I will now use mathematics to prove to the reader that they, alongside everyone else who roams this Earth, are a living, breathing miracle.
To begin with, I will pose the following question: how many generations preceded you, the reader? From the beginnings of life on this planet until now, how many ancestors do you truly have?
Even the most conservative of estimates would place that number in the thousands, with the evolutionarily derived value being many orders of magnitude greater still. Every single one of those generations was born, lived, and died, but not before procreating and having offspring.
To those of you out there who found a significant other and started a family: how difficult was it? My guess is that it took most of you decades of continuous investments of time, energy, and resources, pouring even your very soul into the entire effort.
In other words: continuing the cycle of life is not, nor has it ever been, a trivial task. And that is the master of understatements. To this day, there are hundreds of millions of people who either never had children, or failed as parents, and whose deaths forever severed that precarious link.
But what does this have to do with miracles? Well, to make a long story short, a miracle is defined as any event which had an infinitesimal likelihood of occurrence.
Perhaps you see where I'm going. If statistically there is a certain likelihood per generation of an individual's failure to conceive, bear, and raise progeny, then over the course of hundreds, thousands, and millions of generations, the statistical prospects of having been part of such an unbroken ancestry precipitously drop, with each subsequent generation exponentially increasing the likelihood of the lineage's termination, until the demise of a bloodline becomes for all intents and purposes a statistical inevitability.
And yet, here we are. Billions of years and millions of generations later, we still exist, despite the odds. And if that isn't a miracle, then I know not what is.
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