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.
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.
>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).
I'm in a pretty similar situation ... guess from your profile that it's OK to hook up with you by email ?
>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.
That's not what selection bias is -- that's just an accurate reporting of what you see around you. It would be selection bias if you additionally claimed that this must be the case elsewhere too.
I just mean that I don't hang out in nursing homes, so all of the 70+ people I know are those who aren't in nursing homes. This may cause me to believe that older people don't normally live in nursing homes. Probably I could have explained that better :-)
It is absolutely selection bias, in precisely the context the grandparent stated - he recognized that his data sample may not be representative of the entire population.
Perfect disclaimer on the limitations of his analysis because of the selection bias inherent in the data sample.
There are also those of us who personally know people whose lives are saved only to have the remainder be defined by experiences of pain, discomfort, and indignity. Not to mention, extroardinary cost.
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.
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.)
> nor is rotting away in a forgotten corner of a human warehouse
To play devil's advocate, a lot of older people in Asian, Latin, and Middle Eastern societies don't end up in retirement homes.
Yes, they exist, but it's culturally expected for children to take care of their parents in old age (just like the parents took care of the kids when they were young). Sure it doesn't make the quality of your last decades in life much better but I think at least it'd involve less crippling loneliness.
In developped countries the cost (mental, economical, physical) of caring for parents drive away children, and where there was two to three siblings decades ago, in these day and age single childs are plenty.
> The benefits of some of those advances are questionable at best. 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.
To me, it's absolutely not "questionable at best": it's a tremendous step for humanity on a path to a fully enjoyable long life.
On a population-wide point of view, the next step is that the first 60/70 years should be dedicated to building a strong body. Sport and nutrition, done intelligently (no mindless cardio, for example), can do wonders for the last 20 years of one's life.
A strong body can be achieved by virtually anybody with time and dedication, minus specific conditions (laziness is not a specific condition). I'm not talking about being lean and jacked, I'm speaking about strong body, with working joints that have been taken care of during the whole life.
Of course there's medical conditions specific to old age that can't be escaped even with a strong body, mainly brain decay. Science needs to continue its quest here. I've read that there's hints that Alzheimer may be linked somehow (in a complex way) to lack of sleep: I can assure you that you sleep well when you lift every two days, years after years. In the end there's no simply no logical reason to neglect our body.
The bulk of old people in nursing have just completely neglected their body for their entire life, and that's the main reason why they can't enjoy the last years. As a civilization, we should now focus on engaging current generations to prepare their body for the end.
Five days a week sounds like too much - if you are not able to recover between sessions, you will get symptoms of overtraining which include poor sleep and poor appetite.
I think the issue with nursing homes come from a misunderstanding of what they are. Maybe it’s different outside of Scandinavia, but here, the only people who go to nursing homes are people who are so sick they can no longer stay in their own homes.
So naturally the state of those placed in a nursing home is dire, and when you view the nursing home as a place for the old rather than for what it is it’ll give you the idea that old age isn’t something to strive for.
In reality, however, a nursing home is really a long term hospice and everyone who live there is slowly dying from a range of diseases. Often because they didn’t live healthy lives.
That’s not what old age has to look like though. More and more people are living rich lives even after they turn 90, and while we can talk about the quality of life of those who don’t, the technological advances are also helping people who don’t go to nursing homes.
It’s sepecially helping with mobility, so that people who get sick in a non-lethal way, like getting pains from walking, can stay out of the nursing home longer than they used to.
Don't know where you live, but here in the US and especially in our metro areas, we use nursing homes as a way to seek vengeance against the older generations if they were assholes to younger generations.
On the surface, we like to say how we're providing care and have their best interests in mind as they "age well" and as we repay the debt of elders who took care of us so dutifully for years.
But in reality, the main usage is to get rid of very burdensome, cantankerous, and irresponsible leeches who because they left their children with a sense of hatred will not give in to the idea of putting up with their crap ever again, so let them rot all drugged up in a coma where they cannot escape as they watch TV in a urine-soaked room and play bingo every Wednesday night until they die off.
It's more a short-term fix for us though, a pretty typical American form of cutting off the nose to spite the face since national spending is sprialing out of control from dealing with the old and will become a larger economic problem. Ironically, it does force the hand of the young in later years once filial laws come back in full swing enforcement who will end up saying enough is enough and euthanasia legalization legislation will come swooping in to deal with this.
The policy, cultural struggle I'm currently having is we won't let the elderly die in peace, with some dignity.
The growing acceptance of hospice and euthanasia, during my life time, has been very encouraging.
But what happens when people are kept alive after they lost their agency?
My immediate family has two people in a nursing home. The sicker of the two is essentially a vegetable and is not permitted to die (feeding tube, other heroic efforts). The some what less sicker is also trying to die, but at least still remembers his own name, can return greetings.
If either of these two men were lucid, they'd be livid to learn they're still here.
There's a guy down the hall who hasn't had any external contact in 11 years. No friends, no family. He's a complete vegetable. It's horrifying.
I've instructed my family that when I'm no longer able to converse, when I need someone to manage my hygiene, to let me die. I do not want to become a long term burden on the living.
I'm so worried about it, I've been researching ways to kill oneself, should the need arise.
Holy wow. I can assure you that this is NOT what the majority of Americans who send elders to nursing homes think. It’s more often to simply avoid the burden; laziness rather than spite. Other major reasons are because their families aren’t properly equipped to take care of them. E.g. physically, mentally, financially, or non-existent family members.
Anecdotes based on my experience with mother working as nurse in nursing home, and being American.
Possibly, but the notion of a retirement home as a kind of prison or punishment seems to be rooted in pop culture.
Remember the running gag from "The Golden Girls" where Sophia, the oldest member of the cast, was often threatened to be sent back to the retirement home of hell "Shady Pines".
Depends on the culture too. Some of those "not sharing" those feelings belong to cultures that are OK with putting your parents there instead of taking care of them -- and think it's "for the better". Others wouldn't (statistically) let that happen, even if they have "busy lives" themselves.
(Another alternative of course popular in some cultures is to let them toil away even at 70 or more, and have them live alone and "independent", with the token visit).
I'm not sure you accurately diagnose the degree of polarization in the population with ideas of resentment and hostility that are largely subconscious and tend not to surface until stress manipulates those repressed emotions into actually being confronted as eventually obvious explanations for actions undertaken with ulterior motives.
These feelings are universally shared, but only visible to most in times of scarcity and fear. When economies are bubbling along in mania, people tend to lose sight of the eventualities regarding unsustainable societies. It's easy for people to rationalize their actions as charity, benevolence, and empathetic concern when they themselves are rewarded daily for vocalizing the whitewash and justifying what should be by what is now. When the music stops and individuals are left to fend for a chance at a seat, the full intention of previous actions becomes apparent as if malice is not something definable by planned greed and desire but puppetered unknowingly by a more clairvoyant self that protects its fragile present with the blessing of moral amnesia.
I completely agree that people in general do not want to deal with near death elders , or elders who need caretaking. As of course this is a huge burden and very distracting. I’ve also dealt with this a number of times. It’s certisnly not fun or easy.
BUT all the other undertone and reasoning (e.g. spite), I completely disagree with and do not think this is representative of the majority, or even a large minority.
I'll assume you are indicating that the visitor logs are often empty. Given that, I do not see how no visitors correlates to the families doing it out of vengeance or spite. In general, I feel the poster extremely amplified the reasons why people put family members in nursing homes. Based on this wording, specifically the paragraph about "letting them rot all drugged up... in a urine soaked room". This indicates a rather extreme, and I'd wager rare stance to take. I'm wondering if this is from their own anecdotal evidence.
I do know for sure nursing homes are definitely used to "remove a burden." Dealing with elders at that stage of life can very taxing, and many people would rather simply avoid it. They may even, as the poster hinted at, dislike their family member. However, even then I don't think they share as strong emotions as the poster.
I don't see much daylight between neglecting (apathy towards) family and vengeance or spite.
Whatever the case, I'd welcome research into attitudes towards eldercare. Right now, I feel like we're flying blind. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised whatsoever if GenX'ers (like me) would rather die than be warehoused. But no one I know is thinking that far ahead, having these discussions with their kids. Nor are our parents discussing this with us, now that it's our turn to be the care givers.
--
For instance:
Family Involvement in Residential Long-Term Care: A Synthesis and Critical Review [2008]
"... These collective findings have helped debunk the myth that families abandon their relatives in nursing homes or similar settings to die in isolation..."
To be honest, I'm probably far younger than most on this thread and it's quite easy to dismiss my naive interpretation of a system that may? have the best of intentions but fails to materialize the outcomes sought due to individuals without a greater collective understanding of all parts micro-optimize their own actions guided by intuitive emotional reactions to the detriment of those trying to be helped by creating incentives that retrospectively do have the anthropomorphized _persona_ of malice even if the individuals themselves are deluded only through incompetence and existential horror of viewing their own upcoming mortality through the lens of their decaying elders into thinking they're helping or are at most forced to accept the reality that the burden is too large for themselves and must resort to society for support in handling the situation and absolution of burgeoning guilt through dilution of responsibility.
If you happen to wonder "what went wrong with this guy that caused him to become so jaded?" and contend that "he doesn't speak for all of us, I'm different!" well I will say it is very true that I am sort of an anomaly in current sentiment. Most people do not like how I end up deconstructing the world I perceive and view my analyses as ususally extremist, having getting kicked out (or desperate attempts at 'rehabilitative' disciplinary action) of nearly every organization I've ever been a part of from gatherings of family and friends to Sunday schools and churches, scouting, schools, and companies alike. I realize due to the repeating pattern the problem is most likely seated in myself, but if you're listening you still may like to entertain the idea that the superficial gloss we paint the world in vain attempting to heal our souls could in fact only be concealing a necrotic core. Maybe not out of actual belief in such a situation, but only to check due diligence off the list and set your mind at ease that judgement of our times will be favorably looked upon and your decisions were made with principled reason rather than excuses of being led astray by deception.
"I realize due to the repeating pattern the problem ..."
Sure.
I reprogrammed myself. I chose to be positive, optimistic. It took years.
Life is a gift, every day a celebration. I rejected the recurring debilitating existential terror. I now find joy wherever I can, however I can, and do good works as able.
The number of old people in care homes is relatively low. People also typically report high life satisfaction in their old age. It's easy to look at examples of people in this demographic in unfortunate conditions and project it onto the whole group, but I don't think it's representative in this case.
That said, euthanasia would be a great option to have for those with chronic ailments.
I'm reading Pinkers Enlightenment Now, where he does tackle the issue. Namely he claims that not only has our average lifespan extended, but also the number of healthy years has grown.
For example he states that for the average 4.7 years of added life expectancy between 1990-2010, 3.8 years added were healthy.
The benefits of some advances are questionable, but the benefits of others seem to be more definite
The leading cause of death in the US in 1980 was heart disease. It is still the leading cause of death today. However, the absolute number of deaths due to heart disease has declined by 17% from 1980 to 2015. This is despite the population growing by 42%. That is pretty amazing.
I don't have data on exactly what contributed to this decline in heart disease deaths, but I'd bet it is better drugs. The first statin was approved in 1987. ACE / ARB inhibitors were approved in the 1980s and 1990s. Again I don't have data on exactly what caused the decrease in cardiovascular disease deaths but would love to hear if others do. Nutrition and lifestyle (less smoking?) could have played a role as well, but diabetes deaths have increased a lot, so I don't think lifestyles have become too much healthier
The second leading cause of death is cancer. The number of deaths from cancer has roughly tracked population growth.
The third leading cause of death in 1980, stroke, has seen absolute numbers of deaths drop by 18% from 1980 to 2015
> The number of deaths from cancer has roughly tracked population growth.
Is this a good metric though? It seems to me that (1) once you get cancer, you always have cancer, and (2) if nothing else kills you, cancer does. So maybe a better metric would be, the lifespan of people with cancer?
> ... exactly what caused the decrease in cardiovascular disease deaths but would love to hear if others do.
Unfortunately I don't have data either, but I do have a hypothesis that may or may not end up surviving scrutiny when the relevant data becomes available. If someone can refute these ideas, please contribute.
The ultimate cause: demographics changed.
The recent decades have seen native populations reduce their fertility in the US. This is analogous to ecological succession of pioneering species colonizing barren land building up new soils by quickly flourishing and in turn crowded out in competition as other species take hold in niches opened by the pioneers laying a rich framework however being unsuccessful at sustaining dominance due to the energetic and fitness costs of extreme adaptation in resource poor environments that are unable to be useful traits relative to other species that can quickly capitalize on existing infrastructure when there's no need to divert capacity to build anew when resources become abundant. Today when applied to populations of humans in the US, the same principal goes under names like "white flight" as fleeing urbanization to recreate past conditions that were more favorable in competition strategies, "gentrification" when enclaves of urban areas decay and are then susceptible to recolonization efforts, and "immigration" to relieve bottlenecks in reproduction and the resulting scar of exposed barren land and poor nutrient circulation in the ecosystem that are caused by pioneer individuals stockpiling reserves without reinvesting in reseeding efforts.
Heart disease is typically a progressive terminal stage of diabetes and other metabolic disorders that intertwine risk factors such as poor nutrition, excessive calorie consumption and resulting unhealthy body fat percentages, alcohol abuse, cigarette use, and high stress. Looking closure at the medical literature, I'd actually reconsider the idea that statins produce beneficial health outcomes, but I won't get into that in this comment.
The point here is that in heart disease being the cumulative effects over a lifetime and diabetes as a _leading_ (not trailing) indicator of population risk for heart disease, what you're really seeing is the transition of health since WW2 when war rationing forced the agricultural and food processing industries to change course in providing massive amount of calories at low cost and effective propaganda and marketing to ensure sustained demand when the war was over to not shock the economy back into depression. Heavily processed foods like spam, American cheese, and canned/dried foods are technological means to make food supplies go further with less waste and higher caloric density. Add in things like pushing cigarette consumption heavily after the war and you get the perfect storm that kills off a large percentage of the lower class baby boomer generation early in life by around the 1980s. What's left since then are the middle and upper class baby boomers whose children reproduce in far lower numbers, being replaced with immigrants. Those immigrants come here with very different cultures regarding food consumption, nutrition, and healthcare that for a period of time did decrease the incidence of influence of the cultural epidemic of war-era food technology.
Usually after one generation though, immigrant families transition to the already establish cultural expectations and shift dietary and consumption patterns. Therefore you get the next surge of diabetes as the form of the next incarnation of the cycle. In a few decades you'll see another recurrance in more prevelent heart disease.
We need to focus more on morbidity rather than mortality. The former is for when you stop functioning well, the latter is when you die. Living to 95 when hooked up to machines, immobile, and in pain is clearly inferior to being relatively mobile and dropping suddenly at 85.
My Mum is 86 and my father turns 90 Saturday. I live at my Mum's summerhouse currently and most of the people around are around 80 y.o. There is a bias of course (some died and others ain't comming to their summerhouses) but they are active and taking care of themselves.
I have some re-modelling of the summerhouse done by a neighbor who is 80-ty, he has cancer, had a stroke but is very active, optimistic, friendly and God, he is good with his tools and when starts working he can't be stoped.
The healthcare ain't perfect but it is quite good, the pensions are OK and if you managed to stay active and relatively healthy then you can enjoy your time. That's my impression.
The keyword is maximum. Yes, that can't be improved unless our genes have changed substantially in last few centuries. However average has improved substantially. The massive number of diseases that used to kick in before genetically imposed maximum age limit including diabetes, cancer, heart attack, pneumonia etc have gone down significantly bringing average closer and closer to maximum.
but most deaths occurred in first year or two. doesn't takemany of those to drive down the average. and then there is the stupidity of adolescence and war.
Off the top of my head:
1. Increased risk of getting dementia (due to living longer).
2. In some cancer cases, being kept alive in a state of suffering for a year or two more than you would have lasted without treatment.
3. Health treatment costing a significant fraction of GDP.
Some people might still think these are good things. I think "questionable at best" is a good summary.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Here's the methods protocol [0] for designing version 6 of the Human Mortality Database being visualized at that link.
Notice how I explicity said the word _designing_ and not something like 'calculating' which would misleadingly characterize such a scheme as something that is objectively derivable from verifiable information with valid uncertainty bounds and without the potential for advocating policy with dubious constructed data.
If you've ever thought p-hacking was a riot in academia's social sciences bullshitting, wait until you read through stuff like this with think-tanks coming up with whatever numbers are necessary to justify a policy to secure more funding to shroud misinformation in a thin veil of perceived scientific validity to people who feel comforted if you just put on a white coat. Not only does it go through "careful rexaminations" of methodology with new versions every year tweaking subtle but fundamental things like "we used to assume uniform distributions of births across the entire year on v.5 and as of v.6 now we decided to assume a proprietary non-uniform distribution that flucuates per year (and our policy objectives...) because there were wars that changed reproductive strategies that we conveniently forgot to account for that last year and the error cascades through to every successive year's death risk. Stay tuned for v.7!"
On top of that and pretty much a direct consequence of this so called 'research' being complete bollocks, is that none of this junk is ever peer-reviewed. Couldn't even clear that hurdle.
Sorry to ruin your parade but the statistics accessible via think-tanks and public governments are a complete fabrication. Want to see actual life expectancy tables? You need to buyout a multi-national insurance conglomerate that has survived the test of time with financial crises and political cycles, peeking into actuary tables without the gimmicks of literal data engineering. I highly doubt you, nor anyone here, would ever get close to these secrets. And even then, the usual business model of such corporations that can attain that large of a risk pool and _could_ identify these stats are usually incentivized to profit from regulatory capture rather than the public-face tagline of accurately predicting the likelihood of risk to perfectly balance premiums against claims and extract profit from investing on the float.
Think tanks and political organizations (including government bodies, the UN and such) are more in the business of selling numbers, than reflecting reality accurately.
The problem is that most others don't have access to the infrastructure and raw data to get accurate numbers themselves (or redo the data collection with better methodology).
I don't have the link right now, but one of my favorite tales is a group of traders who called the bluff of both a pervasive incumbent government spouting all kinds of GDP fudging nonsense around the election cycle and a sprawling company who tends to work closely with and aggressively court rusted towns down on their luck as a source of cheap labor with dependent customers who are forced to rely on conditional subsidies that serve to keep labor in line during a growth hacking period to monopolize and export the company-town model requiring more negotiating leverage by leading shareholders with over-optimistic revenue guidance.
Of course, the story is more of a feel-good rationalization of fickle lottery tickets, due to the realism of "the market can be irrational longer than you can remain solvent" even if you're correct and especially due to the incentives involved to keep the insanity going as long as possible, bail out insiders, and conveniently backtrack on contracts due to concerns that actually losing money as a counter-party is not acceptable for the entrenched interests because the boogeyman of contagion would spread as the house of cards comes collapsing down with highly leveraged banks and pension funds unwinding the horrible bets they made that were rationalized by a feeling of untouchability when cozzying up with politicians.
But the details of the story are more interesting in that the methods used, such as realtime satellite based photography to more accurately estimate sales are definitely out of the current realm of accessible infrastructure and data collection methods for mere mortals who know in the back of their mind the stats are a ruse but can't possibly prove it.
I think then simple question I'm trying to ascertain using these figures, are we on a trend that could see humans living to 150 years old? Look at that data and it would suggest so, but I suspect that we are not.
That is either because we're not actually living longer as a species or there is a hard limit on how long humans can live.
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.
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.
The second metric is more useful since the former one is still affected to some degree by those who die early. Would be cool to get some more data on that second metric.
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.
Exactly, and the reason why infant mortality has gone down also has a twist to it that's usually spun for profit. It's not due to heroic advances in obstetrics, nutrition, or even medical care in general, but rather fertility demographic changes.
If you're in a metro area, go to your nearest hospital with a labor wing and ask any nurse on staff if they can describe any pattern between characteristics of a woman and how fast she delivers her offspring. The greatest predictor of risk in death of either an infant or a mother in childbirth is duration of labor. The second greatest predictor of labor death risk is age of the mother.
A growing trend in fertility for a long time by now is positive correlation with poverty, illiteracy, and religious susceptibility. There's also a very effective self-interested cultural and economical push towards _certain_ women fully embracing the (in)action of stopping their lineage either actively through choice or even passively through delay by necessity against the ticking time bomb that is menopause to receive better individual outcomes than creating children for sake of retirement insurance when now such old-age risk can now be offloaded to a pooled global society that has a huge reserve of more fertility-friendly cultures. In addition legal incentives and even unintended economic punishments push _certain_ demographics of males towards rationally opting out of procreation in order to stave off undesirable consequences for their wealth and happiness.
Tangentially, it's not something that people like to talk about in public discourse, but there has also been a very prominent trend of decreasing age in the arrival of puberty especially for girls.
All of these factors are are the outcomes of individuals, demographics, and society in general implementing changes to their reproductive strategies and over time these choices reinforce themselves through natural selection. And of course this will reflect on some opaque metrics such as "average life expectancy" if you are not able to sub-categorize the averages.
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!
I am not a doctor, nutritionist, geneticist, or any other role relevant here, but it seems to me that good genetics are just table stakes in longevity. It’s everything else after that (read: lifestyle) that makes the difference. This appears backed by the pockets of long life around the world.
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.
Hi 883771773929, I noticed your posts. It chimes in with what I understand. You seem to be an objective and intelligent guy. I’m always interested in groups/individuals that may further my own ability to survive in this nutty world. So care to share your email, and/or the groups ( online or otherwise) that you think is worthy of attention, with me? Email is on my profile.
Farmers have generally had pretty terrible (imbalanced) diets until the last century or so because one's diet was heavily dependent on the seasons and local climate.
>Farmers have generally had pretty terrible (imbalanced) diets
So they invented and clinically tested Intermittent Fasting? Trendsetters! ;-D
I don't disagree with you, but here's my point - they weren't eating Cheesy Poofs and Mac and Cheese, they were eating... greens, legumes, root vegetables, etc. Whatever was local and seasonal or that they could preserve using salting or canning. In this regard, even if there was scarcity, what they were eating was likely better for them than what much of our population calls food today.
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.
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.
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.
It's not hugely common, thankfully. Last example I ran into was one of the better authors who do enough research to be historically convincing. Which made it stand out all the more as they should have known better!
As you note there was a lot of death from pestilence. I'm happy for antibiotics preventing minor injuries turning into life threatening infections, and to share house with a few spiders rather than plague carrying fleas and rats.
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?
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
That table is for aristocrats only. It contains only men. The table also excludes "those who had died by accidents, violence, poison, or in battle."
Admittedly, Tudor England was not a very urbanized society, so looking at Londoners alone is also unrepresentative of the whole nation. I think it is at least a bit broader than 52 noble men who managed not to die of accidents or violence.
EDIT: a page later in your source, it also notes "These rates [of death for women] are very high by modern standards... In the 16th and 17th centuries, 11.3% of fertile women died from complications of childbearing."
According to Graunt's own account, he used London's bills of mortality (weekly records of deaths in in London parishes) that were kept in the parish clerk halls. According to the account beginning on page 51 (as numbered in the scan linked below), the people who collected corpses in London would report to the parish clerk how many people had died and the manner of death. Every Tuesday the reports were compiled, printed on Wednesday, published on Thursday. Graunt claims (page 59) that over a period of 20 years these bills recorded 229,250 deaths. Numbers of births came from records of christenings.
Average age of a woman at marriage was 23.5, and vast majority of births were to married women, so mother's average age at first childbirth was above 24:
London was a net population sink until the 19th century. Its native replacement rate was dwarfed by mortality, and a constant stream of immigrants (largely from elsewhere in England) was required to sustain population.
> The highest mortality was in the first five years of course. Take that out of the comparison and the figures change surprisingly.
Not just the children, but women too, mothers specifically. Child birth was very risky until only recently. Since they also had a lot more children the risk was really high.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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%).
Autopsies of supercentenarians suggest that transthyretin amyloidosis and consequent heart failure is the limiting process. Since methods of removing transthyretin amyloid are somewhere in the pipeline (Covalent Bioscience, Pentraxin Therapeutics, etc), this limit won't be around a couple of decades from now.
But you are right; next to no-one cares. The thing that is driving anti-amyloid work in this case is inherited disease in which there is excessive amyloid formation at younger ages, and the growing realization that 10% or more of people who die from heart disease in the 60+ age range are doing so because of normal levels of transthyretin amyloid deposition.
The point is that people a few millennia ago thought that the maximum human lifespan was in the ballpark of 120yr, not that they were exactly correct or incorrect.
It's interesting the a similar way that Eratosthenes calculating the dimensions of the earth was interesting.
I don't follow you. Bible isn't written through oral tradition. It's probably written/revised by bunch of people. It needs more assumptions to think that that prediction would reflect what people a few millenia ago thought that to be maximum lifespan. It'd be more interesting to find that information in a legend/ballad etc which are written through oral tradition. Since Bible isn't oral, the author(s) necessarily added their artistic personality to the work (it's possible 120 "made sense" or "sounded good" to the author of that line or is an important number for them etc)
Ostensibly agree, but as someone who is far from a Biblical scholar, can't we "trace" at least to a limited degree the lineage of these translations?
Said more simply: If the 120 years bit popped up first in the King James version then yes, that's only 420 or so years old so it makes sense that their expectations for maximum life expectancy might be closer to ours.
But what if we have examples from 1000+ years back?
Why is the oral tradition part so important? Wouldn't transcribed versions of "the Bible" (or at least this fragment) that are millenia+ years old be just as valid?
Probably showing my Biblical ignorance here so apologies in advance if this is a poorly conceived question.
Oral tradition part is important because otherwise I don't think "people a few millennia ago thought that the maximum human lifespan was in the ballpark of 120yr" follows. You can say "the authors of Bible thought that the maximum human lifespan was in the ballpark of 120yr" or that they're influenced from the public, but that needs further evidence.
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.
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.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was all true. I'm not Christian either. When I say "Noah lived for hundreds of years" (950 in fact!) I just mean according to the Bible. Same way I'd say Darth Vader ruled the Empire.
Many people who were born after the flood are listed in the Bible as living longer than 120 years. It's just not a very internally consistent book (probably because it has multiple authors).
Edit: I was wrong about the part below.
As for it being 120 years until the flood, if my memory serves me right, that passage is clearly after the flood (and as a reaction to the 'wickedness' before the flood).
That passage is before the flood. Flood planning starts just after.
I don't remember anyone living hundreds of years in the Bible after that proclamation (unless they were already alive, like Noah) but you might be right. I see Jacob was apparently 130 or older and that was later on. Is there anyone who lived a really long time that was born after Genesis 6:3? Seems like a good place to spot an obvious "plot hole".
You're right about the flood planning, I just checked. It's worth noting that the chapters in the Bible are likely modern too.
Abraham lived for 175 years, Moses suspiciously lived for exactly 120 years, some medieval commentators claim the genesis verse is a reference to him (although there is no other proof).
I read some speculation that because of the importance of lunar calendars at the time, ages may have sometimes been tracked in months instead of or in addition to years, and that those very long Biblical ages may be due to an age in months accidentally getting mixed up with an age an years.
That would, for example, put Methuselah at a much more plausible 80 years.
That theory would assume the men from Adam to Noah are actually historical persons with recorded timespans, and there was just some mistake in interpreting the numbers. But consider that Noah is similar to a character known from much older Sumerian flood myths - except in the Sumerian version he is immortal. It is common to ascribe impossibly long lifespans to legendary figures from past ages - the Sumerian list of kings lists their early kings as having reign of tens of thousands of years.
I think it is a fools errand to try to find rational explanations for implausibilities in mythology. After all, the length of lifespan is kind of the least problematic thing about the account of Adam, if you want to understand it as historical.
That has been speculated, but it then means some of those people are giving birth at age 6, which is why it is not universally accepted as an explanation. There is another version of the text that adds another 100 years to age-of-fatherhood, which makes this explanation more plausible if the extra 100 year variant is the correct one, but there are still some ages which are way too young if measured in months and way too old if measured in years.
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.
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.