[ELI5] If any sperm would’ve gotten same upbringing and environment as we got then, why does fertilization of our own sperm is a miracle?

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like if my dad would’ve flushed me, and any other sperm had fertilized then the other sperm which was born would think like i do or it would think differently?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your personal traits rely on both your genetics (the specific egg & sperm that created you) and environment. A different sperm would change your genetics so you would think differently than you do now even with the exact same upbringing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It would be your fraternal twin. So, like you as much as your sibling would be. Miracle is one of those overused words. If it blows one’s sails to call it a miracle, ok I guess.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The term miracle is overused, often to mean a significantly unlikely event.

In the case of your birth, there is the likelihood that your mother survives to term (good chances in the Western World), the chances that you survive to term (about 88%), the chances that your father even put spunk into your mother (variable based on contraceptive method), and most importantly, the odds that the one sperm that creates you reaches the egg first, which are technically astronomical.

But what people forget to calculate is that for you to be here to ponder the question, the events could not have happened any differently.

If you miscarried, you would be dead. If a different sperm reached the egg, you would be a different person. It doesn’t matter how random or unlikely an event is, the fact is that it happened.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So I did the math regarding this a while ago. Of the 36,953 alleles your father possess you inhereted either 18,106 if genetically male, or 18,847 if genetically female, this is because the X chromosome contains 804 genes, while the Y chromosome contains only 63 genes. Now recombination isn’t entirely random, based on the location of the gene on a chromosome certain genes will almost always recombine together but I’m just going to use the simplest math I can to explain the point. This means that of the 18,043 genes that do not come from sex chromosomes, and therefore undergo recombination you have 2^18043 possible combinations. So that means that from the genetic material from your father you have 2^18044 possible combinations of genetic material. From your mother? That number actually goes up to 2^18847 because your mother has two X chromosomes that can recombine.

This means that the chance of your sperm that made you being present was only 4.10E-5420% the chance of the ovum that gave rise to you even making it to puberty much less being fertilized? 9.22E-5665%

Total chance of you existing? 3.78E-11088%