The Problem With Life Expectancy
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- čas přidán 10. 03. 2021
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In order to truly understand differences among animal lifespans, we need to stop thinking about a specific number and start thinking about a distribution.
Check out the MinuteLabs interactive here: labs.minutelabs.io/survival-c...
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Life Expectancy At Birth: The average number of years a newborn in a particular group could expect to live.
Life Expectancy After Babyhood: The average number of years a member of a particular group could expect to live given that they had survived their first year.
Maximum Life Expectancy: The age at which the oldest known member of a particular group died.
Mortality Rate: The frequency of occurrence of death within a particular group during a particular time period.
Life Table: A table that shows the number of individuals within a group that survive from one year to the next until they are all dead.
Survivorship Curve: A plot of the data in a particular life table that shows the years on the x-axis and the number or percent of survivors on the y-axis.
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David Goldenberg | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
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REFERENCES
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Ortiz-Ospina, E. (2017). “Life Expectancy” - What does this actually mean?. Our World In Data. Retrieved from: ourworldindata.org/life-expec....
Brown JS, Cunningham JJ, Gatenby RA. 2015 The multiple facets of Peto’s paradox: a life-history model for the evolution of cancer suppression. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 370: 20140221. Retrieved from: dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0221
Barbieri, M. (2021). Personal Communication. UC Berkeley Department of Demography. Retrieved from: www.site.demog.berkeley.edu/b...
United Nations. 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects. Retrieved from: population.un.org/wpp/
Khan Academy. Life Tables, Survivorship Curves, and Age-Sex Structure. Retrieved from: www.khanacademy.org/science/b...
Deevey, E. (1934). Life Tables for Natural Populations of Animals. The Quarterly Review of Biology. 22(4): 283-314. Retrieved from: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi... - Věda a technologie
Check out the MinuteLabs interactive for this video, "Survival Curves" here: labs.minutelabs.io/survival-curves/
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I replied to you first!
4 minute earth!
Will it be updated with more animals?
I noticed in the Minutelabs webpage, the information on human life expectancy is different than in the video - the video says 72 years (or 75 after infancy); the website says 75 (or 78 after infancy).
Are you related with 'Minute physics' youtube channel?
fun fact: the reason life expectancy in ancient times is lower is because people died at younger ages, those that survived could actually reach 70-ish
Yeah that would have been a great point for them to add to this video
True, modern technology and sociery give us a lot of advantages.
Yeah, but it's not just because of the huge drop in infant and childhood mortality. A lot of older people are able to live much longer too thanks to modern medicine. This also creates a skewed view due to the differences of healthcare infrastructure between the developing world and industrial countries.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it makes perfect sense for human life expectancy to ignore infant mortality as well. It varies so much from country to country and time period to time period that it throws off the final number big time.
It really irks me when people are like "life is so much better now, people used to die at 40!" Yeah, better for babies maybe, our lives are still shit
'Let's Call Her Shelley' is a weird name for a turtle
I'm quite sure her friends don't use her full name all the time. She's probably known as 'Let's' :p
"Shelley" on its own i kind of weird...
would be like naming a human "Skinny" and "Twolegy"/"Erecty"
Or naming an elephant "Nosey"/"Trunky"
The armadillo calls the turtle Shelley.
El cachicamo le dice al morrocoy conchudo - but don't expect a non-Venezuelan to understand that. I first heard those words on a Superholly video; her father grew up in Venezuela.
@@MrJacobElias fatty
Yet, Lettuce Collard Shelley is an awesome name for a turtle...
that Death Note reference at 0:51 is really cool
wow didn't see it at first
Was literally watching death note prior to this, talk about a wild coincidence.
I paused and I was like MISA!?
Omg i just noticed! 😳
I fucking thought it was her
If your turtle manages to reach it's Blastoise phase, it'll probably survive for quite a long time.
Nuzlocke strats
1:12
Little fish: How old are you?
Turtle: 80!
Me: Eighty factorial?!!!
That would be: 7,156,946,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To be fair the turtle didn't say if it was years, seconds, or what. Either way though, even if he meant Plank seconds, the lowest possible unit of time, he'd still be older than the universe itself.
Math geek
@@kennarajora6532 damn bro
@ab ab or the turtle is a traveller from an older universe.
@@Cornu341 one of the Great Old Ones
I'm taking a statistics class and realizing how many frickin' statistics are absolutely _everywhere_
Did they tell you about how 70% of all statistics are made up on the spot yet?
@@nickromo8195 How do i know you're immune? Haha
In all seriousness, they haven't said it outright, but they've pointed out how outliers can affect the mean, and therefore companies etc will report the mean so it seems like you'll make more if you go work for them etc
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
@@nickromo8195 Is that made up too?
Same is true for EVERY subject!
Tbf, *most* things are better represented as higher-resolution continua and fields than as a single number.
If you break down life expectancy to the month, then you can also probably see more about reproductive cycle, since more babies happen in the spring and more deaths happen in the winter (so you should have slight drops in the survival graph at, e.g. 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, etc). Etc.
Except of course, that, the more you break things down, the more noise you need. Either, you need to track more individuals (which aren't always there), or you need to wait before more individuals are born, (but then the patterns might have changed).
@@nielskorpel8860 But if you don't have much individuals to track, your life expectancy is flawed from the start due to your sample group being too small.
Single number have the advantage of easing comparisons.
@@lonestarr1490 Most of the time there's a wide range between where you can trust a graph and where you can see all details without any noise. You can analyze why (and when!) in a number of ways, but simply put large trends are much less sensitive to noise.
@@FxGamerz ... if they actually mean something, yes.
It bears mentioning that the very low infant mortality rate of humans is almost entirely due to modern medicine as well as sociological changes that lead to people having few babies. Infant mortality and childhood mortality was very high in pre-industrial time and it's on account of modern hospitals, professional midwives, better health and safety, and modern medicine in general that people now almost certainly can expect to survive both growing up and giving birth.
Life expectancy always 68 52-84💀
At 2:07, that graph makes me think: wow at 90 years old, you would have outlived 80% of people born at the same time as you. That’s crazy
I would just like to acknowledge that you name is "Derpy Cats" hahahaha xD xD xD
Meaning that basically everyone in their graduating highschool class is mostly dead
"Ha, suck it bitch, I lived!"
@@chopinfrederic5040 Would be an... _interesting_ reunion..
I feel like the graph for cats would be strongly impacted considering indoor vs. indoor-outdoor vs. feral housecats
and it certainly wouldn't be concave!
Yeah outdoor cats generally don't live as long, sadly :(
Would that graph also have to adjust for discrepancies between the ending of each of the nine lives? :P
kinda survivorship bias for cats (longer living cats are the ones who are more represented in the sample).
Cats can have such wildly different livestyles...
I assume there's a big difference between a housecat living wild or a housecat living in a city too. Or if it's alone or with others. Whether it was vaccinated by humans at some point or not. Etc.
0:50 unexpected deathnote reference
I don't know how I missed that the first time
I was thinking: "Yeah, that dog is way outliving you."
caught me so off-guard I’m laughing my ass off
they watch anime, dont they?
The actual life expectancy for dogs is: not enough.
Exactly
My dog is napping in my lap. She turns 11 in a month. Seeing that life expectancy graph dip at 12 scares the shit out of me
Whatever annoys humans should die ASAP. Whatever makes humans slightly haply should never die
@@idontgiveah00t bout now
@@unbearabletruth4310 umm, you we cant fully control that, right?
I really enjoyed the lap that came with this video
The lap 😳
the LAP 🤤😩😱
L É Ь
Are you puppy?
2:40 i want to give that doggo a hug
Imagine living to 60 and knowing that you've only lived half your life.
That'd be nice
@@neurofiedyamato8763 The oldest person alive today Kane Tanaka recieved cancer treatment just after WWII aged 45. She's 118 years old today, can you imagine getting cancer so young, thinking this is probably the end and then outliving every single person that was born before you and becoming the third oldest person ever.
You’ve either only lived half your life or you only have like 10 years left. Kinda crazy to think about
@@neurofiedyamato8763 most of the oldest peoples first answer when they were asked what they wanted most was death
@@autumin6843 I really hope that statement doesn't account for children
I love how you broke down the information in this video and made it so easy to understand! I honestly didn’t know that life expectancy was calculated differently for different animals. Awesome video !
Neither did I and yet it makes so much sense when you think about it.
"Curve's eye view" is my new favourite phrase
Humans only extremely recently started having such a ridiculously low infant mortality rate over the past 100-200 years.
It’s not nearly about the intensive care from parents, it’s about our modern medicine today.
I would also give abortion a huge part in it as well
Idk how its overseas but here aborted fetuses arent counted into the mortality %
So if its same for other countries then we have statistically less fatally sick infants born and hence the mortality among infants is way lower
Partially but not solely and that also plays a part with domestic animals.
I love when we promote looking at things through different lens. It provides us with a broader view of things, which can hopefully lead to more helpful solutions to the variety of issues we face.
What a great way to look at life, death, and what it means to be part of this world :)
What the heck did we do as a species to deserve a channel as pure and awesome as Minute Earth?
and what the heck did we do as a species to live to 122 years old
I think there's a mistake on the website. The oldest living cat was 46, not 38.
Edit: I had read a book from my library that showed the picture of a cat that had lived to 46. It was a really long time ago and a very old book.
I think maybe the information about this cat wasn't wide spread enough to get on the internet since it was documented before that time. The cat was a brown tabby with yellow eyes. I want to say it lived in Texas, but I can't be sure. It's hard to remember exact details from that long ago.
Minor correction: at 2:19, you say "the trend continues to curve downward". The graph and arrow however, actually show an upward "curving" trend (the rate is getting less and less negative each step), it's just that the curve is still very negative.
The derivative f ′ is negative at all points while the second derivative f ′′ is positive.
This was SUCH a well-explained and visually pleasing video. Script, animation, and data were all very well understood. 10/10
0:50 Is that a... Death Note reference? LMAO That just made my day, so awesome.
I really enjoy watching this than my Teacher in our Online Class
One of my all time favorite, Science CZcams Channels Out There, Minute Earth! I love your content you post
That's a very neat website for teachers you built there
You explained this so well and only in like 3 minutes!!
Really informatíve, and good visuals
Seriously simple, yet fantastic video.
Glad you liked it!
This is really interesting. This is the type of thing I *wish* I was learning in school...
this was incredible! thank you
Thank you for explaining it topic.
Beautifully Explained :)
Neat video! Thanks for uploading!
I knew about life expectancy before but didn't know the assumption we are making while calculating these. We adjust the result the based on the need. Thanks, Minute earth
Well explained!
I'd say this is one of your best videos.
ONLY 3 minutes, yet i feel like wacthing a whole documentary. Thanks, very informative...
Great video!
This video was fantastic.
Love you videos!
Wow thank you
Great one!!!
Really Cool Stuff, I’ve never thought of it like that before.
Damn good video!! Thank you very much!
Thank you 😍
0:51 that’s a death note reference 😂 I love that
This is such a good breakdown on why it is a flawed system yet many people are intimidated by graphs and as such would ignore it compared to looking at a single number which is easier to understand.
The value is meant for the general audience. For all practical purposes, when most people think of average life span, we think of dying from "old age." As the video mentions, it is mainly due to the fact that most people only pay attention to domesticated animals. Turtles dying due to predators doesn't fit that conception. Neither do infant mortality. So for species that have a lot of deaths from other causes, we tend to ignore them. As for humans, we aren't dying to these other causes as much nowadays so it tend to not be a big deal even if we include them.
Additionally, human lifespan is often used as a tool to educate the public about improvements in medicine and safety. To do that, we need to include all causes of deaths into the calculations. If we ignore infant mortality, disease and war; medieval lifespan would be similar to our average modern lifespan. But that would not convey the fact our lives are much better now, so the given value is based on all deaths unlike other animals.
To kind of conclude, the inconsistency IMO is introduced in order to communicate certain points across to their audience. Not very genuine but most laymen don't like to look at charts, so a easy to understand value is usually given. Telling people their pet turtle will die in 3.5 years would be bad because their pet turtle won't die in 3.5 years since there's no predators. It's just not relevant, and science communication is meant to provide relevant information in a easy to understand format so people can make informed decision.
Yo! The Death Note reference 0:51 was dope!
yup, i'm pretty sure they watch anime cuz in some of their other videos there r some references from other anime lol
Fascinating
Interesting. God bless and have a wonderful day
minutelabs!? That's awesome
Amazing
when i see Misa looking to how log her pupy live :(
At least it got to be a puppy for its entire life. Poor Alexander.
What does this mean???
@@eon1166 it's a referance for death note anime in anime misa have the power of see how long they are gonna live
Tnx
I guess old turtles die just because shell is suffocates their still growing body?
Nope - I think there just aren't that many of them that get that old, so a rare accident or infection will get them. But the shell thing may happen to really old lobsters; there's some evidence that the very oldest and largest cant molt effectively.
@@MinuteEarth This is basically the concept of biological immortality, right? Lobsters in a sense have a "mandatory" maximum lifespan because their biology imposes one with the exponential decrease in molting efficiency. Similarly tigers and otters have a "mandatory" maximum lifespan because they never stop growing so their heart *must* eventually give in because of the square-cube law. Whereas turtles don't have as much of a mandatory endpoint as they have accumulating risk factors that slightly nudge up yearly death probability.
@@tudornaconecinii3609
Something like that. Many organisms doesn't show evidence of aging (senescence), basically they don't more likely to get sick and/or slowed down with age. However, the longer an organism lived, even the rarest disease, predation, or accident will occur. For such organisms, dying is just about a random chance.
@@MinuteEarth I've heard that it takes so much energy and puts so much strain on the elderly lobster that it does them in, they simply cannot manage molting anymore.
This channel had 1.7 million subscribers now it is 2.5 wow this channel is growing
2:48 Bluey theme intensifies
I'd like to see these sorts of graphs for humans at different places and times in history.
True!
It would be further interesting to have it relative to birth rates, to see the potential long-term effects. (After all, there are actual reasons that entire countries are trying to encourage increasing birth and raising children. It's not too many years more until the relative age bubble will begin to burst and the results could be quite bad and very not easy to "fix".)
@@JarieSuicune It's as if we shouldn't build society based on a pyramid scheme. :)
This is a really good example of the difference between a distribution and (a few) statistics that describe the distribution. Like how means can be helpful but don’t tell the whole story
Nice death note reference
Pretty interesting
I actually learned something in this video.
I enjoyed the vid
0:50 is that a death note reference with "puppy" text?
Thats actually... super cool! Statistics rules!
This is a good vid
Yes
Is that a deathnote reference in my informational video
Nice
0:51 lol deathnote reference :)
Hey, I wanted to call that turtle Sheldon. 🤨
😂😂
2:21 When the SHARK 🦈 appeared, I FELT IT!
What a cool video
curve's eye view, nice
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it makes perfect sense for human life expectancy to ignore infant mortality as well. It varies so much from country to country and time period to time period that it throws off the final number big time.
It's still not so good metrics, as those who did not make it were on average weaker ones. So a population with disastrous care of infants would have artificially inflated life expectancy.
That turtle was high AF lol
Thsts craxy
I knew that was going to be Misa. Nice Easter egg!
Death note reference at 0:51 👀
love the Death Note life expectancy reference :)
There is no such thing as maximum life expectancy, because life expectancy is what is called in probability theory an expectation - it's an average of the lifespans. Also, in a quick google search I didn't find the number 80 associated with the life expectancy of sea turtles (I found 30 and 50 which are also wrong but I don't know where you saw that number associated with turtle life expectancy), because it's not the life expectancy, it's the maximum known lifespan.
2:03 AW NOOOO 😣🥺
Nice video
Support from CuriousPhysics channel 💯💯💯💯
My dog is 17 and still runs around, he’s just deaf and almost blind now.
Wait, why don't humans use life expectancy after babyhood?
The problem with dog's life expectancy? They're too short
I've wondered for a long time if counting human life expectancy from birth is really a good idea. I seem to recall that's behind the apparently false impression that 40 years old would have been like 80 years old back in the day, when actually it was more that the midwives back then weren't as good as contemporary doctors at ensuring babies survived, so a lot of them would die. I also think (I heard this a long time ago, so it might be mistaken) that part of the reason men have a shorter life expectancy is because of the greater likelihood that they'll die in battle or in accidents during dangerous work, but hearing that will make it sound as if a man will probably die of natural causes earlier than a woman.
I've always thought it might make more sense to count life expectancy as "the average age of death given an untimely death does not occur". That's what people often seem to read it as (hence some media having jokes where the 40-year-old is called unbelievably ancient), and it's kind of misleading to be told "this is the age you'll probably die" if the number is skewed by odds that something's going to happen to you.
Basically, I think the principle behind applying dogs' life expectancy differently actually does apply to humans too, and maybe statisticians/scientists should take that into account. Especially for the past, when people were losing a lot more babies than now, and the difference between those two methods was probably quite a bit more significant.
Quartiles are also useful when comparing the different populations
Nice
to what extent is the graph mapping of life expectancy related to animals (including humans) reproductive strategy? - as in the R and K strategies. it seems like the initial part of the graph correlates since an R strategy focuses on high numbers of offspring and thus it is expected a lot die in the initial stage whilst the K strategy focuses on less offspring but more parent care to make sure they survive. But can this explain the end of the graph? as in that humans and dogs (basically K strategy) have the same drop off patterens whilst the turtle (R strategy) has a different shape - does this in any way reflect the strategy for offspring or is reproductive strategy only relevant for life expectancy graphs in the initial stage?
Laughs in 180 year old turtle
2 minutes worth of watching
*Allright Got It*
I like our curve
wow
Cool
If we're going to use a single number, I really wish we went with median life expectancy rather than mean life expectancy for humans.
I'd be super interest in graphs for like the super old clams and sharks that we found out were like 500 years old. Oh even better that one species of jellyfish that can revert to developmental stages if injured and thus has kinda been dubbed as immortal