There are those in this world who believe that there is an Intelligent Designer (who, for brevity we’ll refer to as “God” here, or possibly even “He who created all the universe with his awesome power in just seven days, which is way cooler than what I could accomplish in a week even if I was skagged out on meth the whole time”) who has a direct plan for each and every one of us. It comes as no shock that this is not an opinion that sits well with me. I am not outright hostile to the idea of a creator or a creative force, but that such a creator made the entire universe and everything in it right down to the yous and the mes, well that’s just hard to accommodate.
If God cares about who we are, I have a question for you. What’s with all the sperm? No seriously, I’m curious. Allow me to explain.
Let’s pretend for a moment that nobody ever ejaculated during masturbation, or during wet dreams, or during oral or anal sex, or while rubbing their genitals on any number of substances. I don’t want to focus on the trillions of sperm I wasted prior to my vasectomy every year. We’re just looking specifically at that magical mysterious ejaculation during coitus.
In a coital ejaculation, it’s safe to assume that, all things being equal, a man can send forth an average of fifty million little soldiers, or at least that’s what Wiki Answers tells me. Each one of these little soldiers contains some variation on the genetic material of the man. In other words, there are fifty million different and unique iterations of genetic code in each load of l’il swimmers. Yet somehow, God already knows which one will be you.
How do I figure that? Well, with what we know about human development, a large impact on personality and future actions comes from the genetic material. These genes determine things like how the brain is put together, which will ultimately have a great deal to do with how we interact with the world and how our environment interacts with us. Many mental health issues stem from underlying problems in brain chemistry inherited through the DNA. These issues, in turn, can have a direct result on our behaviors, and it is ludicrous to assume that in any one ejaculation, all of the sperm will possess the same combinations of genes that create these problems.
The deeds of our lives are written in His Big Ole’ Book before we are even born. Certainly, this is a belief held firmly by Calvinists, but while this notion may not hold true for all Christians, I don’t know many who would argue that God has a plan for us, that things happen for a reason, and that we cannot go against the will of God. So clearly, God must be aware of exactly what particular sperm he needs to ensure impregnates a given ovum.
I can accept that. But then why is it that God gives us fifty million sperm per blissful emission? Is he doing it to make his own job harder? If you’re big enough to create a Universe, it must be a real bitch to keep track of a single hurriedly-moving gamete in a sea of millions of them. What possible benefit could the other 49,999,999 sperm provide? We theorize that the deformed sperm are actually perfectly formed, their purpose being to hang out in wait for sperm from a different babydaddy and attack them, but if God’s so awesome that he can make a single sperm in the million manseed march impregnate the target, doesn’t he have the ability to stop unwanted sperm from the wrong donor from winning the race?
On a given day the world over, according to this article on Ask.com, there are 216,000 babies born every day. I tried to find a solid number for the likelihood of miscarriage and found this page which says that miscarriage affects 15% of recognized pregnancies, and may occur in as many as 50% of pregnancies. Let’s be conservative and say the actual value is 25%. That means that the 216,000 babies born every day represents 75% of the total number of successful conceptions, which would thus be 288,000 conceptions every day. Obviously this is not a real number, but work with me here people. Given that each of the loads spilled in that 24 hour period constitutes 50,000,000 sperm, that means God had to keep tabs on 266,000 (ignoring that fragment of the roughly 3% of children who are twins to account for identical twins) separate sperm out of the 13,300,000,000,000 total sperm. That also constitutes 13,299,999,734,000 wasted sperm.
That means God is bloody busy. And this is just ejaculation, we’re not talking about lotteries, and everything insurance companies won’t pay you for. Just jizz. And the Bible doesn’t mention a choir of angels whose job it is to control the lives of in-utero sperm, so I guess he’s doing the job all by his lonesome. You gotta hand it to him, that’s a lot of goo on one omnipotent creator’s plate.
Oh, and for the record, if a typical man ejaculates roughly a teaspoon of semen, or just about 5 ml. That means every day there is slightly more than 1311 liters of semen just from the successful attempts at pregnancy. That’s a very frightening number. Oh, Meddling Kids. You have no idea how much I enjoy posting these things.
Jim
Oh, and for the record if we assume I was only letting loose 50,000,000 mini-me’s each time (which is a low assumption given what the urologist told me) and we assume that I achieved this pilgrimage around 4 times a week, that means in a year I unleashed a total of 10,400,000,000. So trillions may not be the right number, but tens of billions still is impressive.