Feelin’ the Gompertz Law
What’s the Gompertz Law?:
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it ”” 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly minuscule 0.03% ”” about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth ”” my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.
Well, we all know our chances of dying increase as we age. Duh. But the regularity and predictability of the increase is startling, as well as its universality:
Surprisingly enough, the Gompertz law holds across a large number of countries, time periods, and even different species. While the actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that “your probability of dying doubles every X years” holds true. It’s an amazing fact, and no one understands why it’s true.
The body’s defenses seem to have a certain rate of decay, and that’s that.
Why am I writing about his? You can probably figure it out. I’m of the age when more and more people I know—my contemporaries—are wearing down. I had a few friends die in their forties, a few more in their fifties. But they were tragic exceptions, outliers. Now? Trailblazers.
Well, we all know our chances of dying increase as we age. Duh.?
But what about continuing war all around the places Neo?
What would be better to believe there is God who balance the life on earth no one human can control what God creation and control.
Our ability to thing and knowledge it neither limited to our God creation of human on earth but our thinking and brain nor elevated to the universe creators or God gifted a human of this limits.
That said the balance on earth In Iraq, In Syria in Afghanistan, in Yemen and ales where, millions killed/ died each year……? It goes back to those years of human wars and empires with bloody history all along the deep history.
The tempo is consistent with riding the back side of the Bell distribution curve down to its asymptote.
When this distribution is squared, you end up with the Max-Boltzmann curve… and its own asymptote… which is an even better fit for the decay curve.
That is all.
The first normal distribution is luck/ chance…
The second normal distribution is DNA.
it mathematically confirms a point i made about genetics and why we CANT live much past 110..
the reason is that if you think about it, our lives start and then go on for a while with an end… not all ends are the same, but all that live start the same
so what happens is that the story of the early days has humongous advantage in being refined given the number of times that occurs vs the times that people got to the their 50s
(the math for the post fertility feedback is too much to discuss here)
the geneticists look to us as a plan that reaches a steady state, then the slings and arrow of life then make it fail.
in truth, thats a wrong model. took me ten years or more to work out the more valid model. but no one is really interested in that… are they?
the point worked out that what is happening is a form of data compression… since the tree cant grow, and its limited by telomeres, everything that happens has to happen in those limits.
the fact we only lived to about 30 for most of our human existences, made an artificial plateau… a prime… its not that we reach prime then cant maintain it. its that prime and before was the majority existence and so had the most refinement for genetic evolution
now that we are past that, we see how it plays out
in this model, cancer is a key thing… its not a negative
to the individual that it kills it appears negative, but otherwise its not… also, the model had to answer several problems that when italked to the geneticists is something they just ignore.
ie. they ignore that their blue print model isnt a model, and pretend it is…
if they realized how this worked in a system way, they would realize why somet things they try dont work, that the idea of living to 200 is not possible (unless we can slow down divisions or complete the story)
it also explains why fetus go through the stages of our evolution… (compressed time)…
and a great paper was that i figured out how it works in terms of beneficience sorting.. the point is that negative things are favored to appear later in life span, while positive things are favored to move down in their apperance in the cell division matrix…
so what you get is beneficience sorting..
over time and entities, the system compresses the good by moving it down the division tree, and negates bad by pushing it up the tree till its past the point of death
so our youths are very fit with a high Gompertz number… and as you go later and later you run into more and more of the things that have not been pushed past average death (prime), or erased by accident
along with this was the math that SNPs mostly exist in the proteins in which there are later codons.. that is, some codons will make the same thing if you change a letter. they are less fragile… others, will change if you change a letter… very fragile… if the protein gives enough advantage, then its in a constant tussle with the needed benefit, vs the fragile outcomes for some.
there is so much of this i worked out
but now i am a ghost.. dont exist.. negated
waiting for the choir triumphant..
How will the Transhumanism thingy affect Gompertz law?
Been busy, myself, taking care of sick parent the last couple of weeks. Neo is always on my must read list. But not much time to comment. Carry on, everyone.
Living here in this retirement community as I do, one thing I’ve noticed is there are a few people here already dead, they just don’t know it yet.
bumsrush: you may be right.
And then there’s the story I read — in one of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books I believe — about the woman in her eighties who, finally, had to move to an assisted-living facility. She hadn’t been there long when, at a communal dinner, she noticed a striking white-haired gentleman, and couldn’t stop staring at him. He eventually noticed, and politely commented on it. “I’m sorry”, she replied, “but I can’t help but stare. You look exactly — exactly! — like my fourth husband.”
“Your FOURTH husband?” he answered incredulously. “How many times have you been married?” To which she smilingly replied: “Three times.”
They were married a few months later.
I was reminded again today that one must live as full a life as one can.
It also reminded me just how forgetful I am.
May God bless this country and help each of us to capture the moment…to focus on those things that are important.
There was also this video demonstration that had one crossing their legs and lowering and raising themselves from a sitting position without the use of ones hands to assist. A greater likelihood of death within 5 years for those who needed assistance in both lowering and raising themselves from this position. I was afraid to even attempt to lower myself without causing myself serious injury.
Id like to go ahead and subscribe to the after-life edition of NeoNeocon, now if its available. The soonest you could provide the link would probably be better….
All I can say is getting older isn’t for sissies.
“Now? Trailblazers.”
I don’t care what trail they’re blazing, I ain’t going down it.
dissecting leftism:
Medical researchers tend to get very excited even when they detect a very small effect of something. Below is such a case. When everything was controlled for in their analyses, they found a pathetic .66 hazard ratio (“the adjusted hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0.66”). Statisticians don’t usually conclude that something real is going on until the ratio exceeds 2.0. So the lifespan benefits of taking regular exercise are somewhere between tiny and negligible. Pity that.
What we see below is another example of the failure of theory.
It seems obvious that we are designed for an active life so therefore we should live longer if we are active. But we don’t — not to any appreciable extent, anyway
jama article comment above was for
Effect of Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity on All-Cause Mortality in Middle-aged and Older Australians
By Klaus Gebel et al.
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2212268
bumsrush: “Living here in this retirement community as I do, one thing I’ve noticed is there are a few people here already dead, they just don’t know it yet.”
Ain’t that the truth.
I live in an “Active Adult” (over age 55) community. It’s almost as quiet as a cemetery. All activities seem to center around food.
My 85 year old neighbor and her 92 year old boy friend are dancers. Whenever there is a potluck, they put on music and dance. They’re pretty darn graceful, all things considered. They’re still alive and trying to relive their high school years. Good on ’em.
We have had two in the neighborhood pass on in the last year, and the 90 year old widow across the street is preparing to decamp to a nursing home in the next few days. It’s a study in aging – some gracefully, some not so gracefully. Such as me. I’m raging against the falling of the light. I know it’s a fixed fight that I can’t win, but I’m not resigned to it yet.
So, when Obama finally leaves office after eight years we will, all of us, have twice the probability of dying compared to when he was inaugurated!
Another dismal effect of enduring his presidency.
“the regularity and predictability of the increase is startling, as well as its universality”
Try to imagine a universe in which that societal ‘increase’ was not regular and predictable and then, think of the implications. The old must make way for the young or societal stability is impossible because the opportunity for advancement would be strangled in its crib. (perhaps, just maybe… the ‘Big Kahuna upstairs’ actually knows what he’s doing?)
‘Joking’ advice I find of worth; “Don’t take life too seriously. You’re never going to get out of it alive.”
I always looked at it as an example of the Russian roulette statistics problem. If you play Russian roulette one time your chances of survival are fairly good, but if you continue playing it you chances of survival steadily decrease. It’s a case of conditional probability. Every day you stay alive is like surviving a game of Russian roulette and each day your chances of survival become smaller.
Apoptosis. Programmed cell death; after X generations of any particular cell line, death of that line kicks in. Skin is a good example. We wear a new skin every two weeks, but the line is dying, thus the thinning skins that come noticeable with getting older.
No, Don Carlos, you are wrong. Apoptosis is a defence mechanism, perfectly normal, it protects us from degenerating cell and cancers. It is even necessary for longevity and is more, not less, active in long-living species and phylogenetic lines. What is behind the decline of organisms with age, also preprogrammed, is exponential decay of number of stem cells circulating in bloodstream. These stem cells can replace any kind of cells trown away in apopthosis. But why the numbers of stem cells decline in this exponential fashion? This also needs some explanation, now absent.