Reply to Solow: Sense and nonsense in the choice of extinction priors

Solow (1) raises a priority dispute over an equation, suggests that my Bayesian method of inferring extinction probabilities (2) is too liberal, and draws attention to an entirely different way to handle the prior specification. None of these points are helpful, and all require discussion. Solow describes his equation 1 as a formal expression for my verbally stated equation (2) and cites his paper (3) to suggest that he derived it first. The two are similar because they fix the conditionals by incorporating an equation first published by Goodman (4). However, they are not the same: Solow sums …