ScienceEurope
Statistics
Someone begins counting people instead of guessing
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Graunt's work produced the first life table, on which life insurance rests. The line continued with Quetelet's "average man", Nightingale's diagrams of causes of death in the Crimean War, and eventually the whole of modern social science. The other side followed close behind: the same methods were used to rank populations and justify eugenics.
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John Graunt studied London's bills of mortality and found patterns: how many died of what, how many boys and girls were born, how long people lived. It was the start of governing societies by numbers.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org