Can comparing the age of two persons be Statistics?

[ararapina]

I had a discussion with a friend of mine about what constitutes Statistics. In the broad sense statistics is "the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data" (Dodge, Y.,2006 in Wikipedia).

We've been arguing if asking and comparing the age of two persons (e.g. "John is older than Sam") can be considered performing some kind of basic statistics or is it just a reductio ad absurdum where statistics can no longer apply.

Because we have a meaning to the data (age has temporal, social and biological meaning), I consider this description to be part of the field of statistics. This is just the simplest case of considering a paired sample (name; age) and describing the observation with the largest age.

On the other hand my friend considers that comparing ages and stripping they of their meaning are exactly the same, so comparing ages is nothing more than comparing numbers and thus it should fall into other fields of mathematics (perhaps set theory).

Who is right?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Age has emotional meaning. If you told two different people that they have different life expectancies, you would get two different responses (also insurance companies employ actuaries who use statistics for life expectancies for business reasons). And I've known women to lie about their ages. So yes, stats is related to this.

PhilX