How the Human Life Span Doubled in 100 Years (nytimes.com) 97
Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. "There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this..." argues author Steven Johnson.
In a recent 10,000-word excerpt from his new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (now also a four-part PBS/BBC series that's streaming online), Johnson tries to convey the magnitude of humanity's accomplishment: [I]t manifests in countless achievements, often quickly forgotten, sometimes literally invisible: the drinking water that's free of microorganisms, or the vaccine received in early childhood and never thought about again... The decade following the initial mass production of antibiotics marked the most extreme moment of life-span inequality globally. In 1950, when life expectancy in India and most of Africa had barely budged from the long ceiling of around 35 years, the average American could expect to live 68 years, while Scandinavians had already crossed the 70-year threshold. But the post-colonial era that followed would be characterized by an extraordinary rate of improvement across most of the developing world...
The forces behind these trends are complex and multivariate. Some of them involve increasing standards of living and the decrease in famine, driven by the invention of artificial fertilizer and the "green revolution"; some of them involve imported medicines and infrastructure — antibiotics, chlorinated drinking water — that were developed earlier. But some of the most meaningful interventions came from within the Global South itself, including a remarkably simple but powerful technique called oral rehydration therapy... the treatment is almost maddeningly simple: give people lots of boiled water to drink, supplemented with sugar and salts.... The Lancet called it "potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century." As many as 50 million people are said to have died of cholera in the 19th century. In the first decades of the 21st century, fewer than 66,000 people were reported to have succumbed to the disease, on a planet with eight times the population...
Of all the achievements that brought the great escape to the entire world, though, one stands out: the vanquishing of smallpox... One key factor was a scientific understanding about the virus itself... Scientific innovations also played a crucial role in the eradication projects... But another key breakthrough was the development of institutions like the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. themselves. Starting in the mid-1960s, the W.H.O. — led by a C.D.C. official, D.A. Henderson — worked in concert with hundreds of thousands of health workers, who oversaw surveillance and vaccinations in the more than 40 countries still suffering from smallpox outbreaks. The idea of an international body that could organize the activity of so many people over such a vast geography, and over so many separate jurisdictions, would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the 19th century...
The list of new ideas that propelled the great escape is long and varied. Some of them took the form of tangible objects: X-ray machines, antiretroviral drugs. Some of them were legal or institutional in nature: the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, seatbelt laws. Some of them were statistical breakthroughs: new ways of tracking data, like the invention of randomized controlled trials, which finally allowed us to determine empirically if new treatments worked as promised, or proved a causal link between cigarettes and cancer. Some of them were meta-innovations in the way that new treatments are discovered, like the development of "rational drug design," which finally moved drug development from the Fleming model of serendipitous discovery to a process built on the foundations of chemistry...
The truth is the spike in global population has not been caused by some worldwide surge in fertility. What changed is people stopped dying... All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves.
Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.
In a recent 10,000-word excerpt from his new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (now also a four-part PBS/BBC series that's streaming online), Johnson tries to convey the magnitude of humanity's accomplishment: [I]t manifests in countless achievements, often quickly forgotten, sometimes literally invisible: the drinking water that's free of microorganisms, or the vaccine received in early childhood and never thought about again... The decade following the initial mass production of antibiotics marked the most extreme moment of life-span inequality globally. In 1950, when life expectancy in India and most of Africa had barely budged from the long ceiling of around 35 years, the average American could expect to live 68 years, while Scandinavians had already crossed the 70-year threshold. But the post-colonial era that followed would be characterized by an extraordinary rate of improvement across most of the developing world...
The forces behind these trends are complex and multivariate. Some of them involve increasing standards of living and the decrease in famine, driven by the invention of artificial fertilizer and the "green revolution"; some of them involve imported medicines and infrastructure — antibiotics, chlorinated drinking water — that were developed earlier. But some of the most meaningful interventions came from within the Global South itself, including a remarkably simple but powerful technique called oral rehydration therapy... the treatment is almost maddeningly simple: give people lots of boiled water to drink, supplemented with sugar and salts.... The Lancet called it "potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century." As many as 50 million people are said to have died of cholera in the 19th century. In the first decades of the 21st century, fewer than 66,000 people were reported to have succumbed to the disease, on a planet with eight times the population...
Of all the achievements that brought the great escape to the entire world, though, one stands out: the vanquishing of smallpox... One key factor was a scientific understanding about the virus itself... Scientific innovations also played a crucial role in the eradication projects... But another key breakthrough was the development of institutions like the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. themselves. Starting in the mid-1960s, the W.H.O. — led by a C.D.C. official, D.A. Henderson — worked in concert with hundreds of thousands of health workers, who oversaw surveillance and vaccinations in the more than 40 countries still suffering from smallpox outbreaks. The idea of an international body that could organize the activity of so many people over such a vast geography, and over so many separate jurisdictions, would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the 19th century...
The list of new ideas that propelled the great escape is long and varied. Some of them took the form of tangible objects: X-ray machines, antiretroviral drugs. Some of them were legal or institutional in nature: the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, seatbelt laws. Some of them were statistical breakthroughs: new ways of tracking data, like the invention of randomized controlled trials, which finally allowed us to determine empirically if new treatments worked as promised, or proved a causal link between cigarettes and cancer. Some of them were meta-innovations in the way that new treatments are discovered, like the development of "rational drug design," which finally moved drug development from the Fleming model of serendipitous discovery to a process built on the foundations of chemistry...
The truth is the spike in global population has not been caused by some worldwide surge in fertility. What changed is people stopped dying... All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves.
Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.
Re: (Score:3)
Luckily, increasing life span causes demographic collapse.
Skewed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly. The headline strongly suggests that whereas the oldest person in the world was about 100 at any given time for a very long time, now we have double-centenarians. Human life span is not synonymous with human life expectancy at birth.
But the confusion seems to start in the article, because unless the summary grossly misrepresents it, its author seems to think that seatbelt laws are partially responsible for the massive decline in child mortality in India, as opposed to improvements in basic healthcar
Re:Skewed (Score:4, Interesting)
We get a lot of old guys looking back to their youth and say, back when I was a kid I did all these dangerous things and I am still alive. Completely forgetting all the others who did not.
Hack I remember back in my childhood, it was common to see kids in arm and leg casks because they broke a bone, sometime from a car accident, other times, from playing on the playground that is risen 10 feet above the ground. Heck I remember I use to go to the highest point on the playground and jump off.
Re: (Score:2)
Someone once shared a meme I saw that said, 'raise your hand if you ever sat in the back of a pickup without a seat belt as a kid and survived'.
I replied with, 'Better yet, raise your hand if you sat in the back of a pickup without a seat belt and didn't.'
That affirmation by sampling bias buggers me senseless
This is right up there with, 'they don't build them to last like they used to!' Well, genius, you're forgetting that all the ones that weren't built to last back then are already gone...
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly. The headline strongly suggests that whereas the oldest person in the world was about 100 at any given time for a very long time, now we have double-centenarians. Human life span is not synonymous with human life expectancy at birth.
Yup, the limits have not been exceeded.
I think that altogether too many people seem to think as the author does. I know more than a handful of people who believe that even if they do not achiever immortality, their children will. And not the religious "Worship God here, and you'll go to a place where you can worship him forever!", but the one body, one eternal person.
When in fact all the hullabaloo over centenarians, just fuels these people's hopes. People seem to think that the person who hits 100 get
Re: (Score:3)
Is that a Donald Trump most people don't know or a knowledge based most people don't know?
Most people I know do know—maybe because I've repeatedly told them so, maybe not.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Skewed (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, there's still no cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome
LOL, Republicans today are still complaining about Obama's administration. Even calling Biden's presidency Obama's third term. If you expect people to forget about a president a few months after they leave office, you have a lot of disappointment in store for you.
Trump is likely to be a bit different than most though. As someone who was born shortly after Nixon's presidency was over, I have no idea how long his failures remained as a part of public political discourse after he left office. We haven't had a similarly disgraced president since Nixon. But with the Republican party moving on an gaining political success with Reagon only six years later, Nixon didn't do too much damage on the way out.
Trump is different in that the Republican party isn't distancing itself from him like they did with Nixon. By keeping the Big Lie going and making allegiance to Trump a litmus test for Republican leadership, Republicans don't seem keen on letting him fade away either. You can keep calling any time someone brings up Trump's failures a case of TDS, but his impact has certainly not left our political climate yet. The long tail impact of his failures are not nearly over.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. I *knew* somebody would post the "what most people don't know" trope even though the majority do in fact know that.
Re:Skewed (Score:5, Funny)
Between me and Bill Gates we have an average of 62 billion dollars each.
Re: (Score:2)
That's nothing - between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and myself, our combined net worth is almost $330 BILLION.
Re: Skewed (Score:3)
They will be skewed, the datasets for African and Indians that had means of 35 years for death will also have exceptionally low birth survival rates, roll that into your mean age of death and you at looking at gibberish
Re: Skewed (Score:5, Insightful)
They will be skewed, the datasets for African and Indians that had means of 35 years for death will also have exceptionally low birth survival rates, roll that into your mean age of death and you at looking at gibberish
Because infant mortality doesn't matter? Even if the change were entirely driven by reduction in infant and child death, it would still constitute the most incredible improvement in human life in history.
Hans Rosling makes a compelling argument [amazon.com] that if you want to find a single measure for socioeconomic progress, child mortality is the one you should use. Infants and children are extremely fragile, requiring a lot of resources to protect and feed, and they're also extremely important to their parents and families, which means that if the parents have the resources they will be protected and fed (there are exceptions, of course, but in aggregate this is true). So child mortality is an excellent measure of the surplus resources of a society, and the distribution of those resources.
So, even if mean lifespan were merely a proxy for child mortality, child mortality is a proxy for pretty much everything else. This development is a step change in human life, one that's as large in size as the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, but larger in impact because there are so many more people.
Even better for our ability to survive long-term, this change is the first one that actually reduces the birthrate. in centuries and millennia past, humanity didn't live in balance with nature, humanity died in balance with nature... population growth was kept down by death. Particularly child death, but by death at all ages. But it turns out that humans are different from other animals in that when we have both the ability to control reproduction and the confidence that our children will survive, we have fewer of them. The few generations it took people to acquire confidence that their children would live saw a population explosion, but the global birth rate has already leveled off and in most of the developed world is actually declining.
It's also not the case that life expectancy hasn't increased. The very oldest aren't much older, but many, many more of us can expect to live into our 80s and 90s. And the quality of life of the elderly has improved, too. There are far more vigorous, active people in their 60s, 70s and even 80s. Of course we've also learned to keep people alive well past the point where their lives are really worth living. An area for improvement, one of many.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
except the article doesn't mention this and is misleading
It's actually not misleading. You just want to find something in it that isn't there. It's about the doubling of average lifespan, and how that's an incredible advance, which is true.
Re: (Score:2)
"Infants and children are extremely fragile..." You're telling me. I barely got two skips out of the one I took to the old mill pond.
Re: (Score:3)
Agreed. It's a demonstration of how statistics that are poorly interpreted can show just about anything, even things that are patently stupid. People can understand 'average', but not 'bimodal distribution'. We've done really great work on infant mortality and female mortality during childbirth, and whilst we have also decreased adult mortality with modern medicine, we've also increased it with modern living. We have many diseases today that our forebears didn't have to deal with. Many cancers are a result
Re:Skewed (Score:4, Informative)
What most people don't know is that these numbers are skewed. The average life expectancy is adversely affected by the high child mortality rates. Most people who survived their child years would live almost as long as we do today (60's).
True - we are allowing many more to live a more "normal' lifespan.
What we are not doing is extending the limits. While there are more people living into 100+ years old, we have not extended the maximum. There are no 500 year old humans.
My best guess is that outside of becoming human brained Androids or extra-corporeal entities we won't either. One of the biggest impediments is not often looked at, with people fixating on Hayflick limits and things like semi-stavation.
It's what are we going to do about the body's framework? Collagen and calcium phosphate is not substances that are going to wear for the time spans we are thinking of.
I'm reminded of this every day, where in my mid-60's, all those years of Ice Hockey have wreaked havoc on my back, knees, ankles, shoulders and elbows.
Now granted that most people do not play contact sports, but even their skeletal system wears out. It's not a system that lends itself to propelling us around for several hundred years with self repair either.
If we assume eventual success in immortality or something near to it - my money is on human-android fusion.
Re:Skewed (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a very, very good point.
I took up genealogy as an idle hobby a few years ago. I was able to get most of the branches of my family back to at least the early 1700s with a fairly high degree of confidence.
My ancestors in America were all over the place. There's a large group of dirt poor hardscrabble Appalachian farmers and traders, some early Midwestern pioneer types, Pennsylvania Dutch, Southern coastal dwellers, one branch that was very early in Boston/Massachusetts, etc. Your typical American mutt.
Going back to the 1700s, they almost all lived to be ~80 and generally into the low 80s. The oldest I remember finding was a 91-year-old woman who died in the early 1800s.
The shortest lifespans? My great grandparents and grandparents, several of whom died of smoking related diseases, several of whom worked in awful factory conditions, etc. (One exception for a relative who died at aged 68. From family records, he had been gravely wounded at Gettysburg and never fully recovered. Still lived another 40 years after that..)
So yeah, if you made it to adulthood, you had a damn good chance of making it about as long as we do today on average. That is, if you're lucky and avoided war, plague, famine, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't consider that a skew. That's normal and should be part of the avg life expectancy. What is skewed is that the past is worse than recorded per today's standards. A baby that died in the past isn't recorded as a human that died. Per the record, they didn't exist. I know atleast two parents of friends who aren't technically the oldest sibling, and the only reason they know is because their moms told them in the evening of their lives!
What you say is true for most creatures, you make it to a certai
Different measurements (Score:2)
https://ourworldindata.org/lif... [ourworldindata.org]
While reduced infant mortality is important, there is also a definite increase in people living into their 80s and 90s as well.
Bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Life expectancy has not doubled for those aged 5 or over. Life expectancy at birth may well have, but that's because child mortality was incredibly high.
Look in graveyards from the 1800's, never mind the 1920's, and you'll see people living to 70 and 80. Do you think you're going to live to 140-160?
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
the average human life span doubled
They didn't say maximum life span.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
What I get about average life span is that these guys are talking about a mean which is heavily skewed and more or less of no interest. If they want to talk about infant mortality, then fine. That's been a great success story.
If they want to talk about "average life expectancy" then they should be talking about modal age at death. The mean at birth is useless.
Re: (Score:2)
The important counterpart of high infant mortality is high fertility rate. Since about the late 1960s [ourworldindata.org], that has fallen by half. As a result, we end up with roughly the same population growth rate, because so many of the deaths were of young children, who never reached reproductive age.
For population growth and other ways of measuring our collective impact on the planet, average live span isn't very meaningful by itself.
Average( arguments ) (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The point is, this story is essentially made-up. Without any of the article's points actually being wrong due to semantic details and cherry-picking, the sum of the parts results to a bullshit article. It's not worth defending.
I liked the fact that seatbelt laws were mentioned in the list of achievements for doubling the "lifespan" during the last 100 years. Because you had hundreds of millions of people driving and crashing cars back in 1920 to make a statistical difference on the average. Sure seatbelts s
Re: (Score:3)
Because you had hundreds of millions of people driving and crashing cars back in 1920
On a per mile basis, traveling by horseback is far more dangerous than traveling by car - but that's irrelevant. The point of the article is that, on average, people today live longer than people did in 1920 for a variety of reasons.
obligatory car analogy (Score:2)
with 0-60 times there is the rolling start and the standing start.
A lot of time is wasted in the first meter of the standing start but smart traction control and clutch control can overcome that.
Life expectancy improved a lot in the first meter but we're using the 0-60 times to compare the expectancy.
Re: (Score:2)
The article doesn't say how "average life span" is calculated, but my understanding is that it only includes individuals who survive to their first birthday.
Infant mortality and average lifespan are two different statistics.
Reversal of Fortune (Score:1)
People Born in the 1970s are the first generation who will not live as long their parents. Largely the reason for this is pollution - in other words people are dying again.
Re:Reversal of Fortune (Score:5, Insightful)
People Born in the 1970s are the first generation who will not live as long their parents. Largely the reason for this is pollution
That can't be right: pollution is much better now than it was in the 1970s. Rivers were catching on fire [youtube.com]. The EPA has been controversial, but it actually has protected the environment.
Re: (Score:2)
People Born in the 1970s are the first generation who will not live as long their parents. Largely the reason for this is pollution
That can't be right: pollution is much better now than it was in the 1970s...
We uh, had four billion less humans on this planet back then...
Re: (Score:2)
That can't be right: pollution is much better now than it was in the 1970s. Rivers were catching on fire [youtube.com]. The EPA has been controversial, but it actually has protected the environment.
Well... we did manage to address some of the more gross violations, but there were significantly less people back then. And, I suspect, if you took a look at the largest polluter on Earth (China) you'd see they're in pretty bad shape. The shit they release into the air doesn't stay in China. Nor does the crap they dump into the sea stay in Chinese territorial waters.
While western nations have made some strides in pollution reduction, the same cannot be said for our two most populous nations which are fu
Re:Reversal of Fortune (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
ok, you need to actually look at measurements instead of using your intuition. You are being anti-scientific.
Re: (Score:3)
And rivers catching on fire in the 1970s wasn't some new horror of modern pollution. It had been going on for a long time and there are many recorded incidents.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Reversal of Fortune (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately for the world, rates slow at least in countries with some combination of less religious, more wealthy, more educated.
Religion actually has little to no correlation with birth rates (link [youtube.com]). Birth rates around the world can be almost perfectly predicted by two factors: Wealth and education (particularly female education). It's also almost perfectly correlated with child mortality rate, but it seems likely that the causal chain runs from wealth/education -> child mortality -> birth rate. That is, wealth and female education provide the resources and knowledge needed to reduce child mortality, and reduced child mortality provides parents with the confidence that their children will survive, so they have fewer of them and invest more in each.
There is a negative correlation between religiosity and wealth/education, though. I think it's because better understanding of the world and more control over the world reduces the influence of randomness in life, in the sense that your life can suddenly be destroyed by an event you couldn't foresee or prevent. And I suspect that that sort of randomness is a big part of what drives people to seek the comfort that religion provides. It's not the only driver, certainly, but I think it's a big one.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
NIH disagrees. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] Not huge, about 2.3 very religious vs 1.8 not religious. I suspect certain religions in the US such as Mormons that emphasize family may be even greater.
Meh. You're talking about minor variation within a country that already has net-negative growth (except for immigration). You will always be able to find subgroups that are outliers; they're not a driving force.
Interesting that you mention Mormons, because I'm Mormon, and I can tell you that Mormon family sizes have decreased dramatically. Most of the young generation are having only two children. There is no doctrinal basis for large family sizes at all -- the emphasis on family is on closeness and im
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Many people within the US believe trends and norms in this country are representative of the rest of the world. So while religion inside the US may be a good indicator of larger family size, it isn't necessarily true throughout the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
People born in the 1970's had a childhood where they were living with the worst of the traditional, pollution (lead in gasoline and paint, asbestos, toxic waste discharged directly into the water supplies, etc) , so that early exposure may have had a long term effect. On top of that, the we've massively increased the amounts of fertilizers and pesticides being used, so while the rivers may no longer burn as regularly, there are still huge pollution problems in our water supplies. It might be more accurat
It's a bullshit statistic (Score:2)
Conrariwise... (Score:5, Funny)
... we have reliable evidence that human lifespan has greatly decreased since Biblical times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Conrariwise... (Score:5, Informative)
... we have reliable evidence that human lifespan has greatly decreased since Biblical times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The standard for "reliable" has increased since Biblical times.
Re: (Score:2)
Look up! you might catch a glimpse of the sarcasm flying by way over your head.
Re: (Score:2)
Back then religious wars would just randomly break out.
Nope. Back then religious wars went on pretty much continuously.
Re: (Score:2)
What morons mark a joke troll?
Terminology: no change in achievable lifespan (Score:5, Interesting)
The average life expectancy (at birth) has dramatically increased thanks to a reduction of premature mortality, especially perinatal deaths, infectious diseases, and sometimes violent deaths.
But if you survive these causes of premature deaths, the (achievable) human lifespan hasn't changed in thousands of years: Tombstones of Greek philosophers attest they lived into their 80s, and some to over 100 years of age. The Egyptian Vizier Ptahhotep wrote verses about the disintegrations of old age nearly 4500 years ago.
It's important to distinguish these two concepts (average life expectancy, vs. achievable lifespan), which some charlatans like to confuse.
Re: (Score:2)
human lifespan hasn't changed in thousands of years: Tombstones of Greek philosophers attest they lived into their 80s, and some to over 100 years of age.
Maximum lifespan hasn't changed much, but the percentage of people making it in to their 80s, 90s, or 100s absolutely has. Granted that some of those additional years aren't what anyone would call good, but a lot of them are. Not only do many more people live longer, but many, many more of them are still vigorous and active in their 70s and even 80s.
But, yes, the largest driver of in increased mean lifespan is the reduction of child mortality, and that's an incredibly good thing [slashdot.org].
I think average life expectancy (Score:3)
Life Span: Is 120 the new normal? (Score:2)
Longevity.Technology, Jan. 7, 2020
"Japan is also home to the world's oldest living person; Kane Tanaka (pictured) who was born in 1903."
She is 118 years old.
Decline since 2014 (Score:3)
Beside overrating numbers by using a statistical mean which, as many have already commented on here, is unsuited: What also looks like TFA is trying to hide it is that life expectancy in the US has been actually decreasing since 2014.
Yea, but... (Score:3)
Re:Yea, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is simply not true by any objective measure. The percentage of people in the world who live in poverty has declined remarkably over the last few centuries. In terms of basic comfort, the middle class today have a higher quality of life than the millionaires (equivalent of today's billionaires) a hundred years ago. If a millionaire was hot in 1921, they suffered in the heat. Today, even working class people can just turn down the A/C. Even people of relatively modest means can travel around the world at speed and comfort unimaginable then.
Now, it is true that the number of people living into infirm old age has probably increased. But that's essentially a policy choice. I've watched plenty of older people live for a few extra years after being pumped full of antibiotics to save them from infections that would have almost certainly killed them 100 years ago. But nothing says you have to accept treatment at 90 years old. It's just that society expects people to.
People tend to filter out the bad things about the past and remember an idealized version. For example, when people think of 1950s America, they think of Leave it to Beaver, not lynchings in the South. They think of big finned Cadillacs, not people living in dirt floor huts in Appalachia. When they think of the 1920s, they think of the Jazz age, not the fact that a huge portion of Americans had no access to electricity or running water.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Whose entire day consists of sleeping, eating or being fed, pooping and being wiped, falling asleep in front of the TV, and nothing else, all day, every day.
Add work and you've described my day! But wait -- where the hell is my wiper??
Re: (Score:2)
I think it depends on one's attitude. If I'm stuck in a wheelchair, with a hose in me and needing help to take a piss, I'm going to be doing my darndest to make my nurse/attendant/whomever laugh or at least crack a smile. Because it's fun to brighten someone else's day. How do I know this? Because I've done it already.
Tithonus myth (Score:2)
This is the Tithonus myth [wikipedia.org] of ancient times: To wish for eternal life, but forget to wish for eternal youth.
How fortuitous (Score:2)
This is one of the reasons [9cache.com] the human life span keeps increasing.
Capitalism (for now) (Score:2)
Re:Capitalism (for now) (Score:5, Insightful)
The truly horrible thing is that you seem to be under the misconception that it's *either* extreme capitalism *or* extreme socialism.
Look to other countries. Look to Europe for social democracies. Look to Asia for a variety of other systems.
You'll find that the current "American model" is rather bad by a variety of parameters, these days.
Most of Europe has good models. Northern Europe (Scandinavia) has a *very* good model.
Good article marred by subtitle (Score:2)
But for rest of the population to it went up by significant amount in the east. China, India etc. That also contributed significantly to population growth.
They took an interesting true fact, life expectancy increases played a big role in the population explosion, but jazzed it up too much and made it sound as if this is the only reason, and made a mess.
Re: (Score:2)
In a society with very high infant mortality, life expectancy at birth might be 20, because so many people die in the first days of life, pulling the overall number down, while life expectancy at 20 might easily be in the 60s. The doubling of life expectancy over the past century is a result of progress at both ends of the age spectrum: Children are dying far less frequently, and the elderly are living much longer. Centenarians are projected to be the fastest-growing age group worldwide.
So they address the question of infant mortality, Most likely a sub editor decided to create a click bait subtitle and made a mess.
Re: (Score:2)
The life expectancy has not really doubled if you define it at age five instead of at birth.
I believe it usually only includes people who survive their first birthday in order to separate infant mortality from longevity.
Bad subtitle, and some level of misunderstanding (Score:5, Interesting)
Human beings had spent 10,000 years inventing agriculture, gunpowder, double-entry accounting, perspective in painting — but these undeniable advances in collective human knowledge failed to move the needle in one critical category: how long the average person could expect to live.
The article addresses infant mortality but the subeditor made a shockingly poor click baity sub title that derailed the entire discussion here.
One quibble I have with the quote above is, This is the cause of declining life expectancy at birth. In the hunter gather societies before the invention of agriculture, women were not make making babies every year. By the time we studies hunter gatherers they have been driven from fertile lands to marginal lands. All the fertile lands were taken over by farmers, and even herders. Only lands too poor for even cattle grazing was left to the hunter-gatherers. In a fertile river delta the hunter gathers had good life, with decent life expectancy. Its the invention of agriculture that led to the population densities high enough to cause serious communicable diseases and lack of clean water that led to infant mortality.
Re: (Score:3)
I think we can really only guess what infant mortality was like in pre-agriculture societies as there are no written vital records to study. There are archaeological finds, but no real way to know for sure if the incidence of child remains found is a representative sample.
Re: (Score:1)
Organisms that have accident prone life or prey animals dont spend much of their energy in repairing cell damage or developing error correction in cell division. Animals free from predation tend to have long life times. Elephants, rhinoceri, hippopotami, ... Based on that we can estimate pre historic life expectancy of H sapiens. Also menopause, unique to H sapiens, indicate human female bodies lived long afte
Re: (Score:2)
Of course there's no reason to think the metabolic life expectancy was any different than today (really at any time in history). My post was about infant mortality, which is the biggest determinate in life expectancy for large populations. We really don't know for certain what infant mortality rates were like in prehistoric societies.
well ... (Score:3)
In 1950, when life expectancy in India and most of Africa had barely budged from the long ceiling of around 35 years, the average American could expect to live 68 years, while Scandinavians had already crossed the 70-year threshold.
It's the export of Western European / American culture and science that raised the world's overall lifespan. Not a popular sentiment these days, to be sure.
WRONG WRONG WRONG (Score:2)
I just went thru this with a friend on Facebook, and showed that the average adult lifespan increased by about 6 or so years. The real change was in the reduction of child and infant mortality rates. If someone survived their youth and reached adulthood, they basically lived nearly as long as we do today minus about 1/2 a decade.
This is well understood, and yet, article after article keeps trying to portray the image that most people in the past died at 40 years of age. Patently false, many lives into the
We always lived long, trick is not to die early. (Score:2)
refrigeration and indoor plumbing (Score:1)