I am not sure that I’m glad to discover that I’m the 74,770,968,343rd person to have lived since history began. This precise calculation (or should it be estimate or guess?) was performed using a formula from the UN Population Fund, the organisation which last weekend was publicising the birth of the 7 billionth person to be alive today.
I understand that the rate of growth of the world’s population is a matter for concern. And I understand that marketing gurus like to personalise abstract issues in order to draw people’s attention to them. Well-meaning charities like “Adopt-a-child” do the same thing.
But there are dangers in this approach. By focusing on one child, we tend to lose sight of all the others. And by producing a count apparently accurate to one in 74 billion, a rather false impression is given about the precision of the analytical tools available.
And gullible Christians may be misled into counting backwards to number 1 and then being disappointed or even enraged to discover that the very first person is not merely shrouded in the Old Testament adham [=humankind] myth, but both biologically and philosophically impossible to envisage.
