[ExI] A short movie I created (with the help of AI)
Jason Resch
jasonresch at gmail.com
Sat Oct 24 14:23:18 UTC 2026
On Thu, Oct 22, 2026, 11:24 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> *From:* spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
> *…*
>
>
>
> >…Regarding the notion of our being one of 200 million possible distinct
> people who could have been conceived rather than ourself, this is a vast
> understatement, upon which I will comment in a subsequent post. spike
>
>
>
>
>
> If one is not up to speed on how a zygote is formed by whichever sperm
> manages to penetrate the corona radiata and the zona pellucida, there is
> plenty of information available on the process that occurs next: the zygote
> DNA is formed by taking DNA from both the sperm and the ovum. Given a
> particular sperm and a particular oocyte, how many different possible ways
> can those two form a genetically complete zygote? Never mind potential
> irregularities such as trisomy, never mind the mind-blowing complications
> of environmental influences on embryonic development, just consider how
> many different possible ways a particular sperm and a particular egg and
> combine. We are all statistically indistinguishable from impossible.
>
Could you clarify this? My understanding is that if you already had two
generically identical sperm and egg pairs, their combination would yield
identical twins. Is there something more involved in deciding which and to
what extent different genes get expressed that could vary beyond the
genetic information carried by each gamete?
Jason
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20261024/2e07e8aa/attachment.htm>
More information about the extropy-chat
mailing list