Bbc how many people are there in the world

The claim was initially reported on BBC News too. But can it really be true that Scotland is home to almost a fifth of the world's redheads? So where did Hitchins get the figure from? It turns out it was a mistake. Nobody really knows the exact [number]. In the heat of the moment, it seems, he simply got his words muddled, and that proportion of redheads in Scotland became something very different.

This is what happens when you let comedians be spokespeople," says Hitchins. So if we can now confidently say that a fifth of the world's redheads do not live in Scotland, do we know what proportion actually do? Other research has shown we look to the eyes, mouth and nose, in that order. Unless you have particularly rare features, you may have literally thousands of doppelgangers Credit: Francois Brunelle.

Meanwhile more than one in ten people have round faces, according to research funded by a cosmetics company. Finally — how much hair is there out there? A simple calculation male x brown eyes x blonde x round face x fleshy nose x short hair x full beard reveals the probability of a person possessing all these features is just over one in , 0. That would give our guy no less than 74, potential doppelgangers. But judging by the number of celebrity look-alikes out there, it might not be far off.

People of different genders can share facial types Credit: Francois Brunelle. The simplest way to guess would be to estimate the number of possible faces and compare it to the number of people alive today. You might expect that even if there are 7. It takes very little time to collect the first few coupons. The trouble is finding the last few: on average drawing the last one takes about 50 draws on its own, so to collect all 50 you need about No one has any good idea what the first number is.

Indeed, it may never be possible to say definitively, since the perception of facial resemblance is subjective. Some people have trouble recognising themselves in photos, while others rarely forget a face. And how we perceive similarity is heavily influenced by familiarity.

Friewald agrees. Why are we so interested anyway? Research has shown we judge similar looking-people to be more trustworthy and attractive — a factor thought to contribute to our voting choices.

It may stem back to our deep evolutionary past, when facial resemblance was a useful indicator of kinship. In general, the BBC covers both sides of stories, with a slight bias in favor of the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing of information. Although they have failed a fact-check, they appropriately issued a correction.

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