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"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." — Lewis Carroll [4]. In 1973, Leigh Van Valen proposed the hypothesis as an "explanatory tangent" to explain the "law of extinction" known as "Van Valen's law", [1] which states that the probability of extinction does not depend on the lifetime of the species or higher-rank taxon, instead being constant ...
"Chicken-and-egg" is a metaphoric adjective describing situations where it is not clear which of two events should be considered the cause and which should be considered the effect, to express a scenario of infinite regress, or to express the difficulty of sequencing actions where each seems to depend on others being done first.
Sleeping Beauty problem: A probability problem that can be correctly answered as one half or one third depending on how the question is approached. Three Prisoners problem , also known as the Three Prisoners paradox: [ 3 ] A variation of the Monty Hall problem .
RNA folding problem: Is it possible to accurately predict the secondary, tertiary and quaternary structure of a polyribonucleic acid sequence based on its sequence and environment? Protein design : Is it possible to design highly active enzymes de novo for any desired reaction?
Taleb's "black swan theory" (which differs from the earlier philosophical versions of the problem) refers only to statistically unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.
A special case of the “Shifting the Burden” systems archetype that occurs when an intervenor is brought in to help solve an ongoing problem. Over time, as the intervenor successfully handles the problem, the people within the system become less capable of solving the problem themselves. They become even more dependent on the intervenor.
Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves, [1] [2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy (literally: "consumption of the environment"). [3]
In situations where a population consists of items that are distinguishable, a random selection mechanism requires equal probabilities for any item to be chosen. That is, if the selection process is such that each member of a population, say research subjects, has the same probability of being chosen, then we can say the selection process is ...