Attractive Enough to Find a Mate

Attractive Enough to Find a Mate
"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely -​ make that miraculously - ​fortunate in your personal ancestry.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-​eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-​in you."
Bill Bryson

I am currently both re-reading this fine book and listening to its audiobook version (while walking in the woods of my previous post) and stumbled on that same exquisite and dense passage in the introduction which I just had to share with you.
#ZelidarNature  
http://books.google.ch/books/about/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything.html?id=_CWlKRYLbIwC&redir_esc=y