"That’s according to Matthew Barsalou, who debunked the red shirt curse for Significance Magazine by mathematically breaking down the death rates, by uniform color, of characters on the original Star Trek. A simple pie chart reveals 55 total deaths and, yes, red shirts perished in frightening numbers. A whopping 24 died, compared to 9 in yellow/gold command and 7 in blue, with 15 crossing into the final frontier in unidentified colors. However, it’s all a matter of perspective and percentages. There were 430 crewmen aboard the Enterprise, 239 of them in engineering, security or operations, and all wore red. So, in reality, they had a decent survival rate, and it was, statistically speaking – courtesy of a little something called Bayes’ theorem -- the folks in gold who were more likely to meet their maker"
Read more at: http://www.startrek.com/article/did-redshirts-really-die-more-often-on-tos
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