Lucky to be alive

Ah, one more thing I meant to catch up on.

It was Richard Dawkins's birthday yesterday, and I wanted to take the opportunity to note that, along with some heartfelt gratitude for his work.

The Selfish Gene is one of those relatively few books that I can describe as genuinely 'life changing'. The God Delusion, which I just read and have been meaning to comment on (someday...) didn't alter any views, but I could still call it 'life affirming'. The essays in A Devil's Chaplain not only had me riveted, but stand as prime examples of all that an 'essay' can be. The Extended Phenotype, though somewhat harder going, has certainly influenced my thinking on a number of things.

For all these books, for those I've yet to get to (a handsome, illustrated edition of The Ancestor's Tale is on my shelf, awaiting a time when I can give it full attention), and for sharing his wisdom so eloquently, Obscene Desserts sends sincere birthday wishes.

I thought I would post an excerpt of my favourite piece of Dawkins's prose. I see that it's actually part of something that the man himself has suggested to be read at his funeral. That's entirely appropriate, of course, as its an enormously thoughtful meditation the sorrow of death.

It is also, however, a moving statement about the joy of life, along with being a statement of the vast improbabilities that each of us overcomes in being able to enjoy it and a reminder--now that we're here--not to waste it.

It is, thus, perfect for birthdays as well.

And it is in that sense, that I quote it here.

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.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century.' The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century's being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

Indeed.

Happy Birthday!