'We are one' leaves out a lot of people

Say your father always caught the 7.45am tram. As he was rushing out the door his phone rang and he stopped to answer it. This caused him to miss his tram and he waited for the next one - the 8am. This was your mother’s regular tram. He sat opposite to her, and their eyes met. Let’s go back a bit.

A mate of your father was casually reading a newspaper when he saw an article on page five which made him think of your father and he spontaneously rang him. If the paper’s editor had put the article on page six, your father would have caught the 7.45am - and you would not be here. If the reader had been slowed down by an absorbing article on page four, you would not be here. If the reader took a minute longer under the shower before looking at the paper, you would not be here.

This analysis can progress forever. But as you regress from the event (which was the inspiration in the man’s head to phone), you are spreading out from the centre of a web of cause-and-effect with a near-infinite number of elements in it because no event stands in isolation of every other event. Returning to your hypothetical mother to bring home the point a bit more:

Why was the 8am her regular tram? We could regress back from that question with a never-ending series of questions. One could be; why was she even living in Melbourne?

Well, her dad once lived and worked in Adelaide, but one day he took a sickie and went to the races. He felt like having a pee and he was almost equidistant between two toilets. He took the one on the left which looked a little closer, and as he was entering, his boss was coming out. The next day he was summarily sacked. He then left for Melbourne to look for a job, and it was here that he settled down.

So, now your existence owes itself to position of a toilet at a racecourse in Adelaide! But if the man had one beer and not two, he would not have felt the need for a pee. Now your existence owes itself to a glass of beer! And, what of the second glass of beer the man’s boss drank which led him to the toilet? That also has to be part of the picture.

The lifeline of every person touches the lifelines of many others. Each one of those thousands touches the lifelines of thousands more to form a web the size of humanity itself. That revelation gives a whole new meaning to “We are one”.

A startling conclusion

It seems that the lifeline of every human on the planet can be traced back to the same woman. She is known as Mitochondrial Eve and she lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. Now comes the obvious deduction which, if not enough to knock your socks off, will at least startle you; if just one of the zillions of squillions of events from Mitochondrial Eve’s reproductive life to the instant of your conception were missing, you would not be here.

How about introducing your children to this web-over-time concept after your family gets through its puerile flag-waving and anthem-singing on Australia Day.