Actually, the question in the thread title isn't the one I want to ask, but the one I want to ask doesn't fit in the little box.
I was stopped by a couple of Mormons on the street today. It was a surprisingly fun conversation. They were intelligent and articulate (well, one of them was, the other had a couple of well-rehearsed metaphors which he obviously found effective but which were actually terrible) and we had a good old back and forth. Needless to say, I remained an atheist at the end of the conversation and they remained Mormons. There was only one point on which I had to say "well, that sounds incredibly unlikely to me, but I don't have knowledge of the specific facts in order to counter that" (or would have done, had it not been more or less irrelevant to the point we were actually discussing). One of them said that before the advent of medical science it was said that 80% of women should die in childbirth. However the figures showed the opposite and only 20% of women died during childbirth.
Now, what I can't find, and can't work out how it would be calculated in any scientifically robust way, is any figures for how many women, by rights, should die from childbirth with no medical intervention. It seems to me that if there were such a huge disparity between how many women were predicted to die and how many actually did die, that it'd be a relatively well-known fact.
So, something completely made up, something mangled beyond recognition, or a surprising fact? Anybody know?
I was stopped by a couple of Mormons on the street today. It was a surprisingly fun conversation. They were intelligent and articulate (well, one of them was, the other had a couple of well-rehearsed metaphors which he obviously found effective but which were actually terrible) and we had a good old back and forth. Needless to say, I remained an atheist at the end of the conversation and they remained Mormons. There was only one point on which I had to say "well, that sounds incredibly unlikely to me, but I don't have knowledge of the specific facts in order to counter that" (or would have done, had it not been more or less irrelevant to the point we were actually discussing). One of them said that before the advent of medical science it was said that 80% of women should die in childbirth. However the figures showed the opposite and only 20% of women died during childbirth.
Now, what I can't find, and can't work out how it would be calculated in any scientifically robust way, is any figures for how many women, by rights, should die from childbirth with no medical intervention. It seems to me that if there were such a huge disparity between how many women were predicted to die and how many actually did die, that it'd be a relatively well-known fact.
So, something completely made up, something mangled beyond recognition, or a surprising fact? Anybody know?
via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=267023&goto=newpost
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