Folks, there's been a lot said on this thread to dispute Grant's claims, but you've been missing the target (myself included, early on) because all Grant is saying is that only 5% of any species will live in the first 5% of birth order, and it's unlikely that we are in that 5%. That is completely correct in the absence of any other information. The mistake is simply that this 5% probability is being treated as some kind of absolute probability, like the chance a coin will flip "heads". But it isn't, it's a conditional probability, conditional on your knowledge. Here's an example of the difference. If you sit down to a game of flipping coins, you have a 50% chance of winning, no matter who you are. That's absolute probability. But if you sit down to a game of chess, you can't say, there are 2 players so I have a 50% chance. That's true, however, in the complete absence of any other information! But if you have any information at all, the chances change. If, for example, you know that your opponent is the World Champion, and you just learned how to play yesterday, obviously your chances are less than 1 in a million. But if you also know that your opponent wants to lose because he or she is very generous, then your odds could reverse. It's a conditional probability, it's all about what you know. So the real question that should be debated is, do we really have no other knowledge, in which case Carter is the best we can do no matter how many "urn analogies" we trot out, or do we have knowledge that completely changes the probabilities? This kind of amounts to saying, are you an optimist or a pessimist? But the optimists can certainly take comfort in the fact that the Carter argument is not an absolute probability.