Average life expectancy, 89 years in Monaco and 49 years in Afghanistan[1], is a simple yet very meaningful number. I recently saw a quote about life expectancy and how it has more than doubled since the 1800s.[2] This got me thinking about our evolution and changes we bring to our species through advances in our understanding of the world around us. In 1850, the life expectancy of a white male at birth was 38.3 years and in 2014 life expectancy in the US was estimated to be around 77.5-80 years[3]. That is more than double and makes a very valid statistical argument.

Around the same time I saw this quote, I was also reading several biography books, describing people and times from centuries ago, and some of the people in these books were living way past the life expectancy of their time. This gave me another tangent to ponder about.

Life expectancy numbers usually mean life expectancy at birth, and the numbers change dramatically once the age is moved forward. Even during paleolithic times, in hunter-gatherer populations, somebody who reached 15 years of age was expected to live past 54[4] and in 1850 a white male 20 years old would be expected to live past 60[3]. Looking from this perspective and taking out effects of advancements in childbirth and infant care, the improvement no longer looks double. Add better hygiene and just simple understanding of bacteria and viruses to the equation, I wonder if we improved any at all.

As we evolved the ability to design the world around us, our selections have been based on our instinctive desires, rather than what is best or healthy. Instead of growing most nutritious or flavorful, the earth is covered with corn, sugar cane, and canola crops[5], and we elect to live in polluted, crowded cities because they provide us the easiest ways to reach all that our primitive brains desire. On one hand, we over-indulge and reduce the life expectancy of our species, on the other hand, we spend countless resources to find ways to battle with obesity, cancer, depression, etc. and try to improve our life expectancy. Maybe it has become a give a few years, take a few years battle that we lost track centuries ago. If that is the case, what does that tell about homo sapiens in general? Are we really making forward progress in our evolutionary path, or standing still, or maybe even going backward?

Continuing on that tangent, how better are we at thinking, observing, changing, improving ourselves, on a cognitive perspective? As we continue to seek comfort over discomfort, easy over difficult, more dopamine, serotonin, endorphin and the like, we may have evolved the ability to mess with exactly what drove our species forward in the first place.

[1] – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2240855/
[2] – https://www.wired.com/2011/10/intellectual-vs-engineer/
[3] – http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
[3] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
[4] – https://www.wired.com/2017/03/humans-made-banana-perfect-soon-itll-gone