PD Sagcal

Dr. Ragaza
BI 196
18 September 2018

Reaction Paper

I did eventually appreciate the effort that went into making the film. However, at first it was
stunted by my recognition of two conceptual failures in the premise: the fact that probability is not an
intuitive premise for people, and the errors associated with scaling. The film starts off with a statement
saying that while millions of sperm enter the female system, each sperm has a unique gender and
unique set of characteristics. However, the chances of a couple who are trying to conceive being
successful are pretty high, and a successful conception means that there must be one sperm that was
successful in fertilizing the egg. So it all depends on whether you believe that any sperm that fertilized
the egg would have been you or not. If you do not accept this premise then are (1/20,000,000)^(no. of
human ancestors) chances of you existing, and the other (19,999,999)^(no. of human ancestors)
chances would be you being in the void of death.

What this implies is that you either do not accept this premise which is to say you only exist
because someone must have been in your place and it happened to be you (basically saying it wasn't
obligatory for the universe to have you exist) OR that your birth conditions are the result of a selection
bias where only when your specific sperm wins will you be pondering this question (the question
effectively having changed from “why me?” to “why do I exist when there is an overwhelming chance
that I don't?”).

The aim of the video was to scale the events in sperm travel to human size. However, models
can only work so well because not everything can be simplified to a similar phenomenon. Compared
to humans, sperm have a low volume: surface area ratio. This was brought into my attention during
the waiting period in the epididymis and the afterward ejaculation event where it's said that it is the
equivalent of a human being propelled 15 miles in one hour. But due to the drastically lower mass the
sperm experiences far less drag, so the proper abstraction would be a human made of some sort of
aluminum alloy. The depiction of the uterus as a huge plane is also questionable because sperm
lifespans are far shorter than that of humans. Transversing such a plane would be the equivalent to
the sperm what is the human equivalent of decades. Nonetheless, this is a moot point because what is
being showcased here is the gory attrition of sperm (with around 20 million sperm being eliminated
from crossing the cervix alone), and accurate representation of trials is not significant.

My other thoughts were of a more shallow nature. I find it hard to believe that a man like Glen
could ever have a significant other, for one. And learning that everyhting in the female body wants to
destroy sperm (such as leukocytes, acid, and ovulation timing) gave me great relief. I was very
impressed with the methods that some of the researchers who partook in the short film used, such as
using strip club lap dance frequency to quantify a correlation between female attractiveness and
ovulation (thus affirming the theory of the human female having an estrus) or the actual qualitative and
analytical testing done on sperm health based on whether the woman the sperm was delivered to had
an orgasm or not. There was also an experiment wherein a researcher had intercourse then had one
of her Fallopian tubes removed in order to section it and see under an electron microscope how many
sperm cells have made it through, which made me admire their dedication. And the fact that a female
egg costs 30,000$ astounded me because I can just kill someone and sell their eggs and be very rich
if I knew how. But the most curious thing to me about the film above all things is how it talks of sperm.
Unlike other cells which are ordained by physiology to have a telic nature, sperm are described to
have “likes”, and a “desire to stay alive”. They don't move towards a direction until they are near the
egg and otherwise are content to move randomly. They are referred to as having male and female
sexual orientations, and achieve what they should through a combination of following “irresistable”
scents and and extensive guiding and assistance by the female reproductive system. This is a
reminder to me that macro-organisms cells are willing to die for one another solely on the contract and
basis of their shared genetic material; any cell which is not part of a system is out for themselves.

If there is anything useful I could abstract from watching this short film, it's that no matter what
you are trying to correlate or quantify there is always a methodology you can follow to do it (no matter
how insane that methodology seems). One just has to be sufficiently creative.