Doubtful doubt
Biologists have questioned the existence of the limit of human life
Canadian scientists re-analyzed changes in human life expectancy over the past 50 years and concluded that humanity has not yet reached the limit of life, as biologists from the United States stated last year, according to an article published in the journal Nature (Many possible maximum lifespan trajectories).
"It is very difficult to guess how long people will live in the distant future if this limit does not exist. Three hundred years ago, many people lived extremely short by modern standards. If someone had told them that one day their descendants would be able to live 100 years, they would have thought that we were crazy," said Siegfried Hekimi from McGill University in Montreal (in a press release No detectable limit to how long people can live - VM).
Methuselah 's age
The typical duration of human life before the birth of civilization was from 20 to 30 years and then steadily increased with the development of science and medicine. Today, people have been living for more than 60 years in a number of countries around the world, and over 80 years in Japan and other developed countries with high quality of life and first–class medicine. On the other hand, for many living beings there is a certain maximum age at which most of the animals die of old age. In recent years, scientists have been actively arguing about whether this is typical for humans. In October last year, American researchers stated that such a maximum age may be equal to 100-115 years, and this is quite modest by the standards of the age of a number of biblical characters.
Hekimi and his colleagues rechecked these findings by re-analyzing the life expectancy statistics of the longest-lived residents of the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan since 1968 and ending today. They used the same methodology as the authors of statements about the existence of the limit of life: they were not interested in the number of deaths of people at a certain age, but where the most noticeable decline in the number of people who died occurs when comparing data from earlier and later years. If there is no limit to life, then this "survival hump", as scientists call it, will smoothly and constantly move towards an older age. If it exists, then this "hump" will stop at a certain point and will not move on.
Canceling the End of Eternity
The problem, as Hekimi notes, is that the number of centenarians selected for analysis by American biologists was too small for unambiguous conclusions. In addition, the authors of these statements divided the data set into two unequal parts – the era before 1994 and after. Only the latter – a much shorter period of time – played a significant role in the search for the limit of life.
Hekimi and his colleagues expanded the data set and analyzed it as a whole, without dividing it into arbitrary segments. The analysis showed that the growth of both average and maximum life expectancy did not stop during this time, and American researchers were able to detect not the limit of life, but traces of fluctuations in maximum life expectancy.
For example, Hekimi and his colleagues found something similar at the very beginning of this time period, from 1968 to 1980, when the maximum life expectancy also remained in place or even fell, as in the last two decades. Accordingly, we can say that we have not yet reached the limit of life or that it does not exist in principle, scientists conclude.
However, the authors of the discovery of the "limit of life" no longer agreed with Hekimi's conclusions. They are sure that their opponents use the wrong methods of analysis and incorrectly believe that statistics on maximum life expectancy obey the same mathematical rules as sets of absolutely random values. Therefore, according to Jan Vijg and his colleagues from the University of New York (USA), their conclusions remain correct, and Hekimi's criticism is unaddressed and incorrect.
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29.06.2017