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Originally Posted by grant hutchison
Carter requires that any life is as likely as any other life to be sampled. Since we take a random snapshot of our lemmings in time, we're as likely to sample a bulge with lots of lemmings as a trough with few lemmings; but a random lemming life is more likely to sample a bulge than a trough.
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Ironic that I now find myself to be the Defender of Carter! The point is, it makes no difference what the current population is, only the total birth number. If you think there might be correlations between extinction and present population, join the crowd. My point is, to use information of
any type (outside of birth number) will break you from the Carter zero-information analysis, it makes no difference what the information is.
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Originally Posted by grant hutchison
I completely agree that Carter is best undermined by examining his simple assumption, rather than his simple reasoning.
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Yes, it is the assumption that we have no information to go on, when in fact it's not hard to find
something that could correlate with extinction. The problem is, I can't help wondering if Carter's assumption is
optimistic!