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life expectancy & truth expectancy How may times did you enthusiastically accept some good news and then, latter, realize that the news were "good" because you were brainwashed into what is good in that particular instance. Is there a way to avoid this? Maybe, if you are lucky enough to be truthfully primed on the subject. Let me give you an example. The Atlantic of November 2013, a technology issue, under the blockbusting title Die Another Day brings an account on "the golden age of medicine – or why we live 40 years longer than we did in 1880" (see the chart below). Yes, it could be a golden age of medicine – or, rather, a golden age of pharmaceutical industry – but why The Atlantic presents this under the cover of longevity? Because longevity is a well known self-flattering attribute of human nature. And by "why we live 40 years longer" The Atlantic is intentionally misleading its readers using the average life expectancy at birth to be the measure of longevity. The article is actually an advertisement for the pharma- ceutical industry and a brainwashing in the favor of public funding of pharmaceutical research, as simple as that. However, I was prepared for that by R.C. Lewontin in his book Biology as Ideology (Harper Perennial, 1992). Here is what I've learned (the following text is a quote, emphases are mine): |
from Biology as Ideology by R.C. Lewontin What is the evidence for the benefits of modern scientific medicine? Certainly we live a great deal longer than our ancestors. In 1890, the years of life expected for a white child at birth in North America were only 45, whereas now the expected life span is 75 years, but that is not because modern medicine has prolonged the life of elderly and sick people. A very large fraction of the change in the average life expectancy is a tremendous reduction in infant mortality. Before the turn of the century and especially earlier in the nineteenth century, there was a considerable chance that a child never got to be a year old – in 1860, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. Was 13 percent -, so the average life expectancy for the population as a whole was reduced considerably by this early death. The gravestones of people who died in the middle of the nineteenth century indicate a remarkable number of deaths at an old age. In fact, scientific medicine has done little to add years for people who have already reached their maturity. In the last 50 years, only about four months have been added to the expected life span of a person who is already 60 years old. |
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