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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show which crushingly rejects dodgy statistics

while giving a vote of confidence to the good ones.

This week we ask if most of us are really averaging a bottle of wine a day during December.

We remember the father of the index fund, who, according to one possibly over-enthusiastic

estimate, saved investors a total of a trillion dollars.

We think that's a bit much, but it's certainly enough to be worth celebrating.

But first, this week the BBC website published a short documentary under the title, Intersex

Surgery.

Is it right to assign sex to a baby?

Rosie, medicine, dad.

I hate my medicine.

Rosie was born six years ago with ambiguous genitalia.

The UN believe as high as 1.7% of the world are born with intersex traits.

That's roughly the same as people with red hair.

1.7% of the population sounds a lot, and if you say it's the same as the proportion

of redheads, it sounds like an awful lot because, well thankfully, there are a lot of red

heads around.

What do these claims really mean?

Let's start with the redheads.

One of my favourite topics, my wife is one.

1.7% is a credible estimate for the global population of redheads, but their population

...