“The absence of the improbable, the redundancy of the probable, is just as much conclusive evidence against conformity with scientific law as the too frequent occurrence of the improbable itself.”

— Karl Pearson

"The Scientific Aspect of Monte Carlo Roulette" (1894)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The absence of the improbable, the redundancy of the probable, is just as much conclusive evidence against conformity w…" by Karl Pearson?

Karl Pearson 65

English mathematician and biometrician 1857–1936

Related quotes

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 14 "Types of Men" - 3 : The Believer
Source: Prejudices: Third Series

“…it was Darwin’s chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable. … Let the reader … attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty- four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Retrospect of criticisms of the theory of natural selection. In Evolution as a Process, eds. J.S.Huxley, A.C.Hardy and E.B.Ford, London: Allen and Unwin, 1954.
1950s

“It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.”

Agathon (-448–-401 BC) Athenian tragic poet

Aristotle, Poetics, XXV, quoted by George Eliot in an epigraph to Chapter 41 of Daniel Deronda.

“Okay, look at it this way: if the evening news has a very high probability of being accurate, then it's highly improbable that they would inaccurately report the numbers chosen in the lottery. That counterbalances any improbability in the choosing of those numbers, so you're quite rational to believe in this highly improbable event.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

[2000, The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, Lee, Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 9780310565703, http://books.google.com/books?id=5kgb7v1qlF4C]