Why do we say "per egg" instead of "per clutch"

[Simple Man]

Dave is explaining the same thing as myself but I'm going to give this a crack to help you out. I don't mean to offend you if you don't understand probability. I loved this stuff in school. So here goes...

Probability doesn't work the way you're thinking. I will just use your 1/2 or 50/50 for this explanation but you can follow along with the chart if that's easier. Probability means that the more eggs you have the higher percentage you have to hit your probability (50/50). That is because your odds are applied to each egg (not clutch). For smaller clutches your chances of hitting (50/50) probability are lower. The more eggs you have, the higher the (50/50) probability is that you will hit the expected number. That's why the odds are applied per egg. Even with 100 eggs you never will hit the 100% 50/50 probability just because of the way probability works and the fact that the odds are applied per egg. This is posted online @ www.cornguide.com by Serpwidgets to help breeders understand the chances of successfully hitting based on the amount of genes.I don't know any other way to help you understand it besides reading up on probability yourself. I don't mean this offensively.

Since the predictors give odds per egg, I though it might be useful to show the odds in a different way: expressed in terms of "probability of success."

What do I mean by that? Well, say your desired morph has a 1 in 16 chance according to the predictor. How likely are you to hatch one or more in a clutch of 4, or a clutch of 17? If you have a 1/64 chance per egg of some new triple morph from triple hets, what are your odds of hatching one or more if you've got 47 eggs to hatch?

In these charts "success" is defined as hatching any number of the desired morph... not just one, but one or more. All of the charts are the same thing, just "zoomed" to show finer detail for smaller numbers, and zoomed out to show the odds for up to 150 eggs. They include 1 in 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 "odds per egg" which will cover any combination of hets/homos for up to 4 recessive traits at a time.

First is for 16 eggs:
http://cornguide.com/odds/Eggs016.gif

So, to demonstrate how to read this, if your odds are 1/2 per egg you use the top green area. Follow the line up from the bottom depending on how many eggs you have. If you have 1 egg, your chance of success is 50%. With 2 eggs, it goes up to 75%. With 3 eggs you've got an 87.5% chance. And with 4 eggs, the odds go up to 94%.

Notice that the curve never reaches 100%... probabilities are not guarantees. Which probability equates to saying you "should" succeed? Well, it's up to you to decide what level of "risk" you are comfortable with in your own projects. But these make more sense of the predictions because it's not often that you plan on hatching a single egg at a time.

Regards,

B