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Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 194 -23- I used to wonder how and why I am ME, myself, and not someone else - and why not as easily a fish, or a cat, or a tree? "Statistically," writes Doctor Lewis Thomas in The Lives of a Cell, "the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprize. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our place. . . . "Everyone is one in three billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surface of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, |