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More or Less
The death toll in Syria
00:09:35
As global leaders remain divided on whether to carry out a military strike against in...
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Transcript35 lines
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Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldserveys.com podcasts
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this is the short
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edition of More or Less, first broadcast
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on the BBC World Service. Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which looks at the numbers in the news and in life. I'm Tim Harford. This week, can it be true that
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right handed people live on average nine years longer than left handed people?
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But first, the all consuming subject of the war in Syria and the prospect of Western intervention after a chemical weapons attack to the east of Damascus. How many people were killed by this attack? The US government says 1,429, including 426 children. France, which has committed itself to joining the US in military action, says 281 people died. The British Foreign Office hasn't given an official number at all, but the Joint Intelligence Committee says that at least 350 people were killed. And Moscow says it's ludicrous to say that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons at all. All very puzzling. I called up Kelly Greenhill, a professor of political science at Tufts University in the US and co author of a book about the politics of crime and conf statistics called Sex, Drugs and Body Counts. I asked her why the numbers varied so wildly, even between the US and France who've resolved to take military action together.
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C
The Americans acknowledge that they're not only relying on hospital sources and morgue reports, but also on activist testimony, on social media and on unidentified intelligence sources we aren't privy to as well as so far as we can tell, some of the numbers that are coming out are based on numbers of rocket gets fired, wind patterns, dispersal patterns and other sets of expectations. The French, as I understand it, are relying on casualty counts and they're only counting people where they can identify a first and last name. That said, they have also intimated that their mathematical models do suggest that casualty numbers might be as high as about 1500, more or less consistent with the US claim. The British have been rather tight lipped, but so far as I can tell, the British are essentially arguing as well that they're only using numbers of people that they can actually identify as casualties.
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So these numbers then really they're actually answering a different question. So the French are saying we have a reasonably well verified list of 281 named people who have died. And the Americans are saying we think it's plausible that 14, 1500 people could have died based on a collage of different evidence, including Various estimates.
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Well, they're claiming to be answering the same question, but Tim, you're absolutely right. They're speaking to a different set of issues and based on a different set of expectations.
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Which I guess leads to your point, which is that this is all about politics.
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It's at least in large part about politics. And a large number is arguably particularly important to the Obama administration as it's resting its case for military action in no small part on the scale of the attack. And the argument is that there's something about this chemical attack on August 21 that is qualitatively different both in scale and scope than was previously the case.
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Professor Kelly Greenhill of Tufts University, the United nations says that around 100,000 people have died in the Syrian Civil War so far. They get this estimate from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a non profit outfit that in turn relies on information supplied by a number of different groups on the ground in Syria. I spoke to Megan Price of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and I began by asking her how we go about defining a conflict death.
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There is not an official definition. There's a spectrum of what is considered a conflict related death. The narrowest definition would be a very specific violent outcome of the conflict, someone who is shot or is a victim of a bombing or that sort of a violent episode in the conflict. But you could also consider someone who needed medical help and was unable to reach the hospital due to a checkpoint or due to a roadblock as also being a conflict related death.
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And are we counting deaths only on one side?
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The groups are doing their best to count all victims and it really varies depending upon the group's access and connections in the country. Some of the groups have stated that because the regime is not cooperating with them, they are unable to verify regime victims and so they do not publish that data because they do not consider it to be sufficiently verified.
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Meghan Price, her team have counted almost 100,000 deaths in the civil war in Syria between the beginning of the conflict and April this year. Because of the way these deaths have to be verified, she thinks that's likely to be an underestimate of the true death toll. You're listening to more or less now. Loyal left handed listener Claire has been worried about something she heard on BBC Radio.
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Right handed people live on average nine years longer than left handed people.
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I was absolutely horrified.
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I thought that can't possibly be right.
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I turned to Chris McManus, professor of psychology and Medical Education at University College London and the author of Right Hand, Left Hand. The claim is that left handers die nine years earlier on average than right handers. How plausible is that? On a scale of completely plausible to
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vaguely plausible, it's not at all plausible. If this were true, it would be the largest single predictor we had of life expectancy. It would be like smoking 120 cigarettes a day plus doing a number of other dangerous things simultaneously.
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Is it pure myth?
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The data originally said that there was a nine year difference. There was a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine which is very prestigious, published by Diane Halpern and Stan, and they argued that they had data that showed this. And it followed up from another paper a couple of years earlier in the even more prestigious Nature, which was actually entitled Do Right Handers Live Longer? So there's a good pedigree for these claims. They're just utterly wrong. That's the problem.
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So what's the nature of the mistake?
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Well, it's worth looking in detail at what they did. They did this in Southern California and lists are published in Southern California of all the people who've died. And what they did was to send questions round to the recently bereaved families and ask them whether or not they're relative was right or left handed. Amongst other things, they found that the average age at death of the left handers was about nine years younger than the average age at death of the right handers. So they then concluded on that basis that the left handers died earlier.
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Which seems plausible.
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It does indeed, and this is a very subtle error. And their mistake was that they only looked at the dead.
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Now this sounds really weird. The issue is that left handers are more common than they used to be, and we'll explain why that is in a moment. But why does that make a difference? Let me give an exaggerated example. Imagine that there were no left handers at all born before 1973, 40 years ago. Now let's look at death records and ask who amongst the dead is left handed? Well, we know that in our exaggerated scenario, all left handers were born after 1973. So when you look at the people who died in 2013, surprise, surprise, all of the left handers among them died at or before the age of 40. But that doesn't mean that left handers in general are at any higher risk of death. All of this raises the question, why are younger people more likely to be left handed than the elderly? Chris McManus explains.
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The natural rate of left handedness is around 10 or 11%, but the rate was pushed down artificially during the Victorian period.
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People had it thrashed out of them
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partly, but I think also it was quite difficult to be a left hander. I think what happened was left handers became very conspicuous. Suddenly they went to work. Factories were using machines that were designed for right handers and the left handers looked awkward. And then compulsory schooling came along and they were obliged to sit in classrooms and try and write with their right hand using an ink pen. And they made blotches and made a mess. And the result of all of this that left handers became very visible suddenly and I think probably stigmatised.
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And so people who were born left handers, identified as right handers, acted as right handers. And when they died, their families would have said, yes, they were right handed. They were right handed.
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The other thing is that actually the left handers had fewer children in the 19th century and the result of that was that the genes which make people left handed became less frequent. So fewer left handers were born.
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Chris McManus. If there's a number you'd like us to investigate, email us please at more or lessbc.co.uk. you can get our free download at our website, bbcworldservice.com more or less. Until next week. Goodbye.
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