Eli5: Would any of the 250 million sperm I outraced into existence, have been, in any meaningful way different different than I turned out?

Question

We often hear the metaphor, “out of the millions of sperm, you won the race!” Or something along those lines. But since the sperm are caring copies of the same genetic material, wouldn’t any of them have turned out to be me?

(Excluding abiotic factors, of course)

In: Biology

Answer 1

Your father has 23 chromosomes that are half from your grandmother, half from your grandfather. when he made the sperm that made you each sperm got one half of each chromosome so there were 23 coin flips done to make the sperm that became you. So your dad is capable of making 8.4M different sperm. So in the total 250M 3% carried the same genetic information as you have now.