Of course it's true that we are the result of our parents copulating, but the astronomers are thinking even more literally than that.  You are built from elements joined together into compounds joined together into a body. These elements have to be made from simpler elements in reactions of nuclear fusion. This takes place in stars, and all the elements bigger than hydrogen that surround us on Earth were made in stars.

Interestingly, you might want to think about the actual molecules that make you. You probably think you are the same person who was born all those years ago, but you'll notice that you are a lot bigger, a different shape, that your skin and hair are continually renewed, that your nails need trimming, that you perspire, excrete, eat, grow and in other ways change. In fact you are far more fluid than you probably allow for. I wonder how much of the original material still forms part of you.

Oh, and another thought: if you reckon you're in control of your body then tell your nails to stop growing and see if they listen.

Nice, Pete!

Humans are in some ways like a standing ripple over a stone in the stream, or a stationary cloud in a wind over a mountain.  It is the same ripple from second to second, and the same cloud; any fool can see that. It wrigggles and grows and shrinks, but it is still the same.

Or is it? Blink slowly,  and there is not a molecule of water in the ripple that was there when your eyes closed. Breathe slowly in and out a few times,  and not a drop of water in the cloud is the same as when first you looked.

Heraclitus said that no man can step into the same river twice. For my part, I don't believe he can do it once, not even clapping one hand.

Your body isn't quite as fugitive as any of those -- not quite...

Not while you are alive, anyway.

Jon (or that other guy who was here a little while ago.)

Carl Sagan used the expression “WE are made of star stuff” in his TV series Cosmos, though I can’t be sure if he borrowed it from elsewhere. Other than hydrogen and helium almost every atom in your body came from an exploding star earlier in the history of the universe. 

I am not sure whether that should make us feel humble or special, or both

I must say that I find the line of thought behind your question obscure. Do you suppose you could explain what you have in mind? If the copulation of your parents (or great-great-great-grandparents) is to be regarded in the same context and scale as the explosions of the stars that produced the metals that constitute your substance, then why the emphasis on the copulation without which you would not have been here? After all, you also would not be here today if you had not been here yesterday; in a very real sense you come from yesterday, and a good deal more nearly immediately than from a little copulation nine months or a great deal more  ninety generations before you were born.

Do please try to clarify what it is that you are asking. Science can tell you a great deal, but only if you ask meaningful questions. If on the other hand you do in fact know of some source that can tell you the answer to meaningless questions as well, do please tell us, because I doubt that anyone among us would know that.

Cheers,

Jon