Yes, but if you're dead by 50 anyway for unrelated reasons, there's still not selective pressure to combat cancers that only kill you at 60+. That's regardless of your individual reproduction or your contribution to the group's fitness.
It is preferable to die of "old age" (including heart disease or dementia) at 90 than from cancer at 35. Yes, eventually everyone dies, but some early deaths are preventable, it seems to be half of cancer deaths, some car crashes, suicides etc. This means we can and should do something about it.
(Virtually) no-one dies of lifestyle-related cancers at 35. I still wouldn't want to die of cancer or heart disease at 60-80 (my grandmother was very unhealthy, had her first heart attack before 65, and died at 72), but I think dementia is a scarier prospect (my great grandmother died at 96 but had dementia for at least a decade before that).
Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5.
This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).
It might if the reasons we were dying between 55-75 were related to poor nutrition and low activity levels. My assumption (always dangerous) is that the things that kill us in those age ranges are diabetes, heart disease and stroke which are all manageable in some fashion through moderation in diet as well as exercise. Once you make it past 75, you've probably been either lucky genetically or you've been living well or some combination of the two.
On the contrary, I’m on my early forties and my physical condition is way better than it was twenty years ago.
It's a crap shoot. I got hit by metabolic syndrome -- extreme hypertension and type II diabetes. I exercise, I weigh less and am in better shape than I was 20 years ago, but I'm still on a cardiology professor's frequent-flyer list and gobbling meds by the double-handful. Meanwhile, my wife is a four year cancer survivor (another six months to the all-clear, we hope).
The probability of running into a life-threatening or terminal medical condition approaches unity as we age towards the upper limit of human life expectancy (around 114 years, currently). By the time you hit your forties you probably know people who had an unlucky aggressive early-onset cancer; by the time you hit your fifties you can add heart attacks and strokes to that, and less-well-known problems as well. It's all downhill from here, and unfortunately it's not the kind of ride most people enjoy.
Yes, but age is part of the utility. If we can save someone that would be expected to live another 50 years, it's more valuable than saving someone who will live another six months.
That doesn't mean they won't get any care, but it would mean that the maximum that would be spent to save them would be less than someone who was expected to live much longer because of the care.
Sure, though don’t forget 1/4th of American men don’t live past 65, and less than half make it to 79. Dying young isn’t necessarily preferable, but it does impact these statistics.
Yes, someone who's 65 is more likely to live to 85 than someone who's 50. That's extremely obvious once you know that 1) people occasionally die and 2) people don't come back to life after they die. The closer you are to an age, the more likely you are to reach that age.
What you're doing here is grossly oversimplifying the statistical significance of that fact. You seem to think that all people, regardless of race, genetic profile, income, etc. have equal chance of dying the older they get. This is simply untrue.
For example, people between the ages of 50-65 have a higher likelihood of dying from cancer before the age of 85 than somebody who is age 66. This isn't simply because the 66 year old has already made it to 66 so is 1/3 of the way ahead of a 55 year old, which is what you seem to be suggesting.
The fact is that certain diseases, statistically, have a higher incidence in that 50-65 age band and once you are out of it, your odds of succumbing to those diseases are lower. Sure, the 66 year old could get a clean bill of health and then walk in front of a bus, but the odds are they aren't going to die of cancer. That isn't insignificant. Obviously the longer you live the greater the odds something will happen that will end your life, but looking at life expectancy in a black box and ignoring the causes of death is misinformed.
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