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We will be killed immediately, which enabled us lucky. Most people will never die, because they will never be born. Potential, I may have been in place, but in fact will never see the light of day than the Arab sand. Of course, those not born ghosts, including more than poet Keats, scientists than Newton. We know that this is possible because the group who allow us to the DNA, so that a large number exceeds the actual person. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinary, is here.           You: Conceiving the Inconceivable     To live at all is miracle enough   - Mervyn Peake The Glassblower (1950)       We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.   Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existence still had plenty of hurdles to leap. Most conceptuses end in early abortion before their mother even knew they were there, and we are all lucky not to have done so. Also, there is more to personal identity than genes, as identical twins (who separate after the moment of fertilization) show us.   Nevertheless, the instant at which a particular spermatozoon penetrated a particular egg was, in your private hindsight, a moment of dizzying singularity. It was then that the odds against your becoming a person dropped from astronomical to single figures.   The lottery starts before we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each was as improbable as your own. And so on back, through your four grandparents and eight great grandparents, back to where it doesn't bear thinking about. Desmond Morris opens his autobiography, Animal Days (1979), in characteristically arresting vein:   Napoleon started it all. If it weren't for him, I might not be sitting here now writing these words... for it was one of his cannonballs, fired in the Peninsular War, that shot off the arm of my great-great-grandfather, James Morris, and altered the whole course of my family history.   Morris tells how his ancestor's enforced change of career had various knock-on effects culminating in his own interest in natural history. But he really needn't have bothered. There's no 'might' about it. Of course he owes his very existence to Napoleon. So do I and so do you. Napoleon didn't have to shoot off James Morris' arm in order to affect something which changed something else which, after a long chain reaction, led to the consequence that one of your would-be ancestors failed to be your would-be ancestor and become somebody else's instead. I'm not talking about 'chaos theory’, or equally trendy 'complexity theory', but just about the ordinary statistics of causation. The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly tenuous.         — Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder                       Indexes/17