Look, the chances of any of this taking place, short of some medical crisis, are somewhere between exceedingly improbable and utterly impossible.
It is also exceedingly improbable.
It is exceedingly improbable that Akin set out to maintain, or even suggest, that rape is or can be legitimate — legitimate, that is, in the sense of being somehow O.K. What he meant is that while all rapes are bad, some are worse than others.
The only reason Mr Carroll is being raked over the coals is because the play happened to end in an exceedingly improbable interception.
It was exceedingly improbable, he said, that the impulse to feel sympathy with others, and to try to address their needs a instinct which, he allowed, did not embrace all members of the species, but only one's familiars was acquired by learning.
The present results suggest that the preexistence of long non-random coding sequences in random DNA is exceedingly improbable.
None of the thousands of implicit supporters of that majority view has ever tried to explain how such an exceedingly improbable transition might have occurred.
The evolution of a fully cooperative network would be exceedingly improbable and more difficult the larger the number of constituent residues, as all of the residues would need to arise through random drift with a selective advantage accruing only once the entire network was in place.
When, in one of his earlier memoirs, he turns his attention to Peter Watson — the millionaire who financed Cyril Connolly's magazine, Horizon, and had a series of exceedingly handsome and improbable boyfriends — the man's wealth and élan serve only to magnify the extent to which constructive and destructive impulses exist in the same person, perhaps in any person.
But many continued to credit a story that, while improbable, was also strangely plausible, and appealing.
What scientists understand about cultural evolution suggests that, while improbable, it may be possible to move cultures in such directions.
