And you easily fell into the trap. Have you ever actually plotted out this probability curve. It is a sigmoidal curve and your linear approximation is only accurate when the probability is close to 0. The interesting part of that curve occurs in the sigmoidal portion because that is where the probabilities of the particular mutation occurring become reasonable for that event occurring. You have chopped off that portion of the curve and with your approximation will not know how many replications are needed for that event to occur.
It is precisely multiplication and I have left out no key parts. My math has been examined by experts in probability theory. But if you think I’ve left out something, show us.
This is valid reasoning.
I’ll give you a small point here. Competition is not a stochastic process where the multiplication rule would be applied but adaptation is a stochastic process where the multiplication rule must be used to compute the joint probability of microevolutionary steps.
Kleinman