that ever fertilized an egg millions of billions were lost!
Two and a half million fertilized eggs out of 60 million means at least 57 millions lost.
The chance that you, after 250,000 such generations is alive is so small that it asymptotically goes towards zero. That is my first conclusion. That you and I at all exist, is hardly credible.
When Stefan Arver started to think about all this, he even came to the conclusion that the chance that we exist is so small that we really do not, that our existence is but an illusion.
And, yet, we do live!
But why are you you? Why aren’t you somebody else?
If only one single sperm, other than the ones who did it, had penetrated one of the 250,000 eggs which are behind your mother, you would not be you. You would be a different person. And if only one single egg, other than the ones in this chain of 250,000 great great grandmothers, had come into your family, you would not have been the wonderful you. You would, again, have been somebody else.
Agapimo, this may not be a very romantic model for a love letter. And, in fact, what I am saying to you, every good man should say to his woman, and every good women to her man.
From the point of probability the existence of each one of us now existing human beings is a fabulous miracle. Which, whatever happens, should give us a deep almost religious reverence for that Nature which blindly has guided the flow of life in such a way that you and I now can have it, together!!!
Capri in May 2007.
Gunnar Adler-Karlsson
www.philosophicalpark.org
adler.karlsson@capri.it
[i] In earlier writings I have pointed to three other miracles of life. You can find them in my Capri Park book, the “Meditations upon Western Wisdom”. It is available directly from me or here on the web. They are the emergence of life, after ten billion years of nothing but death in our universe; the miracle of evolution, transforming the first bacteria into you and me; and the cultural miracle, permitting six and a half billion humans to live on a globe that only had food for some ten million living as hunters and gatherers. All three are wonderfully unlikely and surely deserve to be seen as true miracles of nature.