Irish Sweeps

    Caption: Lucky winners.

    Features:

    1. The drawing of the lottery tickets by nurses in the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake (AkA the Irish Sweepstake AkA the Irish Sweeps).

      The Irish Hospitals's Sweepstake was an early example of the government-sponsored lottery in the 20th century.

      For many years, it was the only legal one in the transatlantic countries, and so has a bit of historic fame as the Irish Sweeps.

      Now, of course, the lottery corruption is general---but I guess it ill-behooves us in Las Vegas to throw stones.

    2. The winners in evolution, of course, have many unique features, but there are always winners, but some of those features are randomly chosen---so to some degree the winners are chosen by luck.

    3. The anthropic principle does NOT help explain those aspects of us that were determined random causes in the universe which led to existence of us.

    4. It does help us explain the non-random feature causes.

      There is, of course, no hard line between random and non-random features, and thus, among other reasons, every explanation based on the anthropic principle has to be argued.

    Credit/Permission: © Willem van de Poll (1895--1970), 1946 (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by User:Ww2censor, 2007) / Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.
    Image link: Wikimedia Commons.
    Local file: local link: irish_sweepstake.html.
    File: Art file: irish_sweepstake.html.