Comment by FollowingTheDao
1 year ago
Well we seem to now be doing worse than the hunter gatherer's who "had a life expectancy of about 45 years" with the rise in early onset cancers.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/early-onset-cancer-in-youn...
And on your "had a life expectancy of about 45 years", you have a math problem. The average life span was closer to 25 years but was dragged down but the huge amount of infant mortality which is normal in humans.
The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
> The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
Some of them do, but those are filtered to the most healthy if the lot. It's not really surprising that if you lose the sickly ones while they're infants the ones who make it to adulthood are less likely to get sick.
This is further confounded when you have generations that have lived longer, as we do in the first world, because now not only do the sickly ones live long enough to get modern diseases, they also live long enough to reproduce and pass on the previously-non-viable genes. So generation after generation gets added that would never have survived without modern medicine.
I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution for different traits now besides raw survivability, but it does mean that we should expect our disease numbers to be higher.
My point was that when someone says the "life expectancy is 45" that does not mean that everyone dies at 45.
> I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution
We cannot "optimize" our evolution for different traits. Evolution is optimization to the environment. We cannot use human thought to optimize evolution, and that is eugenics anyway so no thanks.
I was anthropomorphizing the natural process of evolution, not suggesting eugenics. I thought that would be obvious, but apparently not.