“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
The point that Feynman was trying to make is that you can’t just hunt for anomalies after the fact and then say they are somehow significant. You have to make predictions and do the test and see if those predictions bear out. In the same way it’s not amazing (at least statistically, although perhaps biologically) that any one person is born. It’s just like that license plate. Of course, the license plate ARW 357 is one of millions of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that it’s amazing every time you see a license plate. They’re all one of millions, and it has to be one of them.
I came to say that, but it's eloquently copied from: http://surplusgamer.tumblr.com/post/1114853865/derren-brown-...