"If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while all the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis have eight, or nine, or ten--it's simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?"
I don’t remember the details but Stephen Jay Gould has an interesting origin story for some systems of racial classification: something about the number five?
I don’t remember the details but Stephen Jay Gould has an interesting origin story for some systems of racial classification: something about the number five?