The Unlikeliness of You
Taking the idea of the Family tree to the existential level. For any given person alive today or ever, it took thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people across human history for anyone one of us to exist, be alive now. This Blood Tree is far more extensive than the family tree, it’s a thought experiment on how many people across time procreating and reproducing for any individual to be here now.
In theory going back 20 generations or 400-500 years, an individual may have up 1 million slots in their lineage, another 40 generations, roughly 1000 years or so that’s 1 trillion. But lineages in practice don’t work like that, they collapse as individuals intermarry, so all peoples share many ancestors multiple times. Genetics says that if we go back far enough the all living people today are related many times over.
A family tree is narrow, personal, and easy to chart. It’s not Life that’s precious but the individual. The family is merely our own way of making the randomness of life more deliberate and predictable. What isn’t deliberate, what cannot be controlled is the mix itself; we can know who made us, our parents and grand parents, but we can never know who we’re made of. Obviously this means there is no such things as a “pure blood.” Purity only comes about when someone makes a deliberate choice about their bloodline’s reproduction.
The family is a strategy, not essence. It is a survival structure, a way to safeguard the individual and extend the line. It’s a deliberate social and biological construct but doesn’t define who we are. It just gives us a chance to persist. The individual is an unfathomably complex mosaic of countless lineages. The blood tree crosses borders, eras, race, and countless forgotten or unknown lives. For any one of us our lineage is not a straight line but a tangled net connecting us all. Purity is an illusion, it only exists when we intervene to narrow the pool. When left to itself the flow of life is dynamic and hybrid, recombining and reweaving. Whatever is “pure” is never natural, but manufactured. We can know who conceived, birthed, and raised us but the deeper reality of what we’re made of is totally known. The individual is the cryqalization of history, all our ancestors, all the convergences of chance is unknowable and can never be fully mapped. The family is a visible history but the individual is a hidden history made flesh. It is identity versus origin.
Countless people had to survive wars, famine, accidents, illness, zig when a zag would have been fatal. Millions of fragile contingencies to account for so one day You or I could be here now. And that’s not including the gamut that we ran as sperm cells before our conception trying to be the “one” that makes it to the egg first. But reproduction is thee most common activity of biology, even without willful action it happens at the cellular level every second. Cells divide, bacteria swarm plants spread seeds, and animals reproduce. Under the right conditions or circumstances like proliferates automatically, it’s not an exceptional feat but a default activity. Life is not unique or rare but what is, is the individual; life may be common but the Individual is a miracle.
What is exceptional is the convergence of chances, timings, and ancestral pairings that make up You or I; of all the possible genetic shuffling that was and could be, here we are. One sequence created our unique consciousness, if even one ancestor had chosen differently or somehow been lost, we would not exist. Specificity is a miracle, life isn’t rare, but this life is. Life everywhere may be the rule but the self is an unrepeatable cosmic accident; something that could never happen again in the exact same way. There can never be another you. Even for identical twins, they each are their own unique being. Some philosophers say that, life is ordinary, but being (the conscious Self) is extraordinary. The myth of “purity” disappears in the face of real genealogical history. Life is common, but the emergence of any one individual is a probability defying miracle. Genetic recombination means our DNA is a patchwork of thousands of different lineages, making “pure blood” an impossible concept outside of contrived, isolated breeding. When traced far back, all living people descend from the same small set of ancestors who lived within the last several thousand years. Our most recent common ancestors.
