Consider The Fact

Technical difficulties yesterday meant large portions of time hanging around waiting for natty little downloads to do their thing. On the plus side, this gave me chance to start reading one of my new books, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

I didn’t get too far with it, as it’s definitely a take your time to think about it sort of book, but I think I’m going to enjoy mulling it over.

I did like this little snippet from the introduction:

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.”

Go on, admit it – you feel pretty special now, don’t you?