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To: PatrickHenry
I mentioned this (without trying to name it) a couple of days ago in a now-dormant thread, when someone trotted out, for the zillionth time, the business of "figuring the odds" against evolution. I said this:

The biggest problem with these computations that take all the mutations that ever happened and then whomp up some kind of factorial result by stringing together all the generations is simply that ... each generation is mathematically on its own!

If I am reading you correctly, you're talking about Climbing Mount Improbable, to use Dawkins' colorful (or would it be colourful??) expression.

I've referred to it in the past as the "second-floor frog fallacy" The creationists' argument is the equivalent of saying that frogs could never get to the second floor of a building, as it is twelve feet above the first floor. They say, "no frog can jump twelve feet into the air, so there can be no frogs on the second floor." This ignores, of course, the staircase...

1,393 posted on 02/02/2005 7:24:09 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: WildHorseCrash
the "second-floor frog fallacy"

That's a good one, and it's in the same general area of fallacies, but not quite the same as "incorporating the continuum." Here's another example of -- ahem! -- my fallacy: you cut the cards, and then start dealing them out, one at a time. The resulting array has the awesome probability of one in 52 factorial, which is, more or less, one in 8.06581752 × 1067. However, as to any one card's chances, the odds are nowhere near as great.

1,395 posted on 02/02/2005 7:34:55 AM PST by PatrickHenry (<-- Click on my name. The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: WildHorseCrash; PatrickHenry
Another way to look at this fallacy is to look at each person's life. What are the odds that each of us will have the exact jobs we have, sit in the exact office or cubicle we do, have the exact friends we do, have our homes decorated exactly as we do, drive the exact car we have now, etc?

I'm engaged to a girl that was born in Vietnam and I was born in Tennessee. What are the odds that we would even meet? For that to happen, countless unrelated events had to occur on opposite ends of the world. Each event built on the other and we did in fact cross paths.
1,399 posted on 02/02/2005 7:43:48 AM PST by JeffAtlanta
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