It's Always Sunny - evolution versus Christianity

[Pat Mustard]

Huggy, the fact is we live longer now than any generation that existed before us. Back in the  Roman empire you could expect to live 25 to 30 years, unless you were lucky enough to be rich and survive infancy (child mortality befor 5 was, at best 50/50). And all the evidence from arcaeology from before then suggests you were ancient by 40. There is no way that in 4000 bce or whenever people lived to be 900, we'd have found evidence.

Let me stop you here.

what you are talking about is the AVERAGE life expectancy.

If we go by your numbers of the child mortality rate being 50% before the age of 5, and say the other 50% lived to be 70; that would be an AVERAGE life expectancy of about 37 years.

So no, you were not ancient by 40 it's just that the high child mortality rates bring down the average, got it?

Bullshit. What you are doing is extrapolating that a lot of the people we know about lived for a long time out to "a significant number of people lived that long". Well guess what, most of the people we know about were rich, they had access to good food, good (for those times) medicine, didn't work that hard, could leave the city during plagues or general unhealthy periods (most of Rome's glitterati left for Baiae and other spa towns during the summer, when malaria was rampant). A quick google search will actually give you historical research on the topic of life expectancy in ancient Rome (the figures in that thread's OP can be found here), based off the available evidence, the proportion of those living in Rome aged 65 or over at any period was somewhere in the region of 4.7%.

For comparison here is Italy's current age graph:


The fact of the matter is people live longer now than they ever had, even 120 years ago the average life expectancy in the Western world was about half of what it is today. Bar ragnarok (of either nuclear, climate or other violent means) or complete economic collapse, both you and I can reasonably expect to live for somewhere between 70 and 80 years (and quite reasonably expect to live longer if we keep healthy and have a good job). That cannot be said for any other period in time before the 1960's.