COLOUR OF BABIES’ EYES FORETOLD?

Taranaki Daily News, 4 August 1934, Page 3 (Supplement)

COLOUR OF BABIES’ EYES FORETOLD?

Statistical Wizards Make Big Claims For Future 44TN TIME it will probably be £ possible for statisticians to estimate how many blue-eyed or brown-eyed children are likely to be born in this country in any year.” This claim to apparently magical power was made at the recent cen-

tenary meeting of the Royal Statistical Society in England. Other equally astonishing predictions showed that statisticians are indeed the real magicians of this age, served slavishly as they are by those almost omnipotent genii: Figures. Among the British statisticians present was Mr G. Findlay Shirras, Principal Professor of Economics at Gujarat College, Bombay University, who told, an inquirer that statistical work in India had recently proved that 94 out of every 100 of the women bear children. Figures have a very definite relation to every family in the world — as Professor Shirras made clear. “If the first child born in a family is a boy,” he said, “the chances are three to one that boys will predominate in that family. If the first child born is a girl, the chances of preponderance of girls are three to two.”

But these achievements are trifling compared with what statisticians have already been able to do in the spheres of industry and economics. And they are soothsayers to whose warnings, and prognostications the Caesars of commerce dare not turn a heedless ear. Statisticians have discovered that we have an excellent chance of living at least four years longer than our grandparents did. Plumbing the depths of the last census they brought to light the fact that married people live longer than those who remain single. The result of their further researches was a warning to widows that their state of life was less conducive to longevity than that of either wife or spinster-.