IT JUST WORKS

Finding Your Roots, is a television program hosted by Prof. Henry Louis Gates. His guests are usually famous or celebrity and he helps them track down their ancestry through genealogical research and DNA matching. I watched the other night as retired Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter discovered his great-great grandfather was a southern slave owner his GG grandmother was a teenage slave. The origin of his family name, on the African American side came from a rich white man. Master Jeter knew the baby was his and after the Civil War, he favored him with privileges and benefits that were unavailable to other former slaves. The patient, relentless research and running down loose ends was better than a movie mystery. 

Gates’ next guest was Rebecca Lobo, former All American basketball player and WNBA star who is now a sportscaster. Her roots went to Spain but she had no idea of any details. Gates found a photo of her great-great grand parents, taken in Morocco in the late 1800’s. They had to flee Spain after a failed revolt, then had to flee Morocco. They booked passage on a ship for Argentina but they arrived late and missed it. Another ship was leaving the next day and they were able to get on board. Not until days later, they discovered the ship was not bound for Argentina but for New York. As Gates and Lobo shared the information there came a point where her body language and expression registered a revelation. If her great-great grandparents had arrived on time, she, Rebecca Lobo would have never been born. Their descendants would have been Argentines, not Americans. Her father would have never found her mother as he would not have been born either. 

If you apply that principle back in time, generation after generation, the fact that our parents found each other at all is mind boggling; their parents before them and theirs before them. That given, you and I, all of us had to be conceived at one particular point in time. On my mother’s side, the egg cell I came from was only available during that particular menstrual cycler. Any other month, a different egg and it wouldn’t be me; the offspring would have been somebody else. The genetic makeup of a particular egg cell comes from the same source as every other egg cell from that woman but none of them will share the same fingerprint. Gene combinations occur in random fashion; remember Mendel’s Punnet Square from biology class? If you have four beans in your pocket, each a different color and you pull out two beans, how many different color combinations are possible - (6). In an egg and a sperm there are thousands of different gene possibilities; that’s why we’re all so different. Every month it’s a similar set but never the same. If that’s not enough, consider the sperm source. Think of it as a horse race with millions of horses, over a course that takes hours to complete. The first sperm to penetrate the egg triggers a reaction that rejects all other sperm. Only one sperm expresses its gene combinations with the egg and they both follow the same random method of selection. It gets even more twisted. Not all sperm have an equal, even chance of being the chosen one. They are produced by the millions in a constant flow, with a shelf life. At any given time, minute to minute, there are only a few thousand sperm that actually have a chance and they are moving along like millions of children playing musical chairs with only one chair. When the music stops, only a few are standing next of the empty chair and they are the few who actually compete for the prize. Maturity and place in line are critical. All the others run out of energy and drop out of the race or arrive too soon or too late. The fact that it takes two DNA packages to make a human is complicated by two different windows of opportunity; one that spans a few hours every 28 days while the other opens and closes, minute to minute, non stop, all the time. All this high drama and they just thought they were having fun. 

So not only couldn’t you have been born to anybody else, but you had to be conceived within a narrow window, of minutes or maybe an hour for you to be you, the you-you see in the mirror and not a different child by the same parents. Gibran said that children are simply life’s longing for itself. Nature does’t have a plan, it just works. That’s what Rebecca Lobo realized with Louis Gates. I know the feeling, had that Ah-Ha experience in grad school and I’ve never gotten over it. The odds against me being born were astronomical but that was before my ancestors found each other, before my parents found each other, before the right egg and sperm cells found each other and against the odds, I was born. Try to imagine all the children who were never conceived. I think about that kind of stuff.