I've been reading, and I found
this paper by Neslusan (2004), and he says that it's not Mercury or Neptune that are the odd planets out--
Earth is the odd planet.
So I tryed in my own way to replicate Neslusan's results--and it's true: Earth is by far the planet that doesn't belong!
Consider the table below (in all scenarios Ceres is included, but Pluto is excluded because of the a priori reasons that we know enough about Pluto to say it's obviously a Kuiper Belt object, and since it's locked in an orbital resonance with Neptune, Pluto wouldn't constitute an independent sample in any case). The numbers are the corresponding r
2 scores:
Code:
Only Pluto Excluded 0.9933
Mercury Excluded as well 0.9918
Neptune Excluded " 0.9905
Earth Excluded " 0.9984
Note that excluding Earth lowers the average error from 10% to a mere 5%. The table clearly shows that Earth is an exceptional place, and that its orbital location cannot be the result of blind Titius-Bode laws at work. Only intelligence can explain our special place in the Solar System.
I'm really surprised that the ID folks haven't picked up on this fact yet. It looks like the Earth didn't even form in this Solar System and was placed where it is long after the Solar System orginally formed.
(Granted, the Moon is as old as the oldest meteorites, so probably the Moon was originally the largest member of the asteroid belt, and was plucked out by God and given to us so we could have tides and so the night wouldn't be dark all the time.)