[Sabertooth]

Scientists estimate that the 1.75 million known species are only 10 percent of the total species on earth, and that many of those species will disappear in the decades ahead. Learning about these species and their evolutionary history is epic in its scope, spanning all the life forms of an entire planet over its several billion year history, said Wheeler.

How can extinction rates be estimated by way of an estimated 10% sample of an unknown (but estimated) survey population?

[PatrickHenry]

How can extinction rates be estimated by way of an estimated 10% sample of an unknown (but estimated) survey population?

Probably the environmentalists are using the same incredibly refined techniques as those used to estimate that there are 3 million homeless in the US. The numbers seem to come from the Seventh Planet.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Simple. The rate is independent of the total number. There are systematic biases such as one only looks at psecies that are easy to observe. If .01% of the observed species disappear each century, this is an estimate of the disappearance rate of all species. There is a large variance in these types of computations however. There are relevant papers in Biometrica, Biometrics, PNAS, and other publications.

[gore3000]

How can extinction rates be estimated by way of an estimated 10% sample of an unknown (but estimated) survey population?

Especially when evolutionists continue to claim at the same time that the reason their still has so many gaps (in exactly the places they need to have fossils) is that the fossil record is incomplete?????????

[beavus]

How can extinction rates be estimated by way of an estimated 10% sample of an unknown (but estimated) survey population?

Easy. Because we "know" that humans are a rainforest burning, species killing, blight on holy mother Earth.

[artios]

You start with the government program you want to start and the freedom you want to erode, then work backwords. Very simple really. If you have sufficient anger toward God and hatred for freedom it is a piece of cake.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

How can extinction rates be estimated by way of an estimated 10% sample of an unknown (but estimated) survey population?

Good question.  I believe that I have heard estimates as high as 1,000 species become extinct yearly.  However, over the last two decades, I have heard that only 1 probable and 2 possible species actually were verified to become extinct.