27 ms·

Do we really live longer than our ancestors?

138 points by sea6ear 8y ago

sandworm101 8y ago
Be careful when reading about the age "40" and "80" in some ancient cultures. "40" used to be a term for "many", as we might say "millions" when we really mean "a great many". Mohammed was 40 when he received god's message. Ali Baba had his 40 thieves. Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years. The Noah suffered 40 days and nights of rain. There is a famous story in Islam of a woman being stung by a scorpion 40 times while at prayer. So a tale of a woman being 80 years old, a suspicious doubling of 40, should probably be read to say that she was very very old rather than literally eighty.
- GoMonad 8y ago
  That's super interesting. Do you have a reference where I can read more about this?
  - jdironman 8y ago
    I second this request. Seems like long ago I might have heard such a reference to 40 meaning many from grandparents but cannot be certain.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion Looks like it also needs a [citation needed].
      - red369 8y ago
        There are slightly better citations at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numbers#cite_note-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numb... The Concise Oxford Turkish Dictionary, Oxford, 1959, s.v. kırk: "Forty; used especially to denote a large indefinite number
  - clear_dg 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mamcx 8y ago
  This sound incredible unbelievable. Also, all the cultures across centuries use the same idea? Exist many samples of the use of numbers in the thousands, btw..
  - OJFord 8y ago
    It doesn't take much to find a common root among cultures, once willing to look 'across centuries'.
  - kmm 8y ago
    Mohammed, the people who told the story of Ali Baba and the ancient Jews all spoke Semitic languages. As with a lot of metaphors, it might have come with the language. Like how early Indo-European cultures had patrilocality and sky gods
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Things like these can jump across language and culture boundaries easily, too. In Russian, there's a fairly obvious pattern to numerals like 20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90. It's not super consistent, but you can easily pick each of those apart and see that it references the corresponding digit, plus some variation of "ten". Note that I didn't list 40. That's because it's special - it has its own word for it, that is completely unrelated to the word for 4 or any other number. Its etymology is contested, but it's certain that it was already special many centuries back, and used to count things (in groups of 40). And then you have archaic idioms like "forty forties", which basically means "hell of a lot". Of course, it can well just be convergent evolution - there's only so many round numbers. And then if you pick one as the standard size of the group for counting, and it's large enough, then a square of that number is also a fairly natural choice for "many". But identical choices in other cultures might give the initial push, or reinforce one of the early roughly equal candidates.
  - yen223 8y ago
    There are, like, a million cultures out there that use an arbitrarily large number to mean "a lot" ;)
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  To the disbelievers and downvoters this is true. I was going to say it stems from Abrahamic tradition, and biblical use as a period of trial, but Wikipedia tells me "The number 40 is used in Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other Middle Eastern traditions to represent a large, approximate number", with some other older traditions shown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_%28number%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_%28number%29 Presumably Pratchett's inspiration for the Troll number system (many-many-lots) :)
  - agapon 8y ago
    [Eastern] Slavic cultures historically used 40 to mean a lot, many. And forty of forties (40 of 40s) means 'great great many'.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
apo 8y ago
Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to delegitimise the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier lives overall. The benefits of some of those advances are questionable at best. Those who have visited a nursing home may know what I'm talking about. Spending the last decade of your life commuting to doctor's offices (or bedridden) ain't no picnic, nor is rotting away in a forgotten corner of a human warehouse. The quality of life position has always intrigued me for this reason. Sometimes what technology giveth with one hand, society taketh away with the other.
- ip26 8y ago
  Some of them, sure. But the benefit of not dying horribly of polio or smallpox is pretty nice, as is the wildly better odds of surviving childbirth. It's kind of anecdata, but have you ever noticed how in classical books from a few hundred years ago, it's sort of normal that Mr So & So might be on his third or fourth wife because the others died in childbirth? Just something that caught my attention.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Slightly more recent: B. Traven notes that in the 1920s in Chiapas 50 % of children would die before the age of 6. (He continues that those surviving early childhood could look forward to reaching a ripe old age.)
- mikekchar 8y ago
  On the other hand, because I live in rural Japan and am only really friends with the people who live near me, almost all of my friends are over 70 (I'm 50). While this is of course selection bias (as well as being anecdotal), people I associate with don't end up in nursing homes -- at least long term. A quick google search tells me that only between 2 and 5% of people over 65 live in nursing homes and that jives pretty well with my experience. Most people seem to live pretty well until a year or so before they die, and then they essentially fall off a cliff. My wife's aunt passed away last year from some kind of brain issue (I never did figure out exactly what the problem was -- lack of vocabulary). She was in and out of the hospital for about 3 months and while distressing, I think she very much appreciated being alive in those 3 months. After that she essentially ended up in a kind of semi-coma where she was awake for maybe an hour a day -- and she was in a nursing home. After another 5 months or so she passed away. I don't know if she got much value from those 5 months, but I know her husband definitely was able to use the time to come to grips with the reality of the situation. Again, just an anecdote, but I think it's illustrative of the complexity of the situation. Anyway, I think most people can look forward to enjoying their old age. Of course it makes a big difference if you look after your body when you are young and it is much easier to do so.
philipkglass 8y ago
People who didn't die of violence, hunger, infectious diseases, accidents, or complications of child bearing could expect roughly as much remaining life span as adults as adults expect today. When you strike those caveats and look at every human born on Earth: yes, people really do live significantly longer now. Whether or not you find this surprising depends on how much you already knew about leading causes of death in centuries past.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  The highest mortality was in the first five years of course. Take that out of the comparison and the figures change surprisingly. Once you got past that, and assuming you didn't get dragged off to war or succumb to some sort of pestilence, life span wasn't so different. Which makes watching or reading period fiction frustrating when they treat a 40 year old as we might an 80 year old. We live longer, but we sure don't age at half speed.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    I haven't encountered period fiction where a 40 year old is treated like an 80 year old, but that would grate on me too. There was still a significantly lowered life expectancy in adulthood due to disease, hunger, violence, childbearing, accidents. See for example John Graunt's life table of Tudor period Londoners: http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt.pdf http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt... Only 25% (!) of Londoners survived until age 27. More than a third of adults who lived to 27 died before age 37. In modern London you can neglect pestilence as almost a rounding error within overall life expectancy, but in some ages of London-past pestilence was the dominant term.
    - sharkmerry 8y ago
      But this is data analyzed in 1661, gathered 127 years prior. so its 1 data point from 1 year, tough to make an accurate call on it as variance would be ridiculously high right? I also did not see any data on sample size, etc. this seems to say life expectancy was ~50 years if you reached 21. https://books.google.com/books?id=T4DLK7zLxYMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=T4DLK7zLxYMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA... graunts life table says 33% chance of living to 21. 8.8% of living to 50. Shouldnt it be closer to 16%? if average is 50, means 50% beyond, 50% short. so 50% of 33% would be 16.5%? perhaps Im looking at this wrong
poulsbohemian 8y ago
Anecdata: I can trace my maternal family tree back approximately 600 years, with records also available for a number of siblings, cousins, etc - so pretty robust data. It's obvious when a flu or similar came through, because you'll notice a number of clustered, young deaths. Meanwhile, those that survive into adulthood were living 70-90 years, and in my direct line generally on the long end of that. This would appear to line up with our genetic markers as well (thanks 23andMe). In my ex's family, genetically there is a clear propensity for cancer, so many deaths in the 50-60 range. So, what's my point on all this? My own anecdata tells me: 1) Eat real food, like those long-lived ancestors. 2) Move / exercise. Most of them were physically active farmers, while I sit here coding away at a desk. 3) Hope you don't have any obvious genetic markers for cancer, heart disease, etc. 4) Be thankful for modern sanitation and immunization! Get your shots, including flu shots!
- austinjp 8y ago
  While I generally agree with (2), and (1) is likely right for the wrong reasons, it's (3) and (4) that are the real trump cards. Mainly (3).
  - 883771773929 8y ago
    If any of those, (3) is the red herring. Your genetic markers are not write-once-at-gamete-recombination / read-only-at-every-transcription. The genetic code humans have includes many graceful degradation mechanisms that allow for plasticity in widely varying conditions. Many 'code sequences' are actually selected by the environment throughout an individual organism's life and the resulting signaling pathways can amplify or suppress various fallback modes. There's a lot of these scenarios that are well documented, anything from the loosely defined and often poorly understood epigenetics processes, but also the signaling regulation of cell growth and death, resulting changes with hormesis, acclimatization, availability/scarcity of nutrients, hormones, pharmaceuticals, viruses, and even mental state. (1) is typically the largest factor of all that listed, with experiments showing repeatedly that 'genetic markers' specifying risk for heart disease, cancer, etc all vastly improve with a reduction of excess body fat and elimination of recreational drug usage such as excessive alcohol and cigarettes. And as for (4), definitely a trump card is not taking a dump in your drinking water supply without reasonable recycling treatment. Many people tend to associate the medical industry as responsible for the supposed improved living conditions of modern developed countries. However, if you look at the repeated succession stages of colonialization throughout the past several hundred years, it's obvious that when people in underdeveloped countries stop shitting in their food and water, illness and resulting death plummet until a few generations later when economically enforced diets and 'sensible medical care' are in full effect leading to a rebound of misery.
LeanderK 8y ago
Is there any interesting research happening on what's limiting our lifespan? Is this super interesting and important question being given enought attention in the research-community? Or is it super-niche?
- marsrover 8y ago
  Genesis 6:3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years." I think this is pretty interesting even if you're not religious.
  - hughes 8y ago
    What is interesting about this? An extra data point to indicate that humans had similarly constrained lifespans when people wrote that book?
  - Nition 8y ago
    One thing I always thought was interesting about that is it happened during Noah's lifetime, when he was probably already older than 120 and lived a few hundred more years after. He's lucky the new rule wasn't retroactive to those who were already alive! Also, there's some debate about whether that line means the obvious (maximum lifespan of around 120 years), or whether it's actually saying that people have 120 years left until the great flood comes. Most people (and me personally as well) think the former but the latter does make some sense as an interpretation in context. Well, except for the fact that it does mark a point in the Bible where people's reported lives stopped being ridiculously long.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      There is absolutely no reason to believe that Noah was already older than 120 or that he lived longer than a normal life span. There is every reason to believe that nearly everyone's body falls apart between 50 and 120 if disease or malice hasn't gotten them prior. When you fabricate its better if the fabrications concern things either long ago or far away and if the present situation is different from that described you have to explain why if you don't want your audience comparing present reality to prior and seeing through the hoax. Example if you wanted to posit that insert legendary figure here was 30 feet tall and came from a village where most were 20' and up you can't set the story in the next village last year because someone has probably been there and noticed that people just aren't that tall. If it was a thousand years prior across an ocean you can claim that people became less mighty as the years went by and lost touch with their gods which plays to people's tendency to filter the past through nostalgia. If a 30 foot tall giant seems less likely than a 900 year old man then you may need to apply critical thinking skills. Just because its still socially OK to believe nonsense doesn't mean its true.
martin-adams 8y ago
I've always been frustrated by these figures because life expectancy has gone up due to reducing infant mortality. It doesn't mean our lifestyle has made humans live longer. It would appear that a more useful metric is number of centenarians per million. On the 1.1.1960, England & Wales had 11.6 centenarians per million. On the 1.1.1990 this increased to 76.3 centenarians per million.[1] Another way to look at it is the risk of death for a given age tracked over time.[2] If you were 60 years old in 1900, would you have a higher risk of death compared to 2000? [1] https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm [2] http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html
- ekianjo 8y ago
  yes reducing infant mortality to close to zero is what has brought the average lifespan up. This is always a good example to use when you want to show that looking only at the average value is meaningless to understand what is really happening.
- branchless 8y ago
  Rising life expectancy is used as a justification for pushing pension ages ever higher, when, as you note, it's really just means people who reach working age work for longer.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  I wonder if your time frame and location are heavily skewed by WW2 losses.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    Centenarians in 1960 would have been 79 in 1939. Far too old for military service. A dip in the numbers, if realised, would only appear many decades later.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      A whole lot more people than soldiers died in the war, given rationing, bombing and what not. 1990 centenarians would have been a more hearty 49 at the time. Just a thought.
schizoidboy 8y ago
> Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to delegitimise the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier lives overall. Sure, maximum might not be changing much, but the fact that the average has changed so drastically means there has been unfathomably less death and suffering than otherwise would have been. Also, the advances have not been just over the last few decades, but more likely one or two hundred years (i.e. since the industrial revolution). There are also serious thinkers (e.g. Kurzweil) who think that biotechnology will increase maximum lifespan pretty soon. I found it strange for an article tagged with 'Biology' to not talk about biotechnology potential related to longevity.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Useful biotechnology may increase life expectancy in the near term, but not so differently as has been discussed here. We have basically zero chance of counteracting a life time of bioaccumulant toxins, telomere shortening, and numerous other shortcomings such that actual maximum lifespan sees a meaningful bump.
  - schizoidboy 8y ago
    Why do you think it's basically zero? To me, it just seems like an (admittedly difficult) engineering problem that we're likely to make a lot of progress on. I'm currently studying biology and it's pretty amazing what humans have discovered in the last ~100 years about how the body works at the atomic level. As a meta-point, I find it fascinating how nearly completely divergent our bayesian priors are (I think our chances of counteracting all of those forces you mentioned are, on a long enough timeline and assuming we're not destroyed and we have sufficient energy, greater than 90%).
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    There are other organisms that do this, so there is no physical limit in this. It's just an engineering problem. For example, telomere shortening is already being worked on. Look up Bioviva science, they have made first human experiments and results look very promising. I think people just got used to being fatalist in this regard, because it is psychologically easier than to tackle this problem.
forkLding 8y ago
This article is a bit presumptuous. I don't think I ever equated lifespan with life expectancy, I never ever thought you would just randomly die of old age at age 30 or even somehow reach old age at age 30. I merely presumed sickness and war would wipe you out and you would die of something like that than somehow superhumanly jumping into your old age as soon as you hit 30.
hyperpallium 8y ago
Civilization has the cure of which civilization is the cause. If you select people who avoid the ills of modern diet and inactivity, while enjoying modern medicine, you may get a different curve.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  You also get unreliable age reporting. At least in some of the supposedly long-lived villages outside of civilization (lika Hunza), it has been shown that when westerners come their and try to study people's age - what they get in response is not the calendar age, but something akin to "social status". If you have a big family and many achievements, they say they are 80. If you haven't achieved that much yet - they call them 60.
  - bachbach 8y ago
    Like leveling up in an RPG!

138 points by sea6ear 8y ago

Be careful when reading about the age "40" and "80" in some ancient cultures. "40" used to be a term for "many", as we might say "millions" when we really mean "a great many". Mohammed was 40 when he received god's message. Ali Baba had his 40 thieves. Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years. The Noah suffered 40 days and nights of rain. There is a famous story in Islam of a woman being stung by a scorpion 40 times while at prayer. So a tale of a woman being 80 years old, a suspicious doubling of 40, should probably be read to say that she was very very old rather than literally eighty.

GoMonad 8y ago
That's super interesting. Do you have a reference where I can read more about this?
- jdironman 8y ago
  I second this request. Seems like long ago I might have heard such a reference to 40 meaning many from grandparents but cannot be certain.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion Looks like it also needs a [citation needed].
    - red369 8y ago
      There are slightly better citations at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numbers#cite_note-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numb... The Concise Oxford Turkish Dictionary, Oxford, 1959, s.v. kırk: "Forty; used especially to denote a large indefinite number
- clear_dg 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(number)#In_religion
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mamcx 8y ago
This sound incredible unbelievable. Also, all the cultures across centuries use the same idea? Exist many samples of the use of numbers in the thousands, btw..
- OJFord 8y ago
  It doesn't take much to find a common root among cultures, once willing to look 'across centuries'.
- kmm 8y ago
  Mohammed, the people who told the story of Ali Baba and the ancient Jews all spoke Semitic languages. As with a lot of metaphors, it might have come with the language. Like how early Indo-European cultures had patrilocality and sky gods
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Things like these can jump across language and culture boundaries easily, too. In Russian, there's a fairly obvious pattern to numerals like 20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90. It's not super consistent, but you can easily pick each of those apart and see that it references the corresponding digit, plus some variation of "ten". Note that I didn't list 40. That's because it's special - it has its own word for it, that is completely unrelated to the word for 4 or any other number. Its etymology is contested, but it's certain that it was already special many centuries back, and used to count things (in groups of 40). And then you have archaic idioms like "forty forties", which basically means "hell of a lot". Of course, it can well just be convergent evolution - there's only so many round numbers. And then if you pick one as the standard size of the group for counting, and it's large enough, then a square of that number is also a fairly natural choice for "many". But identical choices in other cultures might give the initial push, or reinforce one of the early roughly equal candidates.
- yen223 8y ago
  There are, like, a million cultures out there that use an arbitrarily large number to mean "a lot" ;)
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
To the disbelievers and downvoters this is true. I was going to say it stems from Abrahamic tradition, and biblical use as a period of trial, but Wikipedia tells me "The number 40 is used in Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other Middle Eastern traditions to represent a large, approximate number", with some other older traditions shown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_%28number%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_%28number%29 Presumably Pratchett's inspiration for the Troll number system (many-many-lots) :)
- agapon 8y ago
  [Eastern] Slavic cultures historically used 40 to mean a lot, many. And forty of forties (40 of 40s) means 'great great many'.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

apo 8y ago

Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to delegitimise the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier lives overall. The benefits of some of those advances are questionable at best. Those who have visited a nursing home may know what I'm talking about. Spending the last decade of your life commuting to doctor's offices (or bedridden) ain't no picnic, nor is rotting away in a forgotten corner of a human warehouse. The quality of life position has always intrigued me for this reason. Sometimes what technology giveth with one hand, society taketh away with the other.

ip26 8y ago
Some of them, sure. But the benefit of not dying horribly of polio or smallpox is pretty nice, as is the wildly better odds of surviving childbirth. It's kind of anecdata, but have you ever noticed how in classical books from a few hundred years ago, it's sort of normal that Mr So & So might be on his third or fourth wife because the others died in childbirth? Just something that caught my attention.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Slightly more recent: B. Traven notes that in the 1920s in Chiapas 50 % of children would die before the age of 6. (He continues that those surviving early childhood could look forward to reaching a ripe old age.)
mikekchar 8y ago
On the other hand, because I live in rural Japan and am only really friends with the people who live near me, almost all of my friends are over 70 (I'm 50). While this is of course selection bias (as well as being anecdotal), people I associate with don't end up in nursing homes -- at least long term. A quick google search tells me that only between 2 and 5% of people over 65 live in nursing homes and that jives pretty well with my experience. Most people seem to live pretty well until a year or so before they die, and then they essentially fall off a cliff. My wife's aunt passed away last year from some kind of brain issue (I never did figure out exactly what the problem was -- lack of vocabulary). She was in and out of the hospital for about 3 months and while distressing, I think she very much appreciated being alive in those 3 months. After that she essentially ended up in a kind of semi-coma where she was awake for maybe an hour a day -- and she was in a nursing home. After another 5 months or so she passed away. I don't know if she got much value from those 5 months, but I know her husband definitely was able to use the time to come to grips with the reality of the situation. Again, just an anecdote, but I think it's illustrative of the complexity of the situation. Anyway, I think most people can look forward to enjoying their old age. Of course it makes a big difference if you look after your body when you are young and it is much easier to do so.

philipkglass 8y ago

People who didn't die of violence, hunger, infectious diseases, accidents, or complications of child bearing could expect roughly as much remaining life span as adults as adults expect today. When you strike those caveats and look at every human born on Earth: yes, people really do live significantly longer now. Whether or not you find this surprising depends on how much you already knew about leading causes of death in centuries past.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
The highest mortality was in the first five years of course. Take that out of the comparison and the figures change surprisingly. Once you got past that, and assuming you didn't get dragged off to war or succumb to some sort of pestilence, life span wasn't so different. Which makes watching or reading period fiction frustrating when they treat a 40 year old as we might an 80 year old. We live longer, but we sure don't age at half speed.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  I haven't encountered period fiction where a 40 year old is treated like an 80 year old, but that would grate on me too. There was still a significantly lowered life expectancy in adulthood due to disease, hunger, violence, childbearing, accidents. See for example John Graunt's life table of Tudor period Londoners: http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt.pdf http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt... Only 25% (!) of Londoners survived until age 27. More than a third of adults who lived to 27 died before age 37. In modern London you can neglect pestilence as almost a rounding error within overall life expectancy, but in some ages of London-past pestilence was the dominant term.
  - sharkmerry 8y ago
    But this is data analyzed in 1661, gathered 127 years prior. so its 1 data point from 1 year, tough to make an accurate call on it as variance would be ridiculously high right? I also did not see any data on sample size, etc. this seems to say life expectancy was ~50 years if you reached 21. https://books.google.com/books?id=T4DLK7zLxYMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=T4DLK7zLxYMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA... graunts life table says 33% chance of living to 21. 8.8% of living to 50. Shouldnt it be closer to 16%? if average is 50, means 50% beyond, 50% short. so 50% of 33% would be 16.5%? perhaps Im looking at this wrong

poulsbohemian 8y ago

Anecdata: I can trace my maternal family tree back approximately 600 years, with records also available for a number of siblings, cousins, etc - so pretty robust data. It's obvious when a flu or similar came through, because you'll notice a number of clustered, young deaths. Meanwhile, those that survive into adulthood were living 70-90 years, and in my direct line generally on the long end of that. This would appear to line up with our genetic markers as well (thanks 23andMe). In my ex's family, genetically there is a clear propensity for cancer, so many deaths in the 50-60 range. So, what's my point on all this? My own anecdata tells me: 1) Eat real food, like those long-lived ancestors. 2) Move / exercise. Most of them were physically active farmers, while I sit here coding away at a desk. 3) Hope you don't have any obvious genetic markers for cancer, heart disease, etc. 4) Be thankful for modern sanitation and immunization! Get your shots, including flu shots!

austinjp 8y ago
While I generally agree with (2), and (1) is likely right for the wrong reasons, it's (3) and (4) that are the real trump cards. Mainly (3).
- 883771773929 8y ago
  If any of those, (3) is the red herring. Your genetic markers are not write-once-at-gamete-recombination / read-only-at-every-transcription. The genetic code humans have includes many graceful degradation mechanisms that allow for plasticity in widely varying conditions. Many 'code sequences' are actually selected by the environment throughout an individual organism's life and the resulting signaling pathways can amplify or suppress various fallback modes. There's a lot of these scenarios that are well documented, anything from the loosely defined and often poorly understood epigenetics processes, but also the signaling regulation of cell growth and death, resulting changes with hormesis, acclimatization, availability/scarcity of nutrients, hormones, pharmaceuticals, viruses, and even mental state. (1) is typically the largest factor of all that listed, with experiments showing repeatedly that 'genetic markers' specifying risk for heart disease, cancer, etc all vastly improve with a reduction of excess body fat and elimination of recreational drug usage such as excessive alcohol and cigarettes. And as for (4), definitely a trump card is not taking a dump in your drinking water supply without reasonable recycling treatment. Many people tend to associate the medical industry as responsible for the supposed improved living conditions of modern developed countries. However, if you look at the repeated succession stages of colonialization throughout the past several hundred years, it's obvious that when people in underdeveloped countries stop shitting in their food and water, illness and resulting death plummet until a few generations later when economically enforced diets and 'sensible medical care' are in full effect leading to a rebound of misery.

LeanderK 8y ago

Is there any interesting research happening on what's limiting our lifespan? Is this super interesting and important question being given enought attention in the research-community? Or is it super-niche?

marsrover 8y ago
Genesis 6:3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years." I think this is pretty interesting even if you're not religious.
- hughes 8y ago
  What is interesting about this? An extra data point to indicate that humans had similarly constrained lifespans when people wrote that book?
- Nition 8y ago
  One thing I always thought was interesting about that is it happened during Noah's lifetime, when he was probably already older than 120 and lived a few hundred more years after. He's lucky the new rule wasn't retroactive to those who were already alive! Also, there's some debate about whether that line means the obvious (maximum lifespan of around 120 years), or whether it's actually saying that people have 120 years left until the great flood comes. Most people (and me personally as well) think the former but the latter does make some sense as an interpretation in context. Well, except for the fact that it does mark a point in the Bible where people's reported lives stopped being ridiculously long.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    There is absolutely no reason to believe that Noah was already older than 120 or that he lived longer than a normal life span. There is every reason to believe that nearly everyone's body falls apart between 50 and 120 if disease or malice hasn't gotten them prior. When you fabricate its better if the fabrications concern things either long ago or far away and if the present situation is different from that described you have to explain why if you don't want your audience comparing present reality to prior and seeing through the hoax. Example if you wanted to posit that insert legendary figure here was 30 feet tall and came from a village where most were 20' and up you can't set the story in the next village last year because someone has probably been there and noticed that people just aren't that tall. If it was a thousand years prior across an ocean you can claim that people became less mighty as the years went by and lost touch with their gods which plays to people's tendency to filter the past through nostalgia. If a 30 foot tall giant seems less likely than a 900 year old man then you may need to apply critical thinking skills. Just because its still socially OK to believe nonsense doesn't mean its true.

martin-adams 8y ago

I've always been frustrated by these figures because life expectancy has gone up due to reducing infant mortality. It doesn't mean our lifestyle has made humans live longer. It would appear that a more useful metric is number of centenarians per million. On the 1.1.1960, England & Wales had 11.6 centenarians per million. On the 1.1.1990 this increased to 76.3 centenarians per million.[1] Another way to look at it is the risk of death for a given age tracked over time.[2] If you were 60 years old in 1900, would you have a higher risk of death compared to 2000? [1] https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm [2] http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html

ekianjo 8y ago
yes reducing infant mortality to close to zero is what has brought the average lifespan up. This is always a good example to use when you want to show that looking only at the average value is meaningless to understand what is really happening.
branchless 8y ago
Rising life expectancy is used as a justification for pushing pension ages ever higher, when, as you note, it's really just means people who reach working age work for longer.
zdragnar 8y ago
I wonder if your time frame and location are heavily skewed by WW2 losses.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Centenarians in 1960 would have been 79 in 1939. Far too old for military service. A dip in the numbers, if realised, would only appear many decades later.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    A whole lot more people than soldiers died in the war, given rationing, bombing and what not. 1990 centenarians would have been a more hearty 49 at the time. Just a thought.

schizoidboy 8y ago

> Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to delegitimise the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier lives overall. Sure, maximum might not be changing much, but the fact that the average has changed so drastically means there has been unfathomably less death and suffering than otherwise would have been. Also, the advances have not been just over the last few decades, but more likely one or two hundred years (i.e. since the industrial revolution). There are also serious thinkers (e.g. Kurzweil) who think that biotechnology will increase maximum lifespan pretty soon. I found it strange for an article tagged with 'Biology' to not talk about biotechnology potential related to longevity.

b_tterc_p 8y ago
Useful biotechnology may increase life expectancy in the near term, but not so differently as has been discussed here. We have basically zero chance of counteracting a life time of bioaccumulant toxins, telomere shortening, and numerous other shortcomings such that actual maximum lifespan sees a meaningful bump.
- schizoidboy 8y ago
  Why do you think it's basically zero? To me, it just seems like an (admittedly difficult) engineering problem that we're likely to make a lot of progress on. I'm currently studying biology and it's pretty amazing what humans have discovered in the last ~100 years about how the body works at the atomic level. As a meta-point, I find it fascinating how nearly completely divergent our bayesian priors are (I think our chances of counteracting all of those forces you mentioned are, on a long enough timeline and assuming we're not destroyed and we have sufficient energy, greater than 90%).
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  There are other organisms that do this, so there is no physical limit in this. It's just an engineering problem. For example, telomere shortening is already being worked on. Look up Bioviva science, they have made first human experiments and results look very promising. I think people just got used to being fatalist in this regard, because it is psychologically easier than to tackle this problem.

forkLding 8y ago

This article is a bit presumptuous. I don't think I ever equated lifespan with life expectancy, I never ever thought you would just randomly die of old age at age 30 or even somehow reach old age at age 30. I merely presumed sickness and war would wipe you out and you would die of something like that than somehow superhumanly jumping into your old age as soon as you hit 30.

hyperpallium 8y ago

Civilization has the cure of which civilization is the cause. If you select people who avoid the ills of modern diet and inactivity, while enjoying modern medicine, you may get a different curve.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
You also get unreliable age reporting. At least in some of the supposedly long-lived villages outside of civilization (lika Hunza), it has been shown that when westerners come their and try to study people's age - what they get in response is not the calendar age, but something akin to "social status". If you have a big family and many achievements, they say they are 80. If you haven't achieved that much yet - they call them 60.
- bachbach 8y ago
  Like leveling up in an RPG!