Every now and then, you find a human being existing under such a remarkable set of circumstances that you just have to stop and marvel for a while. For instance, this man, who just slightly exceeds the bare minimum levels of attractiveness, intelligence, charm, and physical fitness required for a woman to allow him to impregnate her.
Dang. This guy’s really spreading his DNA by the skin of his teeth!
Forty-four-year-old sales associate Roger Farley has two kids and counting, but if he were even 1% less attractive in any of the many categories that women use to determine whether or not they’ll allow a man to get them pregnant, he would have no kids at all. That’s right: Incredibly, Roger just barely squeaked by the minimum standards required for human procreation like a student who graduated from college with straight D-minuses, and he somehow still has just as much of his DNA continuing on in the gene pool as Barack Obama and Dax Shephard.
Roger has unremarkable (but not repulsive) looks, is just smart enough to have a job that pays a completely average salary, is boring but not exactly annoying, and is juuuust nice enough of a guy for a woman to trust him enough to invite him back to her apartment. He has no particularly strong trait that could make up for any of his other shortcomings, like a super hot guy who’s pretty stupid or a really broke dude who’s incredibly cool. Nope, all of Roger’s impressively marginal traits are constantly in a Mexican standoff with one another, and if any one of them were to take even a minor hit, his ability to be able to reproduce at all would immediately crumble like a house of cards.
Dang, this guy’s chances of continuing to pass on his genes are really clinging to the edge of a cliff!
All it’s gonna take for Roger to lose his ability to successfully procreate is some minor weight gain, a few pimples, or even just a small dent in his car. The entire future of his genes’ legacy is so precarious that watching him go through life gives us the same anxiety that watching someone traverse a tightrope or juggle a dozen flaming bowling pics does. We can hardly bear to look, but we can’t look away either. Watching this man’s genes survive natural selection on a constant razor’s edge is truly fascinating.
