I think the point that needs to be made here is that the risk of death for the human species is 100%. Everyone dies of something within their first two centuries. The death rate from heart disease in women above 50 is high not because they are at particularly high risk of heart disease, but because simply living long enough increases the risk of death. In contrast men die of heart disease on average far younger, and of those who survive to old age the risk always remains higher than for women.
No, simply that despite the fervent wishes of one of the directors, the data did not support the idea that vegetarians lived longer or had a lower incidence of cancer. However, I should point out three things that need to be taken into account. Firstly, it possible that not all of our data regarding diet was complete. In theory, the questionnaires were supposed to be filled out by interviewing patients, but we did find a small number that had contradictory information when compared to other, reliable data sources. Secondly, I have a hazy recollection that the crusading director was able to show results that indicated that obesity was more commonly diagnosed in non-vegetarians. And lastly, our data was selective in that it was only based on hospital, laboratory and doctor records. Although diet was one of our profiling factors (which meant that we did what checks we could to compare our data with the general population), I’m not sure how accurate the general statistics available to us were about vegetarianism.
Not really. Historical demographers have actually tended to find that pre-modern male and female life expectancies were much the same. Pat Thane has an incisive discussion of this point in her Old Age in English History (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 21-4, which, although focused on the English evidence, also draws on the wider secondary literature.
Hence the fact that the age profiles of both sexes were actually rather similar. There were serial widows as well as serial widowers, and as many old women as old men.
Look at what kills 'em; lifestyle (smoking longer and later), diet (not just the extra fries), beer, lack of proper exercising, carrying more weight for longer . . . I’m no Doctor, but at least part of it seems self evident.
a) Is it in fact the case that when we lose lots of men we get lots of the remaining men knocking up several women apiece? If that happened in, say, England post 1918, it’s been kept fairly quiet.
b) Why does evolution care greatly whether women live a long or short time after menopause? Is it possible to show that mere longevity is a survival characteristic (as opposed to, say, the possible advantage conferred by a go-getting risk-adapted grandmother who may not last as long as her lower-testosterone sister, but does a lot more to ensure the survival of her line during the fewer years left to her)?
(pre) historically, they’re the experience on the family firm, they’ve birthed, fed, nurtured and educated choldren, and now they educated their children in bringing up their (grand)childen.
I suppose they also have a carer function, especially if a daughter dies in childbirth - not uncommon, of course, way back in the day.
men on the other hand, no value at all once their hunting skills and capacity wane - just liabilities.
Old age is valuable for males and females alike, in that an older person can still educate es descendants and other younger kin. But males in risky jobs have another consideration as well. It doesn’t much matter if you’ve got the genes to naturally live to be 80, if a saber-tooth eats you today. Much better, if you have some adaptations which will enable you to escape or fight off the saber-tooth right now and survive the day, even if it means losing a few years down the line.
And you might not have seen much polygamy in England after the Great War, but that’s a relatively recent sociological development. Even today, there are still some societies which practice polygyny, and historically in those societies, the “extra” wives were often war widows.
Nah, men were of course jsut as valaubel in terms of knowledge as women.
In reality it seems that you are trying to explain something that doesn’t exist. As I already noted the majority of the age discrepancey between men and women is due to the increased death rate of males under 40, ie well within the reproductive zone. What might be termed post-reproductive males and females have fairly similar life expectancies.
In the West whever a large percentage of the male population dies in a war the women who can find husbands tend to have more kids and the “extras” resign themselves to spinsterhood.
I checked on the causes of US deaths by sex. Men die with greater frequency than women from all causes both accidental and natural. It would appear to me that in addition to being more prone to accidents men are just plain biologically weaker than women. Maybe that Y chromosome carries some baggage.
That’s not really valid reasoning. Men die from ‘natural’ causes in large part because they take high risk occupations. For example if 90% of ecologists working in tropical rainforests are men then it is hardly surpsing that 90% of Americans dying of tropical diseases are men. Similarly if 90% of people working outdoors on constuction sites etc are men then it should come as no surprise that 90% of deaths fom skin cancer are men. And so on and so forth. The probelm with your reasoning is that ‘natural’ doesn’t mean "totally uninfluenced by environment and occupation’. Itr just means “not directly caused by another human”.
The same goes for the idea that men are more accidnet prone. This is most readily proved by looking at atsts for fatalities from car accidents. Women have less accidenst than men and are les liekly to die in a car accident, but that is entirely attributable to the fact that men drive more miles and they drive more in high risk conditions such as long distance driving, night driving and so forth, and usually taht is occupation related. Accounting for those factors men are slightly less accident prone than women but taht doesn’t show up in raw figure so cause so death. The same applies to most otehr accidents I imagine. What is the chance of your average housewife actually killing herself with a chainsaw or an air comprssor? And her husband?
There is no doubt that men take more risks than women, and some of that is doubtless genetic, but a lot of it is social. Women don’t or won’t take a lot of high risk jobs for various reasons which result sin poorer health for men. This of course is the negative side of sexual equialty. We can;t claim to have equality until just as many women are in hospital, in prison and dying as men. But that of course is another debate.
Maybe, but the natural causes listed include things like malignancies such as leukemia, nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis, diabetes melitus and so on. I don’t think there is a lot of doubt that men die younger than women because of their work, lifestyle and the like, but there also seems to be a genetic factor.
Leukaemia is influenced by environment, partcilularly exposure to certain chemicals. I suspect that most industrial chemists, painters, agricultural workers and so forth who get exposed to these chemicals are men.
Kidney disease is linked in large part to dehydration and water intake. Men are more likely to work in occupations that are physically demanding, in the heat and where water is not readily available.
Diabetes is at least in part diet and excercise related, and men are more likely to work long hours, work away fom home and in other situations where diet and excercise go to hell. One of the highest incidences of diabetes is amongst truck drivers, for fairly obvious reasons.
I’m not saying there is no genetic component, clearly there is, but in almost all so-called “natural” causes cases they are confounded in large part by the occuptational/social conditions forced upon men.
There is also the fact that the double XXs allow women to switch bad parts on one chromosome with the good parts on their other X. Men with only one X can not do this. This is why part of the reasons why some disorders and diseases disproportionately affect males. This leads to a much higher fetal mortality rate for males than females.
That’s what I thought. Of course it might be different in primitive societies, but even then, there can be two things going on:
The society values risk-taking and rewards risk-takers with more opportunities to breed. They may get offed early, but not before their risk-taking genes have given them the chance to propagate those same genes.
-or-
The society might well admire risk-taking, but in practice the risk-takers are dying earlier and with fewer offspring than the risk-averse males who are staying at home and producing more progeny.
@kimera - True, of course, but it doesn’t account for anything among the population of those who are actually born.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear, but some of these diseases and conditions last with these males all their lives. For example, hemophilia affects males more than females and, until recently, many more males than females died from it. As David Simmons says, the Y chromosome does carry some baggage.
