Probabilities and Palin
So here is sort of a math point, using this current Babygate matter.
You start out with a highly improbable story, that the Vice-Presidential Candidate and current governor Palin is not the mother of her claimed fifth child, but the grandmother, and that Palin actually fabricated this tory, faking her pregnancy. The actual mother of the baby, so the tale went, was Palin’s then-16-year-old daughter, Bristol.
Now such an improbable tell carries with it several premises, which at the time of the tale were unverified.
Anyway, to refute this improbable tale, the McCain campaign yesterday explained that the daughter, Bristol Palin, could not have been the mother of the previous baby, who was born April 18th, 2008, because she is actually pregnant now, in early September.
How pregnant is she? She is claimed to be “around five months pregnant.”
Okay, so back to basic probability. Here’s the question: does the new story make the old story less or more likely?
With the new story we have verification of several previously unproven premises:
1) That Palin’s daughter Bristol was having pre-marital sex
2) That Palin’s daughter Bristol was not using birth control, or was engaging in a form of birth control that allowed for pregnancy
3) That Palin’s daughter Bristol was fertile.
The “big point” is whether the new story disproves the old story by making it “impossible” or even “unlikely” or “less likely” that Bristol is the mother of both children. For this point, one just has to look at a calendar, and understand fertility. If you have a child on April 18th, you can in fact ovulate soon after. As soon as two weeks, but perhaps more commonly a month after. In either of these scenarios, you can certainly become pregnant again, and be “around five months” pregnant by September.
So this does not work as a refutation. In contrast, the new story makes the old, rather crazily improbable story much much more likely, because it verifies some critical points.
Given all of this, why on earth would the McCain and Palin campaign put out this new story as an answer, as a refutation, to the previous story?
Only time will tell.
