Richard Dawkins: We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

I don't think Newton would have attributed his success entirely to his DNA: <i>If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.</i>

Richard Dawkins' faithful optimism has always bothered me. Even if our species is so special, how does that make us, the individuals, lucky? What good does it do us?<p>Jim Crawford says it better than I: <a href="http://antinatalism.blogspot.com/2008/02/richard-dawkins-blindspot.html" rel="nofollow">http://antinatalism.blogspot.com/2008/02/richard-dawkins-bli...</a> and so does David Benatar: <a href="http://vorosh.blogspot.com/2008/03/optimism-delusion.html" rel="nofollow">http://vorosh.blogspot.com/2008/03/optimism-delusion.html</a>

There's no rule that says two people can't, by simple coincidence, have exactly the same DNA, so the amount of unlucky people is actually infinite.<p>Surprisingly meaningless statement from such a smart guy.

Of all the Dawkins quotes, this one strikes me as weak.

Out of all the possible combinations of human DNA, I wonder what the "perfect" human individual would look like.<p>He or she is hiding there, somewhere, in the probability space of all possible combinations.<p>Must be lonely.

Lets do the math: how many women ever existed? How many years did they were fertile? Then we know the number of ovum/eggs and so: the max number of humans that could have ever been. Right?