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To: Truth666
It's not only coral - it's everything - I didn't even mention so far in this thread the ultimate example : birds.

Yeah, OK, change the subject. It doesn't help you though. All you're showing is that remote, isolated locations exhibit many species that are "significantly" different from the mainstream populations of their closest relatives. If you think that this runs counter to evolution, guess again: that was exactly the observation that led Darwin to his theory of evolution in the first place. He happened to travel to the Galapagos Islands; he may as easily have come to LHI and reached the same conclusions.

what are the chances that their tiny seeds would have survived the journey from New Caledonia or Australia ?

If they can survive the journey through the alimentary canal of a bird, I would say, "not bad".

what are the chances that no similar fossiles have been found there (or anywhere else, for the matter) ?

Considering that very few species of anything leave any fossils at all, I would say, "excellent".

Those things said, you can't play the probability game in retrospect. The history of life is (and always has been) contingent upon chance occurrences. Very little about the development of life is preordained or inevitable. Maybe it is an incredible stroke of luck that this or that species of palm happened to survive, but if it hadn't, some other would have filled its ecological niche, and that would have seemed like a miracle, too.

Point to any lottery winner and ask yourself, "what were the odds of that person winning"? The answer is, "astronomically small". Does that make it a miracle?

200 posted on 05/26/2004 8:56:00 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
"Point to any lottery winner and ask yourself, "what were the odds of that person winning"? The answer is, "astronomically small". Does that make it a miracle?"
The comparison with winning the lottery doesn't stand, both in quantity and quality. Let's see just the last one :
- there must be a lottery winner - even when there's not one we know that somehwere there is ONE ticket that would have been the winner. - taking the palm example and keeping in mind that New Caledonia is the Eldorado for palm species : there is no evidence for even ONE single species that could make it to Lord Howe Island.

Now there are two VERY interesting things in your post, which I was waiting for. One is "big numbers" usage ("astronomically").
Qualitatively where do you see the fact that the earth hasn't been visited by other possible civilisations existing somewhere in the universe ? In the same category of lottery or Lord Howe (absence of any non-endemic palms ?)
204 posted on 05/26/2004 11:17:09 AM PDT by Truth666
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