4 ms·
Billions of years of conflict and selection lead to you. Anyone alive today is the product of a crazy amount of competition over time. That is a pretty impress
by _jal 4y ago
Billions of years of conflict and selection lead to you. Anyone alive today is the product of a crazy amount of competition over time.
That is a pretty impressive lineage, no matter who you are. I know why people see a direct line to this or that ancient tyrant as special, but it is a ridiculously fine distinction, comparatively.
- arethuza 4y ago"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead." Cryptonomicon Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!
- simonh 4y agoMy daughter once said she wasn't sure if she wanted to have kids. I told her she's the end result of an unbroken chain of 4 billion years of successful reproduction, with zero failures, and it would be a shame to break it now. No pressure.
- havelhovel 4y agoGenerally speaking, that chain depended on each generation producing more than one offspring to avoid the risk you’ve described.
- anotherman554 4y agoIt's also true of the ants you step on when you walk outside. It isn't actually worth celebrating.
- actionfromafar 4y agoIt matters to them?
- jmmcd 4y agoMost of those ants are workers, so already evolutionary dead-ends!