Corycia

The other day at work during an afternoon coffee break, the conversation moved round to the question of how many people you could fit onto the Isle of Wight. There was much heated opinion, with opponents maintaining firmly on one side that you could easily fit the entire population of the world onto that small-but-perfectly-formed island off the South Coast, whilst others just as stridently claiming that you couldn’t; there was no consensus. The topic then shifted onto how many people had ever lived: the oft-quoted statement was made that half the people who had ever lived were alive today, and supported by most people in the room. I wasn’t sure about this, having heard somewhere before that the dead outnumber the living by six to one. I decided to find out something about both of these asserted ‘facts’.

Like any proper scientist should, I did my own calculations about the Isle of Wight. First, an assumption: when trying to fit onto the Isle of Wight, people can’t just stand on each other’s shoulders or anything like that; after all, if you could stand on the shoulders of someone below you, could fit the entire world’s population onto an area the size of a paving stone. That would be a pointless calculation: so there’s only one layer of people. But how much surface area does one person need? I assumed something like 50cm x 30cm: some people are smaller, some bigger, but it’s probably about right (use a tape-measure on yourself to try it out!). Next, what is the surface area of the Isle of Wight? Obviously, I got the information from Wikipedia (answer: 380 sq.km) like I did for the world’s population (6.6 billion). It’s then trivial to work out that you can fit about 2.5 billion people onto the island. We could assume everyone is thin (unlikely these days with our obesity epidemic), and say they need 40cm x 20cm instead. Nope, still not enough space on the island though: only 4.75 billion can fit if you assume they’re this smaller size.

So it isn’t true that the world’s population can fit onto the Isle of Wight. However, you could have fitted everyone who was alive in 1950: the population was only 2.5 billion back then – maybe that’s when this statement was originally made…. But, you can now still easily fit the population of the UK into the 380 sq.km on this island; but I don’t think they could all get onto the pier at Ryde.

What about the next statement, that half of all the people who have ever lived are alive today? Unfortunately, this is also not true: according to an article by the Population Research Bureau, it’s a hard estimate to make (I was a bit lazy so I didn’t do that one myself!), but the total number who have ever lived is way over 25 billion, maybe much more (the PRB suggest 120 billion, which is a lot of people – but see below). So, maybe interestingly, the dead do greatly outnumber the living.

The above two examples are maybe not that interesting in themselves, but they illustrate something often seen, both today and presumably much in the past: that there are plenty of commonly-believed things that just aren’t true. Arguing about people fitting onto the Isle of Wight or how many people have ever lived sounds inconsequential in itself, but there are plenty of so-called facts that have important repercussions in the way people go about their lives.

An important example of damaging misunderstanding is a statement I often hear whenever religion is talked about – particularly about Christianity, and I guess more and more it’s said in when Islam is mentioned. I have lost count of the number of people who, almost as a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the word ‘religion’, state baldly that ‘wars about religion have killed more people than anything else’, or words to that effect. Now, regardless of whether you practice some sort of religion or whether you are an atheist, one should at least try to see whether this statement is true before subscribing to it.

So we ask the question: ‘Is it true?’ Is it true that wars, or other conflicts that are religiously-based, have caused more deaths than any other conflict? I wondered about this question, and I wonder still – but I offer the following information at least which may dent the above assertion. We have reasonable grounds to think that the major wars of the 20th Century, with their ‘advantages’ of mechanisation and modern mass-killing weaponry, have allowed enormous numbers of people to be killed, both on the field and in strategic offensives. It is also generally accepted that more deaths were caused in those 20th-century conflicts than in any previous period in history, in part simply due to there being larger populations of people available to take part in that conflict. For example, The First World War is said to be responsible for the deaths of nine million people, the Second for the deaths of 60 million.

We should also consider the Russian Revolution. Whilst not a ‘war’ between two nations, the Russian Revolution was responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 2 million people, either killed or from starvation. After that, the Great Purge instigated by Stalin’s regime against its own citizens resulted in at least 1.2 million deaths, and surely many more that have not been documented. Some historians estimate that overall, Stalin was responsible for over 20 million deaths (for example, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Re-Assessment).

On to Mao and China: the Revolution/Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution – jointly, another testament to the 20th Century. We have death tolls of maybe 2.5 million during the civil war, over 25 million due to the famine brought about partly by the Great Leap Forward, and perhaps more than two million during the Cultural Revolution (although some people dispute these numbers vigorously).

That’s probably enough numbers. But there are some things to note about what’s presented above. Firstly, none of these conflicts have anything whatsoever to do with religion. They were all motivated by strong belief systems of course, but one thing they have in common with each other is that they were all secular movements. World War One was primarily a struggle about imperial power, WW2 a misguided notion about the ethnic superiority of a so-called nation, and the Soviet and Chinese movements were self-consciously anti-religious. Of course, cynics could say that these latter movements were manipulated by the power-seeking aspirations of a few lucky (and obviously able) people – Hitler, Stalin and Mao – but it would be a stretch, to say the least, to suggest for example that Hitler had a Christian frame of mind when he was persecuting and ultimately attempting to eliminate the Jews. So when people say that most deaths from conflict are caused by religion, they are wrong. It isn’t true.

So why are statements of this sort believed uncritically, often without any sort of thought at all? One can think of many such ‘facts’: received wisdom which turns out to be nothing of the sort. Joel Best has written about this phenomenon, which he has termed the ‘mutant statistic’. Simply put, a statement is believed without bothering to think about what it means, if two things about that statement are true:

1. It requires a bit of consideration to find out if it is true or not.
2. It reinforces a pre-existing prejudice in the mind of the hearer.

The original statement – above about religious wars being the cause of most deaths – is a perfect example of this. Firstly, it’s quite hard to work out how many people were killed in historical wars, sometimes in part due to the storytellers who documented those battles embellishing those stories to make them sound better; perversely, it sounds better to say some knight ‘killed ten thousand Moors’ than that he only did in a couple. Secondly, we are apt to see the past as being necessarily more primitive, and therefore more superstitious, than us ‘modern folk’. A past filled with pixies and magic must mean that all wars then were motivated by such considerations; the fact that most religions today were born in that ‘primitive’ past just adds weight to the prejudice.

If this is not convincing, Joel Best presents another example which shows how false (and with study, idiotic) statements are accepted at face value by both the media and the public. An article by Sautter in 1995 in a well-known journal made the statement ‘Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled’. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? After all, everyone knows that gun crime is an increasing problem not just in America but over the Western and wider world. The media report lots of scary stories about how guns are used in crime: I saw one myself just last night. And this sort of statement is so scary it’s used by campaigners to bolster their efforts to curb gun ownership, for example here and here. But, it isn’t true. As Best illustrates, imagine if only 1 child was shot dead in 1950. Then double it each year, 2,4,8,16,32,64…. By 1994 you would have 17.6 trillion children shot dead each year – just in America! That’s a lot, about 150 times more people than have ever lived, in fact. As we started out, a little thought (and maths) shows that the statement is actually not just false, but complete rubbish.

So, when you hear or see statements of ‘fact’, ask yourselves three questions. First, is it true? Second, how do they know? But, most importantly, what are they actually saying? You’ll find that under this simple method of cross-examination, many of the things you read in the paper, or hear people say, dissolve and are either patently false or – worse – meaningless. I’ll leave you with an exercise to illustrate this:

‘Eskimos have thirty different words for snow.‘

If you got this far, thanks for reading: I hope you found it interesting.