For most of history, parents buried about half their children before fifteen.
Now 96 in 100 make it.
A child born in 1800 could expect fewer than 30 years. One born in 2024 can expect 73.
18 chapters, 26 centuries. The case for the species.
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@Daojoan "A child born in 1800 could expect fewer than 30 years. One born in 2024 can expect 73."
Erm, sort of. That needs a "well, actually."
It's true as an average. But those who made it past childhood, the ones who didn't die by 15, had a pretty good chance of living to 70. Even as long ago as whatever book it was in the bible was written, "three score years and ten" was a likely life span. Pretty much like now given a fairly peaceful life and not much modern medicine.
The statistics about infant and maternal mortality are the real fireworks.
So much so that modern obstetrics has shown how huge the selective pressure on women is. Biologist-speak for how many now do _not_ die in childbirth due to quite small variations in anatomy. Caesarean sections have enabled a whole cohort of women in the last 2-3 generations to reach reproductive age who would die in childbirth without surgery.
I don't remember the exact proportion (of course 🙄 ) but I'm pretty sure it was in double digits, like 12% or more. To me, that's utterly amazing. After hundreds of thousands of years of selection, those genes were merely masked and took only two generations to be re-expressed!
@Daojoan My grandmother, born 1906, once showed me a picture of her and her 5 or 6 siblings arranged by height and pointed out a couple of gaps in it - "you expected to lose a couple of kids in those days"
@Daojoan My grandmother, born 1906, showed me a picture of family of 5 of 6 arranged by height and pointed out a couple of gaps in it - "you expected to lose a couple of kids in those days"
@Daojoan That is at most an expectation that people can live to be 73. You don't know what will happen by then. And given the climate, etc., it seems quite ‘optimistic’ to me.
@Daojoan maybe things were more balanced before we became a cancer on the planet.
Anthropocentrism needs to be questioned at its heart: yes, we created more humans living longer lives and less babies dying, but we are rapidly destroying the ecological substrate that makes life possible at all.
Is this all actually a good thing?
... really?
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-stuff-now-outweighs-all-life-earth