(July 23, 2013 at 9:41 pm)Michael Schubert Wrote: If people choke at a rate as low as the number you cited (again, source?)
I did a Google search when I read his comment, and the links I got indicated that in the USA around 2,500 people die annually by choking on something. So his numbers seem correct.
Bear in mind that this is choking deaths, which may not have been the point of the original passage you quoted (which referred to choking as "dangerous" but did not specifically refer to fatalities). People choke on stuff pretty frequently, even on their own spittle. Most of the time it's a minor inconvenience and not life-threatening.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
