1 hour ago, m_m said:

Where is your sampling? The original data? What eras and diseases are you comparing mortality rates from?

And the most important question: what for?? They didn't have today's medicine. People used what they had.

Exactly. And I'm sure we can apply the term evolution here. Folks apply this term everywhere. And if evolutionary processes have occurred, medicine has just changed. It was a change, not development.

Likewise, you can't compare man and an ape, they are different.

This seems confused. To try to sort it out a bit:

1) the data on infant mortality has already been posted in the thread from available sources, so it's pointless for you to demand original data, sampling etc.

2) You most certainly cannot apply the term evolution here, at least not in its biological sense. The thread is about the history of development in human understanding of what is needed for infant health, not about evolution.

3) Having nevertheless set up the Aunt Sally of treating this topic as if it is evolution you then suggest that, according to an evolutionary view, medicine could not be said to have progressed, only "changed". I assume you do this in order to make evolution look ridiculous. But, as nobody with any sense would treat the growth of human knowledge as biological evolution, it is your attempt to do so that that looks ridiculous.

4) And finally, surprise, surprise, we arrive at your perennial preoccupation with denying that mankind is a species of ape. That, I suspect, is what lay behind your rather unclear post. But that's not the subject of the thread either.

57 minutes ago, pinball1970 said:

Countries with highest infant mortality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates

Lowest LEB https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/#google_vignette

LEB was about 35 in the middle ages so you are better off in Chad today then you were then.

Just for clarity, as it is not shown on the graph as reproduced here, the figures are per thousand live births.

16 hours ago, FreeStyle said:

That's just because you're used to reading "scientific" arguments expressed in a cold fashion 😂 but this is just a forum,

It is a science forum specifically so we are going to give arguments based on studies, published work, material from text books and information we gained at Uni.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

1) the data on infant mortality has already been posted in the thread from available sources, so it's pointless for you to demand original data, sampling etc.

Before comparing, you need to have the original data, what to compare with what.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

according to an evolutionary view, medicine could not be said to have progressed, only "changed".

Exactly. I apply the term evolution to medicine, not to infant mortality, which would be natural selection. And you should study what evolution means carefully. Or let's compare YOU with an ape and find out where progress has gone.

Why can you join evolution with religion, and I can not join evolution with medicine?

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

igures are per thousand live births

Thanks for clarifying, as you can see sub Sahara is not the place to have kids statistically speaking.

Also worth noting that Africa receives around 60 billion dollars in foreign aid every year so LEB and IM would be bleaker and even closer to dark age figures if that was removed.

2.6 trillion estimated since 1960 (a Google search)

So my comparison still stands.

9 minutes ago, m_m said:

Or let's compare YOU with an ape and find out where progress has gone.

Already done by Linnaeus and Blumenbach 250 years ago, we are in the same taxa as Pan troglodytes up to genus.

6 hours ago, m_m said:

Where is your sampling? The original data? What eras and diseases are you comparing mortality rates from?

And the most important question: what for?? They didn't have today's medicine. People used what they had.

What for? It was the question that was asked.

6 hours ago, m_m said:

Exactly. And I'm sure we can apply the term evolution here. Folks apply this term everywhere. And if evolutionary processes have occurred, medicine has just changed. It was a change, not development.

Likewise, you can't compare man and an ape, they are different.

I don’t think you understand what compare means.

2 hours ago, m_m said:

Before comparing, you need to have the original data, what to compare with what.

You can compare the results of analysis of the data. We do it all the time. (and there are lots of times comparing the raw data wouldn’t tell you what you want to know)

2 hours ago, m_m said:

Exactly. I apply the term evolution to medicine, not to infant mortality, which would be natural selection. And you should study what evolution means carefully. Or let's compare YOU with an ape and find out where progress has gone.

As you pointed out earlier, progress (development) does not apply to biological evolution. Why would you imply the opposite a short while later?

2 hours ago, m_m said:

Why can you join evolution with religion, and I can not join evolution with medicine?

If you want to talk about medicine evolving you need to make it clear you aren’t talking about biological evolution, since the definitions are different. But it has, and that was an answer to an inquiry, not the topic of discussion.

And who “joins” evolution with religion? (that’s rhetorical; please don’t sidetrack things further by answering)

5 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

LEB was about 35 in the middle ages so you are better off in Chad today then you were then.

How reliable do you think those statistics are?

I can't speak for Chad, but this is the online birth registration portal for Nigeria. Because reasons, I can't comment too much, but feel free to ask yourselves whether it is voluntary, free of charge, free of bureaucratic hurdles etc., likely to be taken up by the entire population?

Similarly:

3 hours ago, m_m said:

Before comparing, you need to have the original data, what to compare with what.

Exactly. I apply the term evolution to medicine, not to infant mortality, which would be natural selection. And you should study what evolution means carefully. Or let's compare YOU with an ape and find out where progress has gone.

Why can you join evolution with religion, and I can not join evolution with medicine?

What? We have the data on infant mortality today and we have estimates from the c.19th and from the Medieval period. We need nothing more.

The rest of your post doesn't make much sense. I have no idea what you mean by "joining" religion with evolution. Evolution is natural science. Religion isn't. The only attempt to join them I'm aware of was so-called "Intelligent Design", which is pseudoscience. And it makes no sense to connect evolution in its biological sense with the development of medicine, as the latter is due to increasing human knowledge, which is not determined by evolutionary processes.

As for this ape business, which for some weird reason seems to consume you, that's not for discussion here.

Edited August 7Aug 7 by exchemist

3 hours ago, m_m said:

And you should study what evolution means carefully. Or let's compare YOU with an ape and find out where progress has gone.

What an amazing display of hypocrisy! Admonishing others to study evolution in one sentence, and making a classic creationist mistake about evolution in the next! Bravo!

22 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

How reliable do you think those statistics are?

I can't speak for Chad, but this is the online birth registration portal for Nigeria. Because reasons, I can't comment too much, but feel free to ask yourselves whether it is voluntary, free of charge, free of bureaucratic hurdles etc., likely to be taken up by the entire population?

Similarly:

One can be distrustful of data relating to populations, populations are messy, biology is messy.

How many people contracted COVID in 2020? How Many died? How many died in 1918 of Spanish flu? What is the world population today? What was it 500 years ago?

We can only work with the evidence and data we have, so the population and IM in Nigeria are always going to be best estimates like any other population data.

The question is, can we do anything useful with that data? Is it complete untrustworthy? Are we able to tease out anything meaningful?

You do not think the government data specifically does not reflect the real number in Nigeria?

Ok, what about the W.H.O? C.D.C? Reading Hamlets (specifically Nigeria) and other scientific organizations and NGOs who have offices in those countries?

We are not talking about one data set here, programmes relating to disease control, clean water, literacy in Africa rely on statistics of this kind to target resources efficiently.

Scientific studies in the area relating to HIV, EBOLA, Marburg, death from malnutrition, Malaria, malnourishment require accurate population data.

6 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

You do not think the government data specifically does not reflect the real number in Nigeria?

Ok, what about the W.H.O? C.D.C? Reading Hamlets (specifically Nigeria) and other scientific organizations and NGOs who have offices in those countries?

+/- 20 million?

5 hours ago, swansont said:

What for? It was the question that was asked.

I don’t think you understand what compare means.

You can compare the results of analysis of the data. We do it all the time. (and there are lots of times comparing the raw data wouldn’t tell you what you want to know)

As you pointed out earlier, progress (development) does not apply to biological evolution. Why would you imply the opposite a short while later?

If you want to talk about medicine evolving you need to make it clear you aren’t talking about biological evolution, since the definitions are different. But it has, and that was an answer to an inquiry, not the topic of discussion.

And who “joins” evolution with religion? (that’s rhetorical; please don’t sidetrack things further by answering)

7 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

I can't speak for Chad, but this is the online birth registration portal for Nigeria. Because reasons, I can't comment too much, but feel free to ask yourselves whether it is voluntary, free of charge, free of bureaucratic hurdles etc., likely to be taken up by the entire population?

These are best estimates, how well do we trust data regarding third world countries on anything?

Is your point regarding LEB and IM is wrong in these areas?

13 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

+/- 20 million?

Is that your error bar? About 20%, is that too large to extract meaningful information about the population of Nigeria?

Before the Human Genome project was completed we were taught that the number of coding genes were in the region of 25,000 (today around 20,000) my good friend was studying physics at the same time and the age of the universe was thought to be between 8-16 billion years old, a factor of two difference.

Closer to home we have the Hubble tension, 10% difference between the two numbers, two approaches. It is an issue hence tension BUT it is also useful and is an active area research.

3 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

These are best estimates, how well do we trust data regarding third world countries on anything?

So? Data generally has some kind of experimental error. How precise and accurate does it need to be? Does it need to be 0.01%? Don’t you still get useful information if it’s 1% or 10%, or (in some cases) just order-of-magnitude estimates?

1 hour ago, swansont said:

So? Data generally has some kind of experimental error. How precise and accurate does it need to be? Does it need to be 0.01%? Don’t you still get useful information if it’s 1% or 10%, or (in some cases) just order-of-magnitude estimates?

That was exactly my point to Sethoflagos.

2 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

That was exactly my point to Sethoflagos.

It depends a lot on how that data is used. Eg two censuses ten years apart may provide an accurate enough population value to give reasonable estimates of say incidence of haemorrhagic fevers per 100,000 per annum. But subtraction retains the same absolute numerical error in a far smaller quantity, so the uncertainty in population growth per annum is enormous.

Hence if population is determined not by recent census but by an old one extrapolated by some historic growth rate, it's likely to be so far out as to render derived statistics no better than OoM.

3 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

It depends a lot on how that data is used. Eg two censuses ten years apart may provide an accurate enough population value to give reasonable estimates of say incidence of haemorrhagic fevers per 100,000 per annum. But subtraction retains the same absolute numerical error in a far smaller quantity, so the uncertainty in population growth per annum is enormous.

What, numerically, constitutes “enormous”?

3 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

Hence if population is determined not by recent census but by an old one extrapolated by some historic growth rate, it's likely to be so far out as to render derived statistics no better than OoM.

What data set(s) are doing this? It seems oddly specific for a general inquiry about worldwide events.

4 minutes ago, swansont said:

What, numerically, constitutes “enormous"

St. dev. of same OoM as the estimated value. ie. Not 100% sure whether it's gone up or down

8 minutes ago, swansont said:

What data set(s) are doing this? It seems oddly specific for a general inquiry about worldwide events.

National data for population, births, and deaths in sub-saharan Africa, specifically Nigeria. It's just an example I have some working knowledge of.

On 8/7/2025 at 2:05 AM, m_m said:

you can't compare man and an ape, they are different.

This actually made me burst out laughing. How can you tell there is any difference if you don't compare them?

8 hours ago, npts2020 said:

This actually made me burst out laughing. How can you tell there is any difference if you don't compare them?

They are different in their being, objectively, not subjectively. They don't need to be compared. Like colours, or numbers.

Likewise, ages are different by default, there is no need to compare them. Because..what for?

Edited August 11Aug 11 by m_m

3 hours ago, m_m said:

They are different in their being, objectively, not subjectively. They don't need to be compared. Like colours, or numbers.

Likewise, ages are different by default, there is no need to compare them. Because..what for?

If you do not wish to, or see the utility of it, then you don’t have to participate.

But that doesn’t mean you should disrupt the discussion of those who do. We are not obligated to justify it to you.

13 hours ago, npts2020 said:

This actually made me burst out laughing. How can you tell there is any difference if you don't compare them?

Yeah it is kinda funny. +1

4 hours ago, m_m said:

They are different in their being, objectively, not subjectively

You are not reading the replies. They are not different they are VERY closely related in terms of morphology and genetics.

So close in terms of morphology that they share the same taxa all the way up to genus.

Humans and chimps are both Eukaryotes, we are animals, embryo has a notochord, we suckle our young, we are primates, we are Hominidae so we have large brains, no tails, extend child care among other things AND we are about 98-99% genetically similar.

That's closer than mice and rats (both rodents and 85%-90% similar genetically) or Indian and African Elephants (about 95% genetically similar)

Chimps and baboons are about 91-93% similar.

So, emphatically no, they are not different, they are closest cousins on the planet.

Last post to you on this so as not to derail further.

2 hours ago, swansont said:

If you do not wish to, or see the utility of it, then you don’t have to participate.

But that doesn’t mean you should disrupt the discussion of those who do. We are not obligated to justify it to you.

Ok, I would like to clarify my words. One thing when you compare to find differences and similarities, and another case to judge, good/bad, better/worse.

Edited August 11Aug 11 by m_m

11 minutes ago, m_m said:

Ok, I would like to clarify my words. One thing when you compare to find differences and similarities, and another case to judge, good/bad, better/worse.

Saying one number is bigger or smaller than another is not judgement. The OP asked why a number was bigger in the past as compared to now. And it was answered, because we know reasons why it’s so.

1 hour ago, swansont said:

Saying one number is bigger or smaller than another is not judgement. The OP asked why a number was bigger in the past as compared to now. And it was answered, because we know reasons why it’s so.

OK, swansont, thank you for your patience, really.

Edited August 11Aug 11 by m_m

2 hours ago, m_m said:

Ok, I would like to clarify my words. One thing when you compare to find differences and similarities, and another case to judge, good/bad, better/worse.

So don't say compare when you really mean judge. One looks for similarities or differences, the other seeks to form an opinion based on specific criteria. Comparing is more objective, while judgement is more often subjective, and science tries to remove as much subjectivity as possible.