The case of genetic lottery: Why no one is better than anyone else

If you are an admirer of Zack Snyder like me, you would have probably seen/heard this monolouge by Dr.Manhattan from the movie Watchmen : “Thermodynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive, meeting, siring this precise son, that exact daughter…… and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away.”

No matter how cheesy that may sound, that is the absolute truth. Everyone is special in their own way. No one is better than anyone else as a person.

created: Krish 17/09/2013

The reason we can’t claim someone is better or worse then someone else is because we would need to be able to create a rating system to compare people with. Any attempt to do so would be extremely arbitrary because there is no absolute way to determine three things:

1) What qualities (of the billions abstract qualities of a human being there are) are ranked in what order?

2) Within each abstract quality there is no way to absolutely formulate exactly how many points a person should get for each quality at any given time.

3) What time frame do we globally rate that person given that people are changing all the time.

Sure we know that some people are not equal in many specific ways, like intelligence and ability to make a lot of money, but these specific inequalities do not allow you to conclude that a person is better or worse as a person than another.

Our genetic code and our learned experiences (how our parents and friends treat us and what our schools are like) are conditions we inherit and we have no choice. These conditions determine how we think, feel and behave. Anyone who thinks we can simply fix all our adversities equally and without help is either stupid, obtuse or ignorant.

How do we absolutely know where love (giving and receiving) is on the human quality list? What about integrity, honesty, sense of humor, intelligence, honor, beauty, charm, thrift, creativity, imagination, ethics, social skills, various physical and mental abilities… the list goes on. How do we know the ranking order of all these qualities? Well we don’t. Our qualities are just too bulkanised.

And even if we could judge what each abstract quality is worth, how are we going to figure out just how much of that quality a person has at any given time? What scientific method can we all agree on? How would we un-arbitrarily decide even that? In addition to that people are changing all the time…. No person does the same thing or behaves the same on different days. So for how long do we rate that person with our arbitrary rating?

The case of genetic lottery: Why no one is better than anyone else

Share your comments and feedback Cancel reply