The side-branch complexity problem

• Note that evolution is less ‘hurried’ and ‘compex’ on the remote side branches, like plants and fungi.

• Eg accurate morphogenesis is needed only for highly agile animals, while eg trees don’t have exact shapes.

• But we would still expect that the tree-of-life would be very tall but narrow, with the intelligent observer’s species on the top.

• I’ll show that this expectation is based on an incorrect argument on probability.

• Consider all the observable trees-of-life (observable if an intelligent being emerged): they constitute an infinite subset of all the ELPs.

  Now the ‘narrow’ trees, that might fit our intuitive expectations are also an infinite subset, and it seems natural that this subset is somehow ‘smaller’ then the set of ELPs with large, broad tree-of-life, with diverse species.

• But the thing is we cannot define a uniform probability measure on countably infinite subsets of a countable infinite set: see the page on probability theory