A lecture by Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford's Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and the author of the landmark 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It took place during a visit to the Galapagos Islands the place that caused Darwin, through his observations as a naturalist, to discover Natural Selection.
From "Unweaving the Rainbow" by Richard Dawkins
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
...we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than sudddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder."
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