Beyond Coincidence Read online

  Hill had set her heart on writing a novel about Captain Scott and his companions and their journey to the South Pole. Her research completed, she settled down to start writing.

  “Just before Christmas, on the 8:50 from Oxford to Paddington, I opened my copy of The Bookseller and saw an advertizement for a new novel by Beryl Bainbridge called The Birthday Boys based on the last voyage of Scott and his companions to the Antarctic. Two years’ work gone down the tube.”

  In 1988 two books were published whose contents were very different yet whose covers bore remarkable similarities. Both Marianne Wiggins’s novel, John Dollar, and Tim Robinson’s guide to Ireland’s Aran Isles, Stones of Aran, had covers that featured a blue dolphin, a black-and-white compass and a map.

  The publishers of John Dollar, Secker and Warburg, were angry, claiming their cover had been widely distributed within the trade months before. John Caple, the artist who designed the cover for Stones of Aran, said he had never seen the other cover.

  Fiona Carpenter, art director of Viking, who published the guidebook, said it was just “a very unfortunate coincidence.”

  Was this simply coincidence, or was it a slightly more subtle example of the technique employed by the junk shop in Clapham that shamelessly called itself Harrods, reproducing the famous colors and typeface? When Harrods threatened legal action it changed its name to Selfridges, claiming the name was valid because it did sell fridges.

  When a case of theft of intellectual property comes before a court, the judge or jury must decide if the alleged copying is, in fact, nothing more than coincidence. They must consider what the chances are of someone completely independently coming up with an almost identical design or invention or, indeed, name for a store.

  In 1998 director Mehdi Norowzian took brewer Guinness to court claiming a commercial for their famous brew was a copy of his short film “Joy.” Norowzian argued that the ad, which showed a man dancing around a pint of Guinness, was a substantial copy of his film and not just “a repetition of an idea.” But the judge ruled against Norowzian and ordered him to pay costs to Guinness.

  It is probably no coincidence that the people who tend to come out best from litigation over infringement of copyright are the lawyers.

  As we’ve seen, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had another possible explanation for how two people might come up with the same creative idea—his theory of the collective unconscious that people tap into: “a force of nature which drives us to come to the same conclusions to the same problems, to follow the same creative processes.”

  Plagiarism even raises its ugly head in the sublime world of laughter. Ownership of jokes, one-liners, and sketch ideas can be aggressively disputed.

  Can more than one person come up with exactly the same joke, by coincidence? Kit and the Widow had one of their comic creations apparently stolen from under their noses, passed round the neighborhood and then served back to them cold. Kit Hesketh-Harvey recalls, “The Lloyd Webber musical Aspects of Love had controversially cast Roger Moore in a singing role. Rehearsals went ahead and Roger left the cast and there was not much explanation of why. The gag we came up with was that when Lloyd Webber discovered that Roger Moore couldn’t sing, he wanted to marry him. It required you to know that he had married Sarah Brightman, the star of his show Cats, and that there had been snide remarks in the press about her singing ability. The idea of Roger Moore, the man who played James Bond, being pursued by Lloyd Webber was so absurd, it was funny. Anyway we did this joke once at a party—and within three weeks Lionel Blair had told me that joke and so had Christopher Biggins. And Christopher had told the joke to Simon Fanshawe, who told it to us on air.” Kit and the Widow are not convinced that this was just coincidence. They think a little “recycling” had been going on.

  Arnold Brown is a stand-up comedian, a profession of eggshell egos and fierce competition for the most original topical gag. Paranoia about having material stolen is a professional inevitability.

  Says Brown, “Comedy is about searching for new ideas—it’s almost like a scientific process. Suddenly you find that little Rubik’s Cube combination—a DNA of comedy which no one else has got to.” So when he hears one of his jokes being told by another comedian, does it make him want to sue or does he put it down to coincidence? “Neither,” says Brown. “It makes me want to kill them.”

  Arnold Brown believes he was the first to come up with the comic idea that cell phones were a godsend to the mentally ill, as they could wander around in public talking to themselves and no one would take any notice. But before he could use it in his act, he heard that another comedian was telling an identical joke. Mysteriously, that comedian was never heard of again.

  Recently the joke appeared again, this time in Martin Amis’s 2003 novel Yellow Dog.

  What does he put this down to? Coincidence? Great minds thinking alike? Or do jokes get stolen?

  “I’m open…,” Brown says, “to litigation.”

  Before he rushes to court, Arnold might take note of the fact that the joke has also been attributed to Jerry Seinfeld as early as 1993. Several other American stand-up comedians also claim ownership. Clearly great comic minds think alike.

  Brown thinks the “coincidence” of jokes turning up in other people’s acts will continue until someone invents a device that can be placed in a gag, which will explode if it is told by another comedian.

  Some of the coincidences that come before the courts are no laughing matter.

  Sally Clark was accused of the murder of her two baby sons. The policeman’s daughter, who had always protested her innocence, was jailed for life in November 1999. She was convicted of smothering eleven-week-old Christopher in December 1996 and shaking eight-week-old Harry to death in January 1998 at the home she shared with her husband Stephen.

  The crux of the case revolved around whether it was conceivable the “crib deaths” of Mrs. Clark’s two children were coincidences.

  The prosecution’s expert witness, an eminent pediatrician told the court that the likelihood of two siblings dying of SIDS or “sudden infant death syndrome” was 1 in 73 million. This was damning evidence against Mrs. Clark and must have had a powerful influence on the jury.

  However, on January 30, 2003, after serving three years in jail, Sally Clark won her appeal and freedom. The convictions were ruled unsafe, as medical evidence that might have cleared her was not heard during her trial. The court also criticized the use in the trial of the statistic putting the chance of two babies in the same family suffering SIDS at 1 in 73 million. It said it had been “grossly misleading,” as the jury started from the incorrect assumption that double crib deaths in a single family were extremely rare. The assumption had been that the cribs deaths were independent events, and so the seventy-three million figure would have been reached by squaring the probability of a single crib death. But multiple crib deaths in one family are not statistically independent. Experts told the appeal court that the risk of a second crib death could, in fact, have been as low as 1 in 100. It was suggested that the prosecution’s expert witness had made a fundamental mathematical error.

  The court had decided that whatever the odds, 73 million to 1, or 100 to 1, the deaths of Sally Clark’s two children had been natural. The fact that she had lost two children was just a tragic coincidence.

  Just months after Sally Clark’s acquittal the trial began of another woman accused of the multiple murder of her infant children—a trial at which the pediatrician was again arguing that the deaths could not be the result of simple coincidence.

  Thirty-five-year-old pharmacist Trupti Patel denied killing her sons Amar and Jamie and daughter Mia between 1997 and 2001—none of them survived beyond three months. She denied she had smothered her babies or restricted their breathing by squeezing their chests.

  In Britain, approximately six hundred children each year die suddenly and unexpectedly at some time between their first week of life and their first birthday. In half of these cases, a clear medic
al reason for the death is found at postmortem—the remaining, unexplained cases are recorded simply as sudden infant death syndrome.

  At the trial of Trupti Patel, the pediatrician stated that “two crib deaths is suspicious, three is murder—unless proved otherwise.”

  The members of the jury, this time, were not convinced. On June 11, 2003, at the end of the six-and-a-half-week trial, they found her not guilty on all three counts of murder. The jury had decided that the deaths of the three babies, as in the case of Sally Clark, had been a tragic coincidence. Whatever the odds against something happening, the fact that odds can be calculated means that it can, and, given enough time, will happen.

  Odds of 73 million to 1, although inaccurately applied in the case of Sally Clark, will, eventually, come up. Even if those had, in fact, been the odds against the deaths of her three children being coincidence, it would not have pointed unerringly to her guilt. A 73 million to 1 chance occurrence isn’t an unimaginable likelihood. If one in every seventy-three million people were green, then there’d be eighty-four green people in the world. Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.

  Judges and juries are regularly asked to weigh up odds of 1 in 3 million—in cases where DNA samples are presented as crucial evidence.

  And, of course, they get it wrong.

  In 1990, Andrew Deen was sentenced to sixteen years in jail for raping three women. The main evidence linking Deen to the attacks was the close match between DNA samples found at the scene of the crimes and those from Deen. At the trial, the forensic scientist presenting the DNA evidence said that the match was so good that the probability of the samples having come from someone other than Deen was 1 in 3 million. In his summing up, the judge told the jury that so large a figure, if correct, “approximates pretty well to certainty.” There could be no coincidence.

  But on appeal the court quashed the conviction, declaring the verdict unsafe. It decided that both the forensic scientist and the judge had fallen into a trap known as the “prosecutor’s fallacy.” They had assumed that the DNA evidence meant that there was only a 3-million-to-1 chance that Deen was not guilty. But they were mistaken.

  For the true picture, the appeal court judges turned to a mathematical theorem constructed by a nineteenth-century cleric. Bayes’ Theorem addresses the laws of “inverse probability.” It provides a formula for working out the impact of new evidence (like DNA samples) on the existing odds of guilt or innocence prior to the introduction of the new evidence.

  If “prior probability” of guilt is small—if there is little other evidence to corroborate the DNA evidence—then even the impressive probabilities of genetic fingerprinting can be dramatically diminished.

  Researchers at the Institute of Environmental Health and Forensic Sciences in Auckland, New Zealand, use crime statistics and “Bayesian reasoning” to estimate typical prior probabilities. They found that even a DNA match with odds of millions to one can be cut down to final odds against innocence of just 3 to 1—leaving plenty of room for “reasonable doubt.”

  So if you are currently stuck in an intractable legal dispute over the probability of something or other having happened, or not happened, as the result of pure coincidence—help is at hand. Try applying Bayes’s handy mathematical formula.

  Good luck.

  6

  LUCK OR COINCIDENCE?

  It’s the day of the Kentucky Derby and you grudgingly hand over your hard-earned $20 for the office pool. Your horse, which has begun with a moderate chance of success, mysteriously chooses to stop half way around the course to admire the stamina and athleticism of its four-legged friends. Your colleague George Robertson wins the jackpot. His horse, a rank outsider, confounds the bookies’ pessimistic expectations. This is the seventh time George has won the sweepstake in ten years.

  Do you say, “Well done George, it’s good to see that the rules of probability are still functioning and that your chances of winning this year were not materially diminished by the fact that you have won so many times before.”

  Like hell you do. You say, “You lucky s.o.b., George. The drinks are on you.”

  It’s hard not to conclude that someone or something is smiling down on the likes of George Robertson, singling them out for good fortune—leaving the rest of us to muddle along the best we can.

  Everything George touches turns to gold. If a nice business trip to Bermuda is in the offing, George gets to wear the shorts. If a promotion is up for grabs, George grabs it. As we know, he wins the Derby pool every year. He won a tidy sum on the football pools a few years back and has even picked up a couple of thousand on the lottery. He’s got a beautiful wife, two well-adjusted, respectful kids, a terrific house (bought outright with an unexpected inheritance) and a luxury car. Yes, George is, indeed, among the luckiest of lucky s.o.b’s.

  But not the luckiest.

  Donald Smith of Amherst, Wisconsin, won the state’s Super Cash game three times. On May 25, 1993, June 17, 1994, and July 30, 1995. He won $250,000 each time.

  Joseph P. Cowley won $3 million in the Ohio lottery in 1987 and retired to Boca Raton, Florida. Six years later he played the Florida Lotto on Christmas Day—and won $20 million.

  In 1985 Evelyn Marie Adams won $4 million on the New Jersey Lottery. Four months later she entered again and won another $1.5 million.

  Why isn’t luck more evenly distributed? What special qualities or mysterious powers are possessed by those few, those lucky few, upon whom Dame Fortune invariably smiles? Is the inordinate amount of good fortune experienced by these lottery winners the result of simple coincidence, or were they born lucky?

  What on earth made gambling-mad Mick Gibbs think he could ever pull off the outrageous wager that finally netted him $912,000 in what has been described as the greatest betting coup of all time?

  Fifty-nine-year-old Mick of the UK, placed a 50 cent stake on a fifteen-part accumulator bet on who would win a long series of games across four different competitive sports.

  The first fourteen parts of his accumulator all came good, defying staggering cumulative odds. The final part of the wager—that the German team Bayern Munich would win a European soccer championship at odds of 12 to 1 looked like a long shot. When the game was played on May 23, 2001, Bayern’s opponents, Valencia, looked set to upset the apple cart when they took a 1–0 lead. Victory for the Spanish side would have meant Mick earned nothing. Bayern managed to tie before the end of the match and the teams had to play extra time.

  Mick was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, pacing up and down in his garden, unable to watch the match. The game—and Mick’s bet—was finally won in the last minute. Bayern won the cup, and Mick won close to $1 million.

  Mick doesn’t put his success down to luck or coincidence. He believes he won the money because of science. He says he spends hours poring over the latest sports news and working out his complicated bets.

  But if all it takes to win a small fortune is a bit of hard work and the appliance of a little science, why aren’t the rest of the world’s habitual gamblers driving around in flashy sports cars, instead of cycling to collect their unemployment checks?

  Can science explain the apparent extraordinary luck of Englishman Charles Wells, the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo?

  Wells’s legendary success did not appear to have involved the use of any system. He walked into the casino in July 1891 and began putting even money bets on red and black, winning nearly every time. When his winnings passed the one hundred thousand francs mark, the “bank” was declared broken, the table was closed and a black “mourning” cloth placed over it. Wells returned the next day to repeat his extraordinary achievement, to the amazement of the casino attendants.

  The third and last time Wells appeared at the casino, he placed his opening bet on number five at odds of 35 to 1. He won. He left his original bet and added his winnings to it. Five came up again. This happened five times in succession. The bank had been broken yet again.

  Extraordinary th
ings do happen in gambling casinos. Evens once came up twenty-eight times in succession at a Monte Carlo casino—against odds of 268 million to 1. But was Wells’s good fortune simply the laws of probability kicking in? Was he the world’s luckiest man? Or was something else going on?

  Wells did not get to enjoy his winnings for long. His luck, or whatever it was, dried up. He got involved in a number of shady deals, was arrested by the French police and charged with fraud. Extradited to Britain, he stood trial and was discovered to have had twenty aliases—his real name was never discovered. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. After his release he went to live in Paris where “the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo” died in poverty in 1926—a broken man.

  The secret of Wells’s amazing achievements at the roulette table was never discovered. It seems unlikely that his gambling feat was the result of pure luck or, indeed, guided by some supernatural force. Although inspiration for gambling success can come from some pretty strange sources.

  On September 15, 1948, a New York—bound commuter train plunged into Newark Bay killing a number of passengers. Front page newspaper photographs showed the train being winched back out of the water. The number 932 could clearly be seen on the side of the rear coach. Dozens of people took this to be a sign that the number had some sort of significance and chose it in that day’s Manhattan numbers game. The number 932 duly came up, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars for the people who had bet on it.

  The good luck experienced by fifteen members of the church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska, didn’t bring them fame or fortune—it saved their lives.

  Choir practice at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice always began at 7:20 on Wednesday evening. At 7:25 P.M. on Wednesday March l, 1950, an explosion demolished the church. The blast forced a nearby radio station off the air and shattered windows in surrounding homes.

  But by an incredible coincidence every one of the choir’s fifteen members escaped injury. Normally punctual, that evening they were all, and for different reasons, late for practice.