We Live Longer Than Our Ancestors?
You ever heard that our ancestors lived an average age of 30+? Gradually with Industrial and Medicine Revolution, our average age increased to 50+, 60+, then around 80+, 90+ today. Is it really due to medicine alone? No. Though modern medicine helps, it's not the sole factor. Yet even with medicine, do you wonder how it helped us?
The old medicine, witchcraft, etc. are dependent on experience, not wonders. In Sapiens, author Yuval Noah Harari mentioned the inability to accept oneself being wrong (which is still significant today outside the scientific world), the reliance on experience than experiment, the ignorance that any information not discovered, or don't have an answer in the Bible/any other religious codex isn't worth pondering, makes ancient people die faster visiting the doctor compared to resting at home, letting the body heal for itself. The early advent of modern medicine discovers lifesaving medicine that, after ignorance for so long, dramatically improves our lifespan as you'd expect before slowing down upon reaching a plateau.
Today, we thought, at least one thought before, that modern medicine only do good in giving us modern vaccine, modern medicine (antibiotics), etc. that increase our lifespan; or perhaps the invention of chemotherapy extends the lifespan of cancer patients. Yet, this is a mistake. It's no doubt that vaccine like HIV and COVID prevents you from catching these deadly diseases; yet, we can't deny that there may be little to no cancer patients in the past, for if people's average age is short, they don't live long enough to catch "cancer." By "no doubt with vaccine lengthening our lifespan," one mean the eradication of smallpox. As for disease, with one's amateur knowledge, one only sees the giant contribution of antibiotics in preventing death from contagion to deadly disease not killable by our bodies alone without taking antibiotics. Otherwise, one can't see other as medicine than as iatrogenics, yet. The benefits doesn't convince one that one's body can't heal itself without taking it. Therefore, disease and pandemic eradication does lengthen our lifespan, but it's really just a few medicine, like antibiotics, that helps. Others probably don't.
Yet, it's not just how we think medicine helps wrong. Statisticians also gave us the wrong impression via "average," which has no s**t use without its variance and/or standard deviation. Really, there are more interesting data than the statistics. Did you know centenarians (who lived at least or more than 100 years old) exists when average age is 30+? Probably not, given how misleading is the "average." When one read the Renaissance by Will and Ariel Durant, there are a lot of significant people living to age 50, age 80, even age 100+; one could say they don't represent those of peasant lifespan, yes; yet if average age is 30+, one's impression is, even if you're long lived, you couldn't possibly lived up to 2x the length, yeah? Maximum 70 years old already is long-lived? What do you mean these guys lived to 80+, 90+, 100+??? What happened?
The answer lies in the graph where people dies isn't bell-curved, but fat-tailed. Child mortality rate was high. A lot of children died within a few days after birth; it's a miracle in the old days for one to live longer than 5 years old. That's why, people of the past took the risk and give many births (remember, mother dies easily giving birth in the past, unlike today with surgery); yet the no. of children reaching adulthood is around a third, even less depending on country, (financial) situation, and many factors. When child mortality rate first declined dramatically, we humans don't immediately reduce our pregnancy rate; perhaps that's one partial explanation of the population boom in the past 2 centuries. And it takes 2 centuries for us to finally have higher death rate than birth rate (in many developed countries). See how slow our mind aligns, and how unwilling we are to change our minds. Anyway, the reduction of child mortality rate probably lessened the fat-tailed effect towards early death, moved it towards living longer life. So, even with unhealthy diet and unhealthy exercise regime we have today, our "average" increase dramatically with drastic decrease in child mortality rate.
Yet, medicine can't be the sole cause in "average" increase. The mindset of war was appealing in the past, for to increase your economic capital, you need war in the past. What? Trade with other countries? You'd be kidding me. That's extremely slow way to capture capital compared to plundering. We today can do it, why not the past? Because the past is the past! Capitalism wasn't invented until the Dutch invented them; even so, these LLCs also have a long way to go. Plus, europe is still trying to spread their mindset around the world, which will took several centuries of conquering colonies, rebelling for independence, before the world took off. Plus, monopolies aren't good for the economy, which is quite true all the time. We also have monopolies today like Google, Amazon, etc. The gathering of capital, the creation of credit is a long process, with bubble expanding and popping lots of times before we get to today's world. Only when we can make more money by trading than plundering do people support peace. You'll have to satisfy your greed before settling for a peaceful life. Otherwise, you'll live hungry, or unless you're willing to live in poverty, to understand like Buddha and the Stoics, that material wealth is of nothing compared to internal peace.
It's not the major outbreak of war like WWI and WWII that brings the most suffering to people, but the unfinished rivals between two clans, two tribes, or two villages, all independent of one another, yet exist in the tens of thousands of millions, that hits the hardest. The aggregation of small scale war may be more destructive than large scale inter-country wars. When people lose war, they're deprived of food, water, etc. Perhaps famine is one of the largest cause of death in history; or even if not, it has significant cause. Unfortunately, you can't treat famine with medicine. Who would have thought, we have so much food today that instead of donating to those in poverty that needs them, our inequality tends us to waste them instead, throwing it away without finishing it, taking more than we can eat, etc.?
Notes:
Originally, one was writing this against "medicine" being the sole factor of our lifespan increase. True in some sense, for giant pharmacist might be over-intervening with our body, where they give us medicine when we're healthy, just because they want to earn more money, hence reduce your lifespan overall. Yet, as one wrote, one realized it's also medicine, not nowadays giant pharmacist, that help with lots of factors. Just see how writing can make one rethink one's decisions, and ask oneself, "Is one getting it right?"
One don't know about what exactly cause the population boom. Another reasoning might be people need more hands in the fields, or people need more hands earning money (even with the extra mouth), or whatever reason.
