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What I love about this is that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the notion that “we live way longer than our ancestors thanks to our progress in science”. F
by dagorenouf 6y ago
What I love about this is that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the notion that “we live way longer than our ancestors thanks to our progress in science”.
From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality. Take those away, and people 5 centuries ago lived roughly as long as today.
Seems like the amount of things we die from increased to match what we’re able to cure, so that we roughly always die at the same age.
- fogihujy 6y agoWas that ever in doubt? The median age of those who die from actual old age has been fairly constant for a very long time. It's just that we're less likely to get eaten by predators or to die from wounds or disease when compared to our ancestors, while our ancestors didn't have to worry about plane crashes or traffic accidents (well, not to the extent we do anyway).
- lucioperca 6y agoYou missing child mortality here and the average poor farmer which will tell a different story.
- hntrader 6y agoI'm at the opposite conclusion to you. You firstly say that improved life expectancy isn't due to science, then you say that two of the three main reasons for improved life expectancy are pandemics and childhood mortality. Those two statements are inconsistent. Medical science is one of the main reasons why pandemics and childhood mortality are less of a problem. Germ theory of disease, vaccines, therapeutics, etc. "we roughly always die at the same age." The paper's data doesn't support this. Figure 4 shows life expectancy among elite men conditional on surviving until 30 was 57-63 for the first few centuries in the sample - irrespective of whether it was a war/non-war period or a period with a specific plague. Nowadays it is much higher than this (late 70s?) for a much larger cross section of people (not just elite individuals).
- loonster 6y agoI would attribute more of the decrease in child mortality to clean water and better nutrition. Vaccines played a negligible roll (diseases were already well past their peak when vaccines came out).
- enkid 6y agoClean water and better nutrition are direct results of scientific findings...
- Retric 6y agoClean water has become more consistent, but it was common in many areas historically. You see remnants of this for example NYC is exempted from water filtration requirements due to how clean their water source is. Good nutrition was similarly common in many areas historically even without scientific understanding of nutrition.
- enkid 6y agoThe reason clean water became consistent is because science told us clean water is important and how to make clean water widely available. Nutrition became better because science allowed us to grow more food across more land more easily. Things like crop rotation, mechanization and fertilizers allowed less land to feed more people a better diet.
- barry-cotter 6y ago> The reason clean water became consistent is because science told us clean water is important and how to make clean water widely available. Both of these long pre-date according resembling the scientific method of germ theory. We’ve known that dirty water makes you sick and how to filter it for so long that the first example of a functioning sewer system I know of is prehistoric[1]. And clean water was transported over hundreds of miles through Roman aqueducts. They didn’t do that for no reason. [1] Mohenji-Daro https://indusrivervalleytechnology.weebly.com/the-sewer-system.html#:~:text=In%20Mohenjo-Daro%2C%20lots%20of%20complex%20sewer%20systems%20have,taken%20a%20ton%20of%20effort%20to%20build%20it https://indusrivervalleytechnology.weebly.com/the-sewer-syst....
- kkoncevicius 6y agoYou can also look at some examples of people from ~2000 years ago, in Greece. For example: Plato: 80 Archimedes: 75 Marcus Aurelius: 58 Ptolemy: 84 Aristotle: 62 Socrates: 71 Seneca: 92 Epicurus: 71 These names are out of the top of my head, ages checked on Wikipedia - seems to be quite in line with the average life expectancy today.
- shawabawa3 6y agoYou are picking only people who's life work means they are remembered for 2000 years That's surely going to be a huge source of bias, because obviously people who lived longer were more likely to have done enough to be remembered
- amelius 6y agoThere's probably some other bias here as well, because people doing intellectual work in those times probably had more privileges, more wealth, etc.
- jfengel 6y agoThey're also going to be more male, meaning they didn't die in childbirth, a serious cause of death for women through most of history. And not males in warfare, a major cause of death for young men through most of history.
- amelius 6y agoThat's an unfair comparison, because these people all had a Mediterranean diet.
- kkoncevicius 6y agoYes OK, but the comparison interesting to me is how much did medicine help. If people lived to their 80 in those ancient times, just with some diet, then medicine is surely not giving us much of a longer live span today.
- antattack 6y agoLets keep in mind that only few, chosen ones could have lived a life of a scholar.
- kkoncevicius 6y agoWe also have to keep in mind that a lot of others would have died of unnatural causes like war. Scholars might be a good idea about how much of age expectancy is due to lifestyle compared with improvements in medicine.
- dis-sys 6y agoyes, that is a survivorship bias.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThey could tell ahead of time "This guy will live a long time; lets make them a scholar?" That seems doubtful.
- antattack 6y agoHere are few factors that would enhance persons lifespan: access to clean water, shelter, nutrition, medicine, and not working in toxic or otherwise risky to your life environment.
- oblio 6y agoAnd dodging simple infections that would have killed us. Dodging diabetes or what have you disease that we can now treat. Modern medicine is a miracle and we're too jaded.
- maweki 6y agoA few years ago there was this atlas obscura article about all the deaths in one region in britain over the course of a year. Quite a lot of people died after tripping and either being cut by their knives or just acquiring an open wound in a different way. Then they die a few days later. Maybe with some notion of natural aging, life expectancy is quite similar. But chances of getting there are way higher now.
- bsza 6y agoLiterally the first line of Dante's Inferno is "Midway upon the journey of our life", and we know that the story takes place in 1300, when Dante was 35 years old. (Although Dante himself died in malaria at 56.) I don't know where this "in the Middle Ages you were considered old folk by the age of 30" myth comes from, but it has no right to exist. It's the history equivalent of the tongue map. Wrong but so widespread that even teachers believe it sometimes.
- bsza 6y agoActually, I got that backwards. His date of birth is unknown, and it was estimated from the Inferno. The real source the 70 year lifespan used for this estimation comes from is the Bible.
- Ma8ee 6y agoIf I would have given birth to 10 kids, seen 5 of them die, and maybe just becoming a grandmother, I would consider myself old even if I only had lived for 35 years. I might live for another 35, but my strength, health and looks would definitely never be close to those of a person in the beginning of their child bearing age.
- tralarpa 6y ago> From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality. Take those away, and people 5 centuries ago lived roughly as long as today. What are your sources? And how do you remove the indirect influences of wars (less food, etc.) that might last for many decades from your data? By the way, the average life span of a 30-year old man in England 500 years ago was around 50 years. It is now over 70.
- enkid 6y agoAre you looking at the same graph I am? The average age of death is 59 in the 1600-1650 range and steadily increases to 76.9 in the >=1930 range. That's a significant improvement. Sure, 1600-1650 is a local minimum, but none of the other ranges have an average death >64.2. That seems like a pretty significant level of progress caused by the revolutions in science between 1650 and 1930.
- joefourier 6y agoAlso medieval and a Renaissance scholars were by definition more “elite” than the average European of the day - it would make sense to compare their lifespan to those of similar socio-economic status today. In many cities you can see that the lifespan increases with the average household income of the neighbourhood, and if you look at say, Monaco, one of the richest per-capita cities, the average life expectancy is 85 for men and 93 for women, over 20 years longer than the average European scholar.
- Telemakhos 6y agoErasmus of Rotterdam was one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance and certainly one of, if not the, best Latinist. His father was a priest, and so could not legally marry Erasmus' mother, who was apparently the father's housekeeper; they were not well-off. The parents died from the plague in 1483, and Erasmus was thereafter raised and educated by monks, whom he eventually joined out of poverty. He went on to become one of the most influential Latinists in history. There was a nobility during the Renaissance, but underneath that was a churning sea of social mobility that rewarded intelligence and capability.
- watwut 6y agoHow exactly this contradicts relationship between social class and lifespan?
- adventured 6y agoThe parent mentions the obviously dramatic impact of infant / child mortality rates. That would definitely apply to the 59 average you're referring to, it's a huge factor in that average. An intentionally simple example of how dramatic it is: Ten people, with 20% of them dying in childhood. Then reduce that to just one dying in childhood. 80, 75, 70, 65, 65, 60, 50, 40, 2, 1 = 50.8 avg Now drop the childhood deaths down to just one. 80, 75, 70, 65, 65, 60, 60, 50, 40, 1 = 56.6 You gained 5.8 years on life expectancy from cutting the rate in half. Now take us from 1650 childhood mortality rates, to affluent modern nations where it's eg 5 deaths per 1000 live births in a nation like Canada (and that's down by 75% from 20 per 1000, 50 years ago). I can only imagine how high the rate was 400 years ago, it would absolutely tank the average in an epic way.
- boomlinde 6y ago> From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality. Is there an easy way to confirm that these improvements are independent of the progress of science?
- sparsely 6y agoThe data in the article shows that life expectancy was significantly lower among European elites than it is now. At 30, in the period they consider expected age of death was in the 60-70 range. Now it's in the high 80s among ALL europeans in the region they consider, which seems like a pretty big difference. "Seems like the amount of things we die from increased to match what we’re able to cure" This is always going to be approximately true, unless we end up living forever somehow.
- bla3 6y agoThat's something that sounds like it makes sense but is flat-out wrong. See this graph (from the TFA): https://read.dukeupress.edu/view-large/figure/2454457/dem8938107figure4.tif https://read.dukeupress.edu/view-large/figure/2454457/dem893... A bit depressing that these lazy, swaggy, wrong hot takes are so often upvoted.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThat's the same graph shown in the OP, with the scale expanded to make it look bigger?
- bla3 6y agoYes, TFA and OP mean the same thing.
- osrec 6y agoI think it's fair to say the reduction in pandemics and child mortality can at least be partly attributed to our progress in medicine.