Rare events justify mechanisms requiring many precise conditions

Evidence

A lot of factors have to be just right to make this cookie cutter mechanism happen. But the earth is a big place, and cookie cutting is discovered perhaps once a decade or even less somewhere on the whole surface of the planet. We are permitted therefore to concoct a mechanism where many factors have to be just right. The other conjectures all seem far less likely: steam explosions with no source of steam, meteor strikes with no shred of evidence for them, and mischievous aliens. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 719

Categorization

• SEED: A methodological angle: how rarity licenses unconstrained hypothesis space in physics — a neat essay on evidential reasoning.
• XREF: connects to: The essence of necessity is contingency, grounded in an event — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 128; A truly open future requires an accidental, non-appropriable event. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 171; Frequent ‘disasters’ select for traits while rare ‘catastrophes’ mostly just decrease fitness — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 95