Saturday, October 19, 2013

Revelation on a football saturday evening: Lucky to be alive!

Saturday evening.

I finished the leftover home-cooked food, loaded up and ran the dishwasher, and enjoyed a hot shower.  There was nothing left to do but to settle in front of the television.

I switched it on.  

I channel-surfed past the football games and ended up at C-Span's BookTv--it was a few minutes into the After Words program with Richard Dawkins.

Who would want to miss watching an interview with Richard Dawkins.  And watch football instead?  Not me. No, sir!

Dawkins was being interviewed about his latest book, which is a memoir, part one.  Even normally, he is a good storyteller, and in this he was even more relaxed.  The ground that was covered was not anything new--from life and science, to atheism, to justice.  And, of course, about meme.

Dawkins' points were yet again a reminder on how lucky we are to be alive, given the randomness of it all.  (For you lazy people, I have clipped that segment here from the program that is available in its full length.)

He refers to how even a sneeze could have resulted in a different world history sans Hitler.  And uses sneeze as that metaphor so much that I wondered why he didn't quote Martin Luther King, Jr. who talked about the sneeze as well. In the powerful "mountain top" speech the day before he was assassinated, King talks about getting a letter from a young girl, a white girl, who wrote to him after he survived the stabbing by a crazy woman.  Referring to the NY Times report that King could have died if he had even sneezed, the girl wrote to him that she was happy that King didn't sneeze.

So, yes, a sneeze is all that matters, metaphorically and literally sometimes.

When discussing the remarkable odds against which we have come to exist, Dawkins recited that old Aldous Huxley poem.  The genius and polymath that he is, Dawkins has it all in his memory.  A lesser mortal that I am, I later googled for it:
A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.
It was the first of the million million to reach the egg and won the race.  Who knows how I would have turned out if it had been one of the others, eh!  

Thus we are born. Out of randomness. We evolved out of random events.  Life itself evolved in a random manner.  

Who better than Monty Python to put this all in perspective ;)

4 comments:

Ramesh said...

Ahh - the glory of randomness. Of course, the very randomness makes sure that you would exist. Well, if not you, maybe Prof Phe or Prof Bhe or whatever ... But one of you has to exist, because randomness decrees it so. That's the charm of probability isn't it. The odds of you winning the Powerball is one in many millions and yet somebody has to win the Powerball.

Glad to hear that the leftovers were finally finished !! And you went into all this musing instead of watching a game of football ????? You sure are a strange type :)!! But then, on second thoughts, I can excuse you - for it was "football" of the variety where the foot doesn't touch the ball and the hulks are dressed in tight pants :):)

Sriram Khé said...

But, dammit, why can't I be that guy who wins the Powerball!!!!
I suppose one has to first buy a ticket .... hehehe ;)

Yep, the men-in-tights for those who cannot sit through the men-in-tights of ballet ... muahahaha

Imagine if thanks to the randomness instead of me it were a uber-brahmin Venkataramasubramanian Iyer ;)

Ramesh said...

Namaskaram Venkatasubramaniam saar. Neinga Kshemama irukkela ? Sandhyavandanam Achcha ? Naalaikku Pournami illaya. Koyilukku archanai koduthuthirukkom. Nengalum Varella??

Hahahahahahahahaha

Sriram Khé said...

வேங்கடராமசுப்ரமனியன், பெரியவரே
"ராம" விட்டுட்டேளே--ச்சே!!!
muahahahahaha