Anthropogenic Effects and Reproduction Success

Or: careful what your sampling from, if you’re even sample at all.

There is an chain of reproduction, stretching from a first-living organism all the way to you-reading-this-sentence. Every single organism within this chain managed reproduction, asexual or not, purposeful or not.

What then, are the odds that you’ll reproduce? Hard to say really, based on the above paragraph. What is certain is that the chance you’ll reproduce is not sampled from the distribution of your ancestor organisms; you don’t have a 99.99999999999 percent chance of being successful. Sorry. You’re just not that pretty.

But it would be easy to read a pop science article and get convinced as much. “All animals that led to us have been successful” and it certain seems like we are sampled from this distribution. But we aren’t. There are many more animals than those who led to the things alive today (side note: I’d love to try to estimate what percent of things reproduce, and then make an estimation of what genes live forward, even as a simple model).

A common sampling error seems like it occurs within the arguments about simulation theory (which is out of vogue recently, at least with the people I talk to).

Sampling from all possible existing universes is, uh, dumb as fuck. How could we possibly imagine what all possible universes look like? How could we possibly conceive of what the distribution were sampling from is? The only thing I’m sure of is that we’ve got absolutely no ability to reason about probabilities in the context of other universes.

What is probability isn’t really well defined to me. I know what they say probability is - but I don’t get it. Is it some natural placement of these things in the world! Really truly, I should try and learn quantum mechanics.