Scientists Claim That 72 Is the New 30 . . . So, How Do We Pay for Increased Life Expectancy? Video. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, February 26, 2013. Also find it here.
72 is the new 30: Scientists claim healthcare and medicine extends keep us younger for longer. By Anna Hodgekiss and Martin Robinson. Daily Mail, February 26, 2013.
Human mortality improvement in evolutionary context. By Oskar Burger, Annette Baudisch, James W. Vaupel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Early Edition, October 15, 2012. PDF.
Abstract:
Life
expectancy is increasing in most countries and has exceeded 80 in several, as
low-mortality nations continue to make progress in averting deaths. The health
and economic implications of mortality reduction have been given substantial
attention, but the observed malleability of human mortality has not been placed
in a broad evolutionary context. We quantify the rate and amount of mortality
reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human
mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for
ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has
decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and
today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between
hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees. The bulk of this mortality reduction has
occurred since 1900 and has been experienced by only about 4 of the roughly
8,000 human generations that have ever lived. Moreover, mortality improvement
in humans is on par with or greater than the reductions in mortality in other
species achieved by laboratory selection experiments and endocrine pathway
mutations. This observed plasticity in age-specific risk of death is at odds
with conventional theories of aging.
