John Popp, in his guest column taking on the "evolution establishment," makes a common mistake in talking about probability:
Part of the massive effort to silence the Grantsburg School District was a letter from the Wisconsin academic community friendly to evolution, asking the Grantsburg School Board to rescind its policy and teach only evolution, with 321 professors and academicians as signatories. Most of them are biologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and zoologists, but no mathematicians, although there were two professors with statistical disciplines. Perhaps if this group had canvassed more mathematicians, they would have learned that the statistical odds of evolution are not very good. In 1981, Sir Fred Hoyle, famous British mathematician and astronomer who originated the steady-state theory of nucleogenesis, calculated the probability of life originating by random processes was one chance in 10 to the 40,000th power
