The Selfish Gene

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here

Richard Dawkins reads from his book 'Unweaving the Rainbow'

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He was voted Britain's leading public intellectual by readers of Prospect magazine and was named one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" for 2007