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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

Billions of years of conflict and selection lead to you. Anyone alive today is the product of a crazy amount of competition over time.

That is a pretty impressive lineage, no matter who you are. I know why people see a direct line to this or that ancient tyrant as special, but it is a ridiculously fine distinction, comparatively.

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"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."

Cryptonomicon

Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!

Is your username a cryptonomicon reference too?

Well spotted :-)

My daughter once said she wasn't sure if she wanted to have kids. I told her she's the end result of an unbroken chain of 4 billion years of successful reproduction, with zero failures, and it would be a shame to break it now. No pressure.

Generally speaking, that chain depended on each generation producing more than one offspring to avoid the risk you’ve described.

It's also true of the ants you step on when you walk outside. It isn't actually worth celebrating.

Most of those ants are workers, so already evolutionary dead-ends!

It matters to them?

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