The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
Interpretation
Life is filled with unlikely events that occur on a grand scale.
Richard Dawkins suggests that life, in its complexity and diversity, arises from a series of statistically improbable events that happen extensively in the universe. This perspective underscores the extraordinary nature of life and the myriad of conditions that had to align for it to exist, prompting reflection on the randomness and chance inherent in biological evolution and existence as a whole.
In practice
During a science lecture about evolution, to emphasize the unlikely nature of life.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
So, he reasoned, if you can identify the sources of a government's power - people working in civil service, police and judges, even the army - then you know what a dictatorship depends on for its existence.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.
Nuclear disarmament is one of the greatest legacies we can pass on to future generations.
A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
Is it not strange, that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies!
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