From: Gregg N 

Steve Ewing wrote:
>
> You keep bringing up all these happy coincidences.  People do win
> lotteries, you know.  The probability that you will flip a coin and it
> land heads 100 times in a row is very high (too lazy to calculate it)
> yet the probability that you will do so a 101st time is still 50-50.
>
> There are many mutations that don't cut the mustard-- survival of the
> fittest, y'know.  To say that conditions have to be "exactly right"
> and so forth gets the argument backwards-- the mutations that survive
> and pass on their characteristics are the ones that do so *because of*
> the conditions, not *in spite of* them.  If conditions had been
> different we may have all had three left feet and a hand growing out
> of our foreheads; who knows?
>
This reminds me of the hypothetical stock market scam:

I guy receives ten letters in a row accurately indicating the direction the
market will go the following trading day. How can this be he wonders? After
the tenth letter, he receives one offering to invest a large some of money.
So the guy sends all his money to the scammer and loses it.

What the scammer did was to gather 1024 names and send half of them a
message that tomorrow the stock market will go up, and the other half a
message that it will go down. The next day he discards the group he
misinformed and of the remaining group again sends half of them a message
the market will go up and the other half a message it will go down. He
continues this until he is down to his last correct message. At the end
there was only one "surviver".

Gregg

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