Check out the MinuteLabs interactive for this video, "Survival Curves" here: labs.minutelabs.io/survival-curves/ Thanks for increasing the life expectancy of the MinuteEarth channel by supporting us! Want to become our Patreon or member on RUclips? Just visit www.patreon.com/MinuteEarth or click "JOIN". Thanks!
I noticed in the Minutelabs webpage, the information on human life expectancy is different than in the video - the video says 72 years (or 75 after infancy); the website says 75 (or 78 after infancy).
Yeah, but it's not just because of the huge drop in infant and childhood mortality. A lot of older people are able to live much longer too thanks to modern medicine. This also creates a skewed view due to the differences of healthcare infrastructure between the developing world and industrial countries.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it makes perfect sense for human life expectancy to ignore infant mortality as well. It varies so much from country to country and time period to time period that it throws off the final number big time.
The armadillo calls the turtle Shelley. El cachicamo le dice al morrocoy conchudo - but don't expect a non-Venezuelan to understand that. I first heard those words on a Superholly video; her father grew up in Venezuela.
Tbf, *most* things are better represented as higher-resolution continua and fields than as a single number. If you break down life expectancy to the month, then you can also probably see more about reproductive cycle, since more babies happen in the spring and more deaths happen in the winter (so you should have slight drops in the survival graph at, e.g. 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, etc). Etc.
Except of course, that, the more you break things down, the more noise you need. Either, you need to track more individuals (which aren't always there), or you need to wait before more individuals are born, (but then the patterns might have changed).
@@nielskorpel8860 But if you don't have much individuals to track, your life expectancy is flawed from the start due to your sample group being too small.
@@lonestarr1490 Most of the time there's a wide range between where you can trust a graph and where you can see all details without any noise. You can analyze why (and when!) in a number of ways, but simply put large trends are much less sensitive to noise.
It bears mentioning that the very low infant mortality rate of humans is almost entirely due to modern medicine as well as sociological changes that lead to people having few babies. Infant mortality and childhood mortality was very high in pre-industrial time and it's on account of modern hospitals, professional midwives, better health and safety, and modern medicine in general that people now almost certainly can expect to survive both growing up and giving birth.
@@nickromo8195 How do i know you're immune? Haha In all seriousness, they haven't said it outright, but they've pointed out how outliers can affect the mean, and therefore companies etc will report the mean so it seems like you'll make more if you go work for them etc
That would be: 7,156,946,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To be fair the turtle didn't say if it was years, seconds, or what. Either way though, even if he meant Plank seconds, the lowest possible unit of time, he'd still be older than the universe itself.
Cats can have such wildly different livestyles... I assume there's a big difference between a housecat living wild or a housecat living in a city too. Or if it's alone or with others. Whether it was vaccinated by humans at some point or not. Etc.
Humans only extremely recently started having such a ridiculously low infant mortality rate over the past 100-200 years. It’s not nearly about the intensive care from parents, it’s about our modern medicine today.
I would also give abortion a huge part in it as well Idk how its overseas but here aborted fetuses arent counted into the mortality % So if its same for other countries then we have statistically less fatally sick infants born and hence the mortality among infants is way lower
I love when we promote looking at things through different lens. It provides us with a broader view of things, which can hopefully lead to more helpful solutions to the variety of issues we face.
I love how you broke down the information in this video and made it so easy to understand! I honestly didn’t know that life expectancy was calculated differently for different animals. Awesome video !
@@neurofiedyamato8763 The oldest person alive today Kane Tanaka recieved cancer treatment just after WWII aged 45. She's 118 years old today, can you imagine getting cancer so young, thinking this is probably the end and then outliving every single person that was born before you and becoming the third oldest person ever.
I think there's a mistake on the website. The oldest living cat was 46, not 38. Edit: I had read a book from my library that showed the picture of a cat that had lived to 46. It was a really long time ago and a very old book. I think maybe the information about this cat wasn't wide spread enough to get on the internet since it was documented before that time. The cat was a brown tabby with yellow eyes. I want to say it lived in Texas, but I can't be sure. It's hard to remember exact details from that long ago.
Minor correction: at 2:19, you say "the trend continues to curve downward". The graph and arrow however, actually show an upward "curving" trend (the rate is getting less and less negative each step), it's just that the curve is still very negative.
Life expectancy is a bs measurement anyways, as most people don't understand that it's for the year you are born. Most people think that it applies to their lifespan (ie: I'm 35 now and people my age think our life expectancy is 80, but it isn't. It's close, but it's 73, a tad shorter).
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it makes perfect sense for human life expectancy to ignore infant mortality as well. It varies so much from country to country and time period to time period that it throws off the final number big time.
It's still not so good metrics, as those who did not make it were on average weaker ones. So a population with disastrous care of infants would have artificially inflated life expectancy.
This is such a good breakdown on why it is a flawed system yet many people are intimidated by graphs and as such would ignore it compared to looking at a single number which is easier to understand. The value is meant for the general audience. For all practical purposes, when most people think of average life span, we think of dying from "old age." As the video mentions, it is mainly due to the fact that most people only pay attention to domesticated animals. Turtles dying due to predators doesn't fit that conception. Neither do infant mortality. So for species that have a lot of deaths from other causes, we tend to ignore them. As for humans, we aren't dying to these other causes as much nowadays so it tend to not be a big deal even if we include them. Additionally, human lifespan is often used as a tool to educate the public about improvements in medicine and safety. To do that, we need to include all causes of deaths into the calculations. If we ignore infant mortality, disease and war; medieval lifespan would be similar to our average modern lifespan. But that would not convey the fact our lives are much better now, so the given value is based on all deaths unlike other animals. To kind of conclude, the inconsistency IMO is introduced in order to communicate certain points across to their audience. Not very genuine but most laymen don't like to look at charts, so a easy to understand value is usually given. Telling people their pet turtle will die in 3.5 years would be bad because their pet turtle won't die in 3.5 years since there's no predators. It's just not relevant, and science communication is meant to provide relevant information in a easy to understand format so people can make informed decision.
Nope - I think there just aren't that many of them that get that old, so a rare accident or infection will get them. But the shell thing may happen to really old lobsters; there's some evidence that the very oldest and largest cant molt effectively.
@@MinuteEarth This is basically the concept of biological immortality, right? Lobsters in a sense have a "mandatory" maximum lifespan because their biology imposes one with the exponential decrease in molting efficiency. Similarly tigers and otters have a "mandatory" maximum lifespan because they never stop growing so their heart *must* eventually give in because of the square-cube law. Whereas turtles don't have as much of a mandatory endpoint as they have accumulating risk factors that slightly nudge up yearly death probability.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 Something like that. Many organisms doesn't show evidence of aging (senescence), basically they don't more likely to get sick and/or slowed down with age. However, the longer an organism lived, even the rarest disease, predation, or accident will occur. For such organisms, dying is just about a random chance.
@@MinuteEarth I've heard that it takes so much energy and puts so much strain on the elderly lobster that it does them in, they simply cannot manage molting anymore.
Another problem of defining life expectancy for species like human is that human's society change very quickly. Is the life expectancy for human: 1. Average age of people DIED RECENTLY. 2. Life expectancy of all people CURRENTLY LIVING. 3. Life expectancy of all babies were BORN RECENTLY.
They perform the calculations for the case 1 and give the results as if it were the case 3. Depending on what happens in the next hundred years the average life span for babies being born in 2021 can any number from 20 to 200.
There is no such thing as maximum life expectancy, because life expectancy is what is called in probability theory an expectation - it's an average of the lifespans. Also, in a quick google search I didn't find the number 80 associated with the life expectancy of sea turtles (I found 30 and 50 which are also wrong but I don't know where you saw that number associated with turtle life expectancy), because it's not the life expectancy, it's the maximum known lifespan.
True! It would be further interesting to have it relative to birth rates, to see the potential long-term effects. (After all, there are actual reasons that entire countries are trying to encourage increasing birth and raising children. It's not too many years more until the relative age bubble will begin to burst and the results could be quite bad and very not easy to "fix".)
There is a lot of confusion about life expectancy in past generations.People imagine that because like expectancy in a certain older century was 30 that everyone dropped dead around that time which is completely wrong. It is a complete misunderstanding. What happened was a higher infant mortality rate in the past. Past childhood a goodly number of people still ived to 59, 60, 70 and beyond. You couldn't run a society if everyone dropped dead at around 30. The lower infant mortality rate today is very recent in deep geological time and completely unusual among animals, including human of the past.
I knew about life expectancy before but didn't know the assumption we are making while calculating these. We adjust the result the based on the need. Thanks, Minute earth
I've wondered for a long time if counting human life expectancy from birth is really a good idea. I seem to recall that's behind the apparently false impression that 40 years old would have been like 80 years old back in the day, when actually it was more that the midwives back then weren't as good as contemporary doctors at ensuring babies survived, so a lot of them would die. I also think (I heard this a long time ago, so it might be mistaken) that part of the reason men have a shorter life expectancy is because of the greater likelihood that they'll die in battle or in accidents during dangerous work, but hearing that will make it sound as if a man will probably die of natural causes earlier than a woman. I've always thought it might make more sense to count life expectancy as "the average age of death given an untimely death does not occur". That's what people often seem to read it as (hence some media having jokes where the 40-year-old is called unbelievably ancient), and it's kind of misleading to be told "this is the age you'll probably die" if the number is skewed by odds that something's going to happen to you. Basically, I think the principle behind applying dogs' life expectancy differently actually does apply to humans too, and maybe statisticians/scientists should take that into account. Especially for the past, when people were losing a lot more babies than now, and the difference between those two methods was probably quite a bit more significant.
This is a really good example of the difference between a distribution and (a few) statistics that describe the distribution. Like how means can be helpful but don’t tell the whole story
How about creatures that typically dies after giving birth or lay eggs(for example an cuttlefish) and many insect, is that drastic senescence or "welp, the babies are on their own now, peace out"
I'd be super interest in graphs for like the super old clams and sharks that we found out were like 500 years old. Oh even better that one species of jellyfish that can revert to developmental stages if injured and thus has kinda been dubbed as immortal
I am a tourguide and I like to explain people that historic Life Expectancies do not mean what we usually think. We tend to think that people in the Middle Ages died young, because life expectancy was a lot lower. But as soon as you explain that it is an average taken, AND the high child mortality, we seem to understand. I wonder how much human Life Expectancy changes in the past 1000 years, if we just look at people who survived infancy.
honestly speaking, most people wouldn't understand the graph if you show them. It is better just to give them numbers ,in fact, using all three numbers could tell a good picture of the picture, and that way, it is way more easier to consume for most people.
I think it makes perfect sense the doube standard in life-spectancy statistics, ignoring dead puppies and baby turtles... even though I had one pup die on me because of parvovirus.
Alot of it depends on how active they are, basically a high metabolism means a shorter life because you have more oxidative stress and cell division. Slow and cold blooded animals like tortoises and greenland sharks live hundreds of years because they are so inactive. Granted that for an individual human being active extends your lifespan so its more of a per species trend.
Nature is a dangerous and brutal place. While several animal species *can* live longer than the longest-lived humans, there are almost zero that outlive us on average (turtles are a beautiful example of this because of how their metabolic rate slows down their senescence relative to ours, but their infant mortality rate completely overrides the effect of that on life expectancy).
@@jasonreed7522 For the *average* human being active extends your lifespan. If we're talking about edgecases, the effects of oxidative stress once again dominate. For example, athletes have longer average lifespans than the average person, but are also *less likely to be centenaries* than the average person.
The average mean, median, mode, and maximum are wild. For a male in the US the normal measurement is the mean which is 76. But this includes infant mortality, so if you aren't an infant this isn't a useful number at all. The average median age (50% have died) is a more useful number at age 80. Which means that if you make it past age 5, there is a much more than 50% chance to make it to age 80. The average mode (age where the most people die) is 85 with the vast majority of deaths of people past their early 20s (where suiside, war and accidents take a lot of lives) happening within 2-3 years of that age. So again, if you are past age 5, you can generally expect to make it to age 85 +/-2 years... So 83-87. But the oldest people can live to their early 120s. This is where science is pushing hard to improve things right now. Pushing that boundary from 85 to a natural death closer to 120 is huge. And almost all of it relates to weight and cancer management. If you can keep weight under control then at the very least more of your life will be healthy, but risk of death from stroke, heart attack and other inflamitory diseases is greatly reduced which should allow you to live longer as well as in better health. Cancer management is the other huge factor with age. Because it is a dice roll. You can do everything right and still get cancer. So advances in cancer management are the other big factor in life extension. The big question though is in the way we manage these things. Diet and exercise will only make up for so much of people's life habbits, so we are likely to see other technology developed to manage these issues. And these technologies may well push life well beyond the natural life expectancy limit of 120. So if you are under the age of 40 right now your life expectancy is limited to your budget rather than your genes. The key to a healthy life isn't only in good physical habits, it is also good fiscal habits. And I'm not about to make an opinion on how good or bad or fair that is... Just saying that is going to be the name of the game going forward, and we all need to make steps towards that end... Or lack of end.
For pet animals that have feral counterparts they basically have 2 sets of life expectancy numbers. And on another note, I've never seen life expectancy represented with a single number unless you specifically wish to know how long any given animal is able to live. For example; a house cat has an average lifespan of 13-17 years with an additional note that with proper care and luck they can reach their late 30s.
It's always better to look at the whole distribution rather than at a single number like the average. It just gives a much fuller picture, no matter what you are looking at. If you think averages are good enough for everything, remember that almost all people have an above average number of legs.
Honestly, we should just move away from averages in general. Medians are so much more useful and representative. And you can easily add a modifier like "oldest 75%" to make it clear what range you're talking about. Averages in my opinion are pretty much useless.
Can we chart the curve of the graph and use an equation to describe life expectancy? That would be accurate AND make complex math more relevant in real life.
Another point of interest: the first two examples are generally also in a domestic setting. If you were to put them more "in the wild" they'd also have lifespans more similar to the turtle. Often when we talk about the life expectancy of an animal, we are looking at the typical lifespan in captivity/domestic life.
Aww. The elderly dog drawing reminds me of mine. She's reddish-brown and around 12 years old, and has always peed in the house so the diaper is appropriate.
4:27 [ON MOBILES] If you exit the screen and click on the screen (not on the links and I cards), you see a hidden Coronavirus! [ON DESKTOP] Hover over the progress bar (the red bar thing) and you see a hidden Coronavirus!
Heads up about Noom. I can’t say for sure if it’s a scam, but I was persuaded to pay $10 for the trial! And when I wanted to cancel I got a 65% discount offer!! That’s surely a scammy technique. I found it a bit weird that a reputable channel would endorse such a company. For anyone else, read the reviews first. Peace.
No one is sitting around saying 'well how come all those baby turtles die of they live to 80?' I don't see a problem here, I just see three ways of talking about life expectancy that best fits the species.
Well, honestly, when we ask "how much do they live?" we really mean the old age of a somewhat healthy life and the average of deaths caused by age including sicknesses that the old ones cannot resist well. In other words, how much an animal would live if nothing goes really wrong. We do not mean being eaten as eggs, babies or strong adults. We do not mean accidents or rare diseases. It's most often a "how long does this animal live in normal conditions of no surprises?". That usually means life expectancy. As in, we expect this animal to live that long if nothing makes the time shorter.
Check out the MinuteLabs interactive for this video, "Survival Curves" here: labs.minutelabs.io/survival-curves/
Thanks for increasing the life expectancy of the MinuteEarth channel by supporting us! Want to become our Patreon or member on RUclips? Just visit www.patreon.com/MinuteEarth or click "JOIN". Thanks!
I replied to you first!
4 minute earth!
Will it be updated with more animals?
I noticed in the Minutelabs webpage, the information on human life expectancy is different than in the video - the video says 72 years (or 75 after infancy); the website says 75 (or 78 after infancy).
Are you related with 'Minute physics' youtube channel?
fun fact: the reason life expectancy in ancient times is lower is because people died at younger ages, those that survived could actually reach 70-ish
Yeah that would have been a great point for them to add to this video
True, modern technology and sociery give us a lot of advantages.
Yeah, but it's not just because of the huge drop in infant and childhood mortality. A lot of older people are able to live much longer too thanks to modern medicine. This also creates a skewed view due to the differences of healthcare infrastructure between the developing world and industrial countries.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it makes perfect sense for human life expectancy to ignore infant mortality as well. It varies so much from country to country and time period to time period that it throws off the final number big time.
It really irks me when people are like "life is so much better now, people used to die at 40!" Yeah, better for babies maybe, our lives are still shit
'Let's Call Her Shelley' is a weird name for a turtle
I'm quite sure her friends don't use her full name all the time. She's probably known as 'Let's' :p
"Shelley" on its own i kind of weird...
would be like naming a human "Skinny" and "Twolegy"/"Erecty"
Or naming an elephant "Nosey"/"Trunky"
The armadillo calls the turtle Shelley.
El cachicamo le dice al morrocoy conchudo - but don't expect a non-Venezuelan to understand that. I first heard those words on a Superholly video; her father grew up in Venezuela.
@@MrJacobElias fatty
Yet, Lettuce Collard Shelley is an awesome name for a turtle...
that Death Note reference at 0:51 is really cool
wow didn't see it at first
Was literally watching death note prior to this, talk about a wild coincidence.
I paused and I was like MISA!?
Omg i just noticed! 😳
I fucking thought it was her
Tbf, *most* things are better represented as higher-resolution continua and fields than as a single number.
If you break down life expectancy to the month, then you can also probably see more about reproductive cycle, since more babies happen in the spring and more deaths happen in the winter (so you should have slight drops in the survival graph at, e.g. 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, etc). Etc.
Except of course, that, the more you break things down, the more noise you need. Either, you need to track more individuals (which aren't always there), or you need to wait before more individuals are born, (but then the patterns might have changed).
@@nielskorpel8860 But if you don't have much individuals to track, your life expectancy is flawed from the start due to your sample group being too small.
Single number have the advantage of easing comparisons.
@@lonestarr1490 Most of the time there's a wide range between where you can trust a graph and where you can see all details without any noise. You can analyze why (and when!) in a number of ways, but simply put large trends are much less sensitive to noise.
@@FxGamerz ... if they actually mean something, yes.
It bears mentioning that the very low infant mortality rate of humans is almost entirely due to modern medicine as well as sociological changes that lead to people having few babies. Infant mortality and childhood mortality was very high in pre-industrial time and it's on account of modern hospitals, professional midwives, better health and safety, and modern medicine in general that people now almost certainly can expect to survive both growing up and giving birth.
Life expectancy always 68 52-84💀
I'm taking a statistics class and realizing how many frickin' statistics are absolutely _everywhere_
Did they tell you about how 70% of all statistics are made up on the spot yet?
@@nickromo8195 How do i know you're immune? Haha
In all seriousness, they haven't said it outright, but they've pointed out how outliers can affect the mean, and therefore companies etc will report the mean so it seems like you'll make more if you go work for them etc
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
@@nickromo8195 Is that made up too?
Same is true for EVERY subject!
1:12
Little fish: How old are you?
Turtle: 80!
Me: Eighty factorial?!!!
That would be: 7,156,946,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To be fair the turtle didn't say if it was years, seconds, or what. Either way though, even if he meant Plank seconds, the lowest possible unit of time, he'd still be older than the universe itself.
Math geek
@@kennarajora6532 damn bro
@ab ab or the turtle is a traveller from an older universe.
@@Cornu341 one of the Great Old Ones
At 2:07, that graph makes me think: wow at 90 years old, you would have outlived 80% of people born at the same time as you. That’s crazy
I would just like to acknowledge that you name is "Derpy Cats" hahahaha xD xD xD
Meaning that basically everyone in their graduating highschool class is mostly dead
"Ha, suck it bitch, I lived!"
@@chopinfrederic5040 Would be an... _interesting_ reunion..
I feel like the graph for cats would be strongly impacted considering indoor vs. indoor-outdoor vs. feral housecats
and it certainly wouldn't be concave!
Yeah outdoor cats generally don't live as long, sadly :(
Would that graph also have to adjust for discrepancies between the ending of each of the nine lives? :P
kinda survivorship bias for cats (longer living cats are the ones who are more represented in the sample).
Cats can have such wildly different livestyles...
I assume there's a big difference between a housecat living wild or a housecat living in a city too. Or if it's alone or with others. Whether it was vaccinated by humans at some point or not. Etc.
2:40 i want to give that doggo a hug
If your turtle manages to reach it's Blastoise phase, it'll probably survive for quite a long time.
Nuzlocke strats
Humans only extremely recently started having such a ridiculously low infant mortality rate over the past 100-200 years.
It’s not nearly about the intensive care from parents, it’s about our modern medicine today.
I would also give abortion a huge part in it as well
Idk how its overseas but here aborted fetuses arent counted into the mortality %
So if its same for other countries then we have statistically less fatally sick infants born and hence the mortality among infants is way lower
Partially but not solely and that also plays a part with domestic animals.
0:50 unexpected deathnote reference
I don't know how I missed that the first time
I was thinking: "Yeah, that dog is way outliving you."
caught me so off-guard I’m laughing my ass off
they watch anime, dont they?
I love when we promote looking at things through different lens. It provides us with a broader view of things, which can hopefully lead to more helpful solutions to the variety of issues we face.
I love how you broke down the information in this video and made it so easy to understand! I honestly didn’t know that life expectancy was calculated differently for different animals. Awesome video !
Neither did I and yet it makes so much sense when you think about it.
I really enjoyed the lap that came with this video
The lap 😳
the LAP 🤤😩😱
L É Ь
Are you puppy?
The actual life expectancy for dogs is: not enough.
Exactly
My dog is napping in my lap. She turns 11 in a month. Seeing that life expectancy graph dip at 12 scares the shit out of me
Whatever annoys humans should die ASAP. Whatever makes humans slightly haply should never die
@@idontgiveah00t bout now
@@unbearabletruth4310 umm, you we cant fully control that, right?
"Curve's eye view" is my new favourite phrase
Imagine living to 60 and knowing that you've only lived half your life.
That'd be nice
@@neurofiedyamato8763 The oldest person alive today Kane Tanaka recieved cancer treatment just after WWII aged 45. She's 118 years old today, can you imagine getting cancer so young, thinking this is probably the end and then outliving every single person that was born before you and becoming the third oldest person ever.
You’ve either only lived half your life or you only have like 10 years left. Kinda crazy to think about
@@neurofiedyamato8763 most of the oldest peoples first answer when they were asked what they wanted most was death
@@autumin6843 I really hope that statement doesn't account for children
What the heck did we do as a species to deserve a channel as pure and awesome as Minute Earth?
and what the heck did we do as a species to live to 122 years old
What a great way to look at life, death, and what it means to be part of this world :)
I think there's a mistake on the website. The oldest living cat was 46, not 38.
Edit: I had read a book from my library that showed the picture of a cat that had lived to 46. It was a really long time ago and a very old book.
I think maybe the information about this cat wasn't wide spread enough to get on the internet since it was documented before that time. The cat was a brown tabby with yellow eyes. I want to say it lived in Texas, but I can't be sure. It's hard to remember exact details from that long ago.
Minor correction: at 2:19, you say "the trend continues to curve downward". The graph and arrow however, actually show an upward "curving" trend (the rate is getting less and less negative each step), it's just that the curve is still very negative.
The derivative f ′ is negative at all points while the second derivative f ′′ is positive.
Life expectancy is a bs measurement anyways, as most people don't understand that it's for the year you are born. Most people think that it applies to their lifespan (ie: I'm 35 now and people my age think our life expectancy is 80, but it isn't. It's close, but it's 73, a tad shorter).
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it makes perfect sense for human life expectancy to ignore infant mortality as well. It varies so much from country to country and time period to time period that it throws off the final number big time.
It's still not so good metrics, as those who did not make it were on average weaker ones. So a population with disastrous care of infants would have artificially inflated life expectancy.
I really enjoy watching this than my Teacher in our Online Class
This is such a good breakdown on why it is a flawed system yet many people are intimidated by graphs and as such would ignore it compared to looking at a single number which is easier to understand.
The value is meant for the general audience. For all practical purposes, when most people think of average life span, we think of dying from "old age." As the video mentions, it is mainly due to the fact that most people only pay attention to domesticated animals. Turtles dying due to predators doesn't fit that conception. Neither do infant mortality. So for species that have a lot of deaths from other causes, we tend to ignore them. As for humans, we aren't dying to these other causes as much nowadays so it tend to not be a big deal even if we include them.
Additionally, human lifespan is often used as a tool to educate the public about improvements in medicine and safety. To do that, we need to include all causes of deaths into the calculations. If we ignore infant mortality, disease and war; medieval lifespan would be similar to our average modern lifespan. But that would not convey the fact our lives are much better now, so the given value is based on all deaths unlike other animals.
To kind of conclude, the inconsistency IMO is introduced in order to communicate certain points across to their audience. Not very genuine but most laymen don't like to look at charts, so a easy to understand value is usually given. Telling people their pet turtle will die in 3.5 years would be bad because their pet turtle won't die in 3.5 years since there's no predators. It's just not relevant, and science communication is meant to provide relevant information in a easy to understand format so people can make informed decision.
I guess old turtles die just because shell is suffocates their still growing body?
Nope - I think there just aren't that many of them that get that old, so a rare accident or infection will get them. But the shell thing may happen to really old lobsters; there's some evidence that the very oldest and largest cant molt effectively.
@@MinuteEarth This is basically the concept of biological immortality, right? Lobsters in a sense have a "mandatory" maximum lifespan because their biology imposes one with the exponential decrease in molting efficiency. Similarly tigers and otters have a "mandatory" maximum lifespan because they never stop growing so their heart *must* eventually give in because of the square-cube law. Whereas turtles don't have as much of a mandatory endpoint as they have accumulating risk factors that slightly nudge up yearly death probability.
@@tudornaconecinii3609
Something like that. Many organisms doesn't show evidence of aging (senescence), basically they don't more likely to get sick and/or slowed down with age. However, the longer an organism lived, even the rarest disease, predation, or accident will occur. For such organisms, dying is just about a random chance.
@@MinuteEarth I've heard that it takes so much energy and puts so much strain on the elderly lobster that it does them in, they simply cannot manage molting anymore.
This is really interesting. This is the type of thing I *wish* I was learning in school...
Another problem of defining life expectancy for species like human is that human's society change very quickly. Is the life expectancy for human:
1. Average age of people DIED RECENTLY.
2. Life expectancy of all people CURRENTLY LIVING.
3. Life expectancy of all babies were BORN RECENTLY.
They perform the calculations for the case 1 and give the results as if it were the case 3. Depending on what happens in the next hundred years the average life span for babies being born in 2021 can any number from 20 to 200.
when i see Misa looking to how log her pupy live :(
At least it got to be a puppy for its entire life. Poor Alexander.
What does this mean???
@@eon1166 it's a referance for death note anime in anime misa have the power of see how long they are gonna live
There is no such thing as maximum life expectancy, because life expectancy is what is called in probability theory an expectation - it's an average of the lifespans. Also, in a quick google search I didn't find the number 80 associated with the life expectancy of sea turtles (I found 30 and 50 which are also wrong but I don't know where you saw that number associated with turtle life expectancy), because it's not the life expectancy, it's the maximum known lifespan.
This was SUCH a well-explained and visually pleasing video. Script, animation, and data were all very well understood. 10/10
0:50 Is that a... Death Note reference? LMAO That just made my day, so awesome.
I'd like to see these sorts of graphs for humans at different places and times in history.
True!
It would be further interesting to have it relative to birth rates, to see the potential long-term effects. (After all, there are actual reasons that entire countries are trying to encourage increasing birth and raising children. It's not too many years more until the relative age bubble will begin to burst and the results could be quite bad and very not easy to "fix".)
@@JarieSuicune It's as if we shouldn't build society based on a pyramid scheme. :)
Wait, why don't humans use life expectancy after babyhood?
Nice death note reference
ONLY 3 minutes, yet i feel like wacthing a whole documentary. Thanks, very informative...
2:48 Bluey theme intensifies
There is a lot of confusion about life expectancy in past generations.People imagine that because like expectancy in a certain older century was 30 that everyone dropped dead around that time which is completely wrong. It is a complete misunderstanding. What happened was a higher infant mortality rate in the past. Past childhood a goodly number of people still ived to 59, 60, 70 and beyond. You couldn't run a society if everyone dropped dead at around 30. The lower infant mortality rate today is very recent in deep geological time and completely unusual among animals, including human of the past.
I knew about life expectancy before but didn't know the assumption we are making while calculating these. We adjust the result the based on the need. Thanks, Minute earth
I've wondered for a long time if counting human life expectancy from birth is really a good idea. I seem to recall that's behind the apparently false impression that 40 years old would have been like 80 years old back in the day, when actually it was more that the midwives back then weren't as good as contemporary doctors at ensuring babies survived, so a lot of them would die. I also think (I heard this a long time ago, so it might be mistaken) that part of the reason men have a shorter life expectancy is because of the greater likelihood that they'll die in battle or in accidents during dangerous work, but hearing that will make it sound as if a man will probably die of natural causes earlier than a woman.
I've always thought it might make more sense to count life expectancy as "the average age of death given an untimely death does not occur". That's what people often seem to read it as (hence some media having jokes where the 40-year-old is called unbelievably ancient), and it's kind of misleading to be told "this is the age you'll probably die" if the number is skewed by odds that something's going to happen to you.
Basically, I think the principle behind applying dogs' life expectancy differently actually does apply to humans too, and maybe statisticians/scientists should take that into account. Especially for the past, when people were losing a lot more babies than now, and the difference between those two methods was probably quite a bit more significant.
This is a really good example of the difference between a distribution and (a few) statistics that describe the distribution. Like how means can be helpful but don’t tell the whole story
That's a very neat website for teachers you built there
0:51 that’s a death note reference 😂 I love that
From what I understood, the Turtle meta is good at late game
Hello, fellow TierZoo viewer.
We should calculate life expectancy from the average age to die from old age, so not getting murdered, hit by a car, rare illness
You explained this so well and only in like 3 minutes!!
minutelabs!? That's awesome
One of my all time favorite, Science RUclips Channels Out There, Minute Earth! I love your content you post
This channel had 1.7 million subscribers now it is 2.5 wow this channel is growing
2:21 When the SHARK 🦈 appeared, I FELT IT!
If we're going to use a single number, I really wish we went with median life expectancy rather than mean life expectancy for humans.
How about creatures that typically dies after giving birth or lay eggs(for example an cuttlefish) and many insect, is that drastic senescence or "welp, the babies are on their own now, peace out"
I'd be super interest in graphs for like the super old clams and sharks that we found out were like 500 years old. Oh even better that one species of jellyfish that can revert to developmental stages if injured and thus has kinda been dubbed as immortal
I am a tourguide and I like to explain people that historic Life Expectancies do not mean what we usually think.
We tend to think that people in the Middle Ages died young, because life expectancy was a lot lower. But as soon as you explain that it is an average taken, AND the high child mortality, we seem to understand.
I wonder how much human Life Expectancy changes in the past 1000 years, if we just look at people who survived infancy.
Hey, I wanted to call that turtle Sheldon. 🤨
😂😂
honestly speaking, most people wouldn't understand the graph if you show them. It is better just to give them numbers ,in fact, using all three numbers could tell a good picture of the picture, and that way, it is way more easier to consume for most people.
My dog is 17 and still runs around, he’s just deaf and almost blind now.
I think it makes perfect sense the doube standard in life-spectancy statistics, ignoring dead puppies and baby turtles... even though I had one pup die on me because of parvovirus.
Wait, so why are loggerheads that survive to very old age better protected from death than younger ones? Is it their anatomy? Survival skills?
Seriously simple, yet fantastic video.
Glad you liked it!
I mean...that's exactly the reason why the mean is a terrible indicator of a distribution when you deviate from the normal.
It’s interesting that there are many animals that live longer than humans!
Imagine if they would recieve our science 😂
Alot of it depends on how active they are, basically a high metabolism means a shorter life because you have more oxidative stress and cell division.
Slow and cold blooded animals like tortoises and greenland sharks live hundreds of years because they are so inactive.
Granted that for an individual human being active extends your lifespan so its more of a per species trend.
Nature is a dangerous and brutal place. While several animal species *can* live longer than the longest-lived humans, there are almost zero that outlive us on average (turtles are a beautiful example of this because of how their metabolic rate slows down their senescence relative to ours, but their infant mortality rate completely overrides the effect of that on life expectancy).
@@jasonreed7522 For the *average* human being active extends your lifespan. If we're talking about edgecases, the effects of oxidative stress once again dominate. For example, athletes have longer average lifespans than the average person, but are also *less likely to be centenaries* than the average person.
The problem with dog's life expectancy? They're too short
The average mean, median, mode, and maximum are wild.
For a male in the US the normal measurement is the mean which is 76. But this includes infant mortality, so if you aren't an infant this isn't a useful number at all.
The average median age (50% have died) is a more useful number at age 80. Which means that if you make it past age 5, there is a much more than 50% chance to make it to age 80.
The average mode (age where the most people die) is 85 with the vast majority of deaths of people past their early 20s (where suiside, war and accidents take a lot of lives) happening within 2-3 years of that age. So again, if you are past age 5, you can generally expect to make it to age 85 +/-2 years... So 83-87.
But the oldest people can live to their early 120s.
This is where science is pushing hard to improve things right now. Pushing that boundary from 85 to a natural death closer to 120 is huge. And almost all of it relates to weight and cancer management. If you can keep weight under control then at the very least more of your life will be healthy, but risk of death from stroke, heart attack and other inflamitory diseases is greatly reduced which should allow you to live longer as well as in better health.
Cancer management is the other huge factor with age. Because it is a dice roll. You can do everything right and still get cancer. So advances in cancer management are the other big factor in life extension.
The big question though is in the way we manage these things. Diet and exercise will only make up for so much of people's life habbits, so we are likely to see other technology developed to manage these issues. And these technologies may well push life well beyond the natural life expectancy limit of 120. So if you are under the age of 40 right now your life expectancy is limited to your budget rather than your genes. The key to a healthy life isn't only in good physical habits, it is also good fiscal habits. And I'm not about to make an opinion on how good or bad or fair that is... Just saying that is going to be the name of the game going forward, and we all need to make steps towards that end... Or lack of end.
For pet animals that have feral counterparts they basically have 2 sets of life expectancy numbers.
And on another note, I've never seen life expectancy represented with a single number unless you specifically wish to know how long any given animal is able to live. For example; a house cat has an average lifespan of 13-17 years with an additional note that with proper care and luck they can reach their late 30s.
Relatedly, the land tetrapods that have greater regenerative capacity don't care for their young at all, except for some nesting snakes.
It's always better to look at the whole distribution rather than at a single number like the average.
It just gives a much fuller picture, no matter what you are looking at.
If you think averages are good enough for everything, remember that almost all people have an above average number of legs.
Death note reference at 0:51 👀
Those are rookie numbers
We’ve got to pump them up!
Did you want them to include trees? Or were you aiming for immortality?
Quartiles are also useful when comparing the different populations
Honestly, we should just move away from averages in general. Medians are so much more useful and representative. And you can easily add a modifier like "oldest 75%" to make it clear what range you're talking about. Averages in my opinion are pretty much useless.
Can we chart the curve of the graph and use an equation to describe life expectancy? That would be accurate AND make complex math more relevant in real life.
Another point of interest: the first two examples are generally also in a domestic setting. If you were to put them more "in the wild" they'd also have lifespans more similar to the turtle.
Often when we talk about the life expectancy of an animal, we are looking at the typical lifespan in captivity/domestic life.
I've heard a lot of animals are given two statistics depending on whether the animal lives in the wild or not.
Aww. The elderly dog drawing reminds me of mine. She's reddish-brown and around 12 years old, and has always peed in the house so the diaper is appropriate.
4:27
[ON MOBILES]
If you exit the screen and click on the screen (not on the links and I cards), you see a hidden Coronavirus!
[ON DESKTOP]
Hover over the progress bar (the red bar thing) and you see a hidden Coronavirus!
on browser you can see it when hovering over the progress bar since the little preview image doesn't show overlays ^^
@@NiyaKouya oh, ok!
Heads up about Noom. I can’t say for sure if it’s a scam, but I was persuaded to pay $10 for the trial! And when I wanted to cancel I got a 65% discount offer!! That’s surely a scammy technique. I found it a bit weird that a reputable channel would endorse such a company. For anyone else, read the reviews first.
Peace.
I'd say this is one of your best videos.
Really informatíve, and good visuals
0:49 She seems familiar i wonder where ive seen her
0:51 ah, yes i guess that makes sense in that context
Thank you for explaining it topic.
The oldest dog is 31 😮😮😮
This video was made 3 years ago
No one is sitting around saying 'well how come all those baby turtles die of they live to 80?'
I don't see a problem here, I just see three ways of talking about life expectancy that best fits the species.
Tnx
Beautifully Explained :)
As someone who took AP environmental sustainability, I saw the graphs and was like WAIT I KNOW THIS
Thats actually... super cool! Statistics rules!
The flaw presented here is common to all applications of statistics. The smarter we seem to get... the stupider we are.
0:50 is that a death note reference with "puppy" text?
Well explained!
0:51 lol deathnote reference :)
this was incredible! thank you
2:03 AW NOOOO 😣🥺
Yeah, tbh that makes sense. I think that on a surface level it works as is, but the curves give a lot more nuance.
Great one!!!
Well, honestly, when we ask "how much do they live?" we really mean the old age of a somewhat healthy life and the average of deaths caused by age including sicknesses that the old ones cannot resist well. In other words, how much an animal would live if nothing goes really wrong. We do not mean being eaten as eggs, babies or strong adults. We do not mean accidents or rare diseases. It's most often a "how long does this animal live in normal conditions of no surprises?". That usually means life expectancy. As in, we expect this animal to live that long if nothing makes the time shorter.
Yes
Y’all that death note doe