At the 2010 Comic-Con in San Diego, a number of people were asked what they thought to be the greatest superpower. Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four (among many others), said it was "good luck," because nothing can go wrong if you have good luck.
Many superhero stories attempt to give a scientific veneer to the powers given to their protagonists, ranging from radioactive spiders to differences in star wavelengths. And one of the most popular scientific foundations for superpowers is genetics (see The X-Men). So, what would it mean for there to be a gene for good luck? And how would this trait manifest itself?
Well, rather than speculating, we can look to Larry Niven, a science fiction writer who has actually explored this. In his stories, there is a certain species of alien that is profoundly cowardly and tries to reduce the danger of its environment. One of their most common methodologies is through artificial selection: breeding various other aliens for different traits they deem beneficial. For example, a militaristic species is manipulated in a series of wars, such that the least warlike (the ones who do not go out and fight) are the only ones who end up reproducing, because everyone else dies in battle.
So how did these aliens deal with humans? Humans, while neither the strongest nor the smartest, are considered inherently lucky, at least for the purposes of Niven. So these aliens actually engineer a series of lotteries where the human winners are preferentially able to have children. The implication in the stories being that the luckier people are the ones who get to reproduce more. And in this way, humans are selected for luck genes.
Of course, this is not how probability really works. There are already astronomically small odds that each of us exist. For example, the sperm that actually was involved in your conception is only one in 100 million, in addition to the fact that there is a non-trivial probability that that specific "round" of insemination was unsuccessful. So any human that already exists has overcome some astronomical odds. And this isn't even including the counterfactuals: everything from the chance encounter that led to your parents meeting to the ricocheting bullet that prevented your grandfather from dying during World War II prior to meeting your grandmother. These counterfactuals can ramify so rapidly that existence as we know it becomes so statistically unlikely that the numbers enter the realm of statistical mechanics. Just because someone succeeds over and over need not mean that it is for a reason; if enough people are competing (at existence or even just beating the stock market) then success could be simply due to chance without imputing a rationale. So the upshot is that simple improbability need not be the precondition for the presence a luck gene, though I have no idea what sort of selection mechanism should actually be used.
But given such a gene, how would it operate? In Niven's novels, it generally acts as a sort of overriding self-preservation gene, acting entirely independently of the individual's conscious decisions. For example, deadly falls are averted at the last moment. Niven even explores what the end-point for a species would be, when everyone is lucky and almost nothing can go wrong. In the story Safe at Any Speed even bad things end up being incredibly good: A character whose car is swallowed by a giant creature emerges unharmed and ends up receiving a great deal of money from the manufacturer.
This is similar to another luck-bending, albeit non-genetic, phenomenon in the fictional world of the Harry Potter novels. There exists a potion called Felix Felicis, which confers luck upon whoever drinks it. But whatever we are examining, whether the luck gene of Larry Niven or the Liquid Luck potion, both seem to use a sort of precognition. The luck mechanism seems to operate by examining the ramifications of all possible actions and choosing the best one, yielding a Panglossian reality for the user (or gene-carrier). The only example I have found that tries to explain how this could possibly work is in Neal Stephenson's book Anathem. In Anathem (spoilers!), there is a small population of individuals known as Incanters who, using an understanding of quantum mechanics, can exist simultaneously in multiple parallel universes and choose which is the best one to actually continue to exist within. In this way, what they do might appear to be incredibly lucky, but they are simply choosing their best possible reality.
So perhaps a "luck" gene that somehow confers a quantum mechanical manipulation power could exist. But having that mutation means you've got to be pretty lucky to start.
Further reading: If you're interested in a more rigorous discussion of luck and skill, and without any mention of speculative genetics, I highly recommend Michael Mauboussin's analysis.
Note: this post was adapted from a post on my personal blog
Image: Kelley Mari/Flickr/CC
