New Year's Day, 2007

Dear Colleague:

    Who is the most successful man in the world? If success is measured by power and wealth in this life, and by the ability to pass one's genetic material to succeeding generations, then the answer has to be Genghis Khan (1162-1227), "Universal Ruler," whose empire, at its maximum extent, stretched from east China to the gate of Vienna, and whose chromosomes led an unprecedented career of amplification. Scientists have discovered that "some 16 million men living between Afghanistan and northeastern China—almost one in every 200 men alive—belong to a single patriarchal lineage," the source of which has to be Genghis Khan, for no other man has remotely his access to beautiful and willing women (Science, Vol. 299, 21 February 2003).

    This news makes me feel a little inadequate, for the world I possess is just a small condo and my genetic material stops with me. So, not surprisingly, I have come up with a different criterion of success—happiness. To have lived our allotted time happy, surely that is success. Was Genghis Khan happy? I don't know, but if with all his power and all his biological prowess, he felt somehow dissatisfied, as though life had not delivered all it could, then he was not happy and his life not a success. The happiness I have in mind derives from gratitude. Gratitude for what? At this time of the year, we are naturally grateful for family and friends, turkey dinners and the singing of carols. But it can and, in my opinion, should go deeper than that to—to what? To the sheer fact of existence. Everything that exists seems to me gratuitous—an accident. Our very universe—just one among many according to the latest theory—happens to favor nebulas and stars and life. But life is extremely rare in our universe. Complicated forms of life are rarer still. Even on the exceptionally favored planet earth, it took an unconscionably long time—3 billion years--for evolution to come up with some primitive multi-cellular organisms. No guarantee, is there? that the process of emergence will continue? None at all. Yet it did continue until, miraculously, dinosaurs appeared. A cosmic event—possibly meteors—then wiped out the dinosaurs. That event needn't have happened, but it did, a consequence of which was that the surviving organisms could radiate adaptively, a process that led to mammals and, in good time, to us.

    My own existence is, of course, a statistical fluke. Of the millions of spermatozoa that entered my mother's womb, one only succeeded in beating out all the others to fertilize the egg and produce yours truly. Can you blame me if I feel grateful for that little swimmer's prowess? You, dear friend, take me too much for granted. You don't seem to realize that I am the product of a race, the happy outcome of which is so unlikely that I, for one, am quite ready to call it a miracle. My success does have its downside. If another spermatozoon had reached the target ahead of the one that gave rise to me, you might have had another Confucius or Mao Tse-tung! The world may indeed be poorer because of my success, but you can't expect me to be sorrowful.

    Last night, as I approached my Doty School Condo, I suddenly see it as pure accident—or pure miracle. For this particular building doesn't have to exist. Some other building might well have been raised in its place. Once I enter that state of mind, everything I see around me could be something else. Existence, as such, becomes inexplicable, mysterious. All the stories I tell or know about the world seem all of a sudden quite arbitrary because they all blithely leave out plausible, alternative paths. That millions of chance events could lead to me and this "Dear Colleague" letter is surely cause, so far as I am concerned, for gratitude and happiness.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu