Quote:
Originally Posted by smy_749
If he had done this with 3 or 4 juvies, and consistently only received one male, and under the same incubation controls, raised another group of babies, each alone in isolation, and received the expected 50/50 ratio, then maybe you could look into it.
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You'd have to do this x several hundred times for it to be statistically significant.
There are a lot of really interesting books (Irrationality, The Invisible Gorilla etc) on perception, memory and the distortion of reality that are worth reading. We remember coincidences because they surprise us, but end up reading a lot more into them than we should. We remember the time we walked down to the shop at just the right time to bump into an old friend we hadn't seen in years, but forget the other 364 times we walked down there that year without bumping into anyone at all.
The general public has a particularly poor understanding of the statistics of averages nor what 'random' really means. For example, if the average number of fatal shark attacks in a particular year is around 1 and suddenly there's a year during which 4 people get killed, everyone (including the media) immediately assumes that sharks are increasing in number at a rapid rate. No one stops to think that sharks can't grow to man-eater size in a single year, quickly enough to bolster the number of man-eaters by 400% from one year to the next.
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