Opinion – Suzana Herculano-Houzel: The preposterous statistic of what was already without being

Through a happy combination of sabbatical semester, science and vaccines, I was able to spend my daughter’s birthday with her, in Rio, preceded, in a double additional stroke of luck, by her training as a political scientist and by the birth of her little godfather, Luna. Births are always magical: that moment when you stop thinking life is perfectly normal and realize that generating a new life is really fabulous. Furthermore, discovering oneself no longer a student, but more a supposedly productive individual on the planet, is something that invites pause for reflection.

Whence my daughter woke up philosophizing, from the height of her newly completed 22 years of life: “Mother, have you ever thought that since there are always pregnant people in the world, the average number of skeletons per person is always greater than one? And on average , do you also have more than one brain per body?”.

In fact. I went to look, and more than one in every 100 people (women, men and non-binaries) in Brazil has two brains and two skeletons — or more! It would make a lady headline in a newspaper: “Scientists map life on planet and discover 100 million living things with 102 million brains—what do you mean?”

The perfectly correct yet biologically preposterous statistic serves as a reminder that, without context, numbers are just numbers and fulfill the owner’s wishes.

For example, it’s easy to make a death toll look higher or lower than it is: just find the benchmark that suits the need at the time. Deaths… per inhabitant? By case? By vaccinated person?

The unreasonable statistic of more than one brain on average per person on the planet (and no, we don’t have a second brain in the gut, please) goes back to the legend of the “average” or “normal” brain as well.

The “normal” brain, calculated mathematically as a reference for statistics and function mapping exams, does not exist. Each of us has a slightly different brain, which makes us individuals as well as similar to others, which makes us members of the same species, human beings recognizable as such. Similar but different. Similar, And different.

Nonsense statistics further remind that life, like death, is a process.

Luna at the same time did not exist and already lived in the bodies of her mother and father before the two parties met, like so many of her other sisters and brothers who at the same time already are and will never become.

To my students, I ask “When does life begin?” and I let them realize that all life at the same time was already being and gradually becomes. The question, in fact, is when the second brain and skeleton, in some formative state, come to count as a new person, rounding off the statistic.

In Luna’s case, the answer is now obvious. Welcome Dear.