I saw this article at MSN (from Current Biology) on why women live longer than men and thought it was worth sharing with readers:
New research reveals that mutations to the DNA of the mitochondria cause men to age faster than women — a finding that may explain why women, on average, outlive men.
The researchers from Monash University in Australia examined male and female fruit flies that carried mitochondria — the part of the cell that converts food into energy — of various origin. They found that genetic variation in the mitochondria predicted life expectancy in males, but not in females. The investigators concluded that several mutations within the DNA of mitochondria affect how quickly men age as well as their longevity. …
…Our results therefore suggest that the mitochondrial mutations we have uncovered will generally cause faster male aging across the animal kingdom.”
Luckily, these researchers (unlike the New York Times) seem fine with finding ways to help men live longer:
The study authors said they plan to continue their research and explore ways to negate the genetic mutations that negatively affect men’s life expectancy.
As my husband always says, “faster, please.”
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Image courtesy shutterstock / Liew Weng Keong
I looked up the census records many years ago and found that the difference in longevity began only in 1928 and advanced only incrementally after that. ??????
@peter38a:
“the difference in longevity began only in 1928 and advanced only incrementally after that. ??????”
If true, that neatly coincides with a generation after the age where mechanization began to increase the productivity of housewives, reducing the amount of physical labor they were required to do.
Men also had large productivity increases due to mechanization, but they continued to work long hours to increase output and thereby their wealth, which was largely spent on the home and luxury items for women.
All part of The Patriarchy’s Evil Plan To Oppress Women.
~ ~ ~
As the quote above illuminates. I have always ascribed the lifespan difference to the difference in how hard men and women work for how long and the relative amounts of stress their work creates.
I have been housekeeper and cared for a child, and it is a much easier job than high stress work in an office with deadlines or work in a factory or work as a salesman or a mechanic, all of which I have done.
Yup.
Dont need some expensive fruit fly grant to see the obvious.
To quote the author
“a finding that may explain why women, on average, outlive men”
On Average?
OK.
How many female cops get killed every year?
Firepeople? Cab drivers? Cell tower installers?
All construction trades? Soldiers? Motorcyclists?
Gangbangers/drug dealers? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Women have a longer “average” life expectancy,
mostly because they dont get killed as much.
But you cant spend millions of taxpayers money on a “study” when common sense truth and some simple ‘rithamaticy clouds those dollar signs in your eyes, now can you?
Excellent point “Old Guy”. I thought of that, but the increase is almost the same regardless of increases in life stresses for woman, number of women in the workforce during war time, or not; most women working in many (not all) of the stressful jobs men are holding presently. In other words no matter what the division of labor over the decades the disparity in deaths continues to ratchet up.
Allow me to try this idea. American (let’s stay within one border) white males are almost or are the most competitive (aggressive? But the two are not the same) of their gender existent, they also make up virtually one hundred percent of serial and mass killers. Men are not just competing for “toys” but for the sexual favors of their female cohort.
When the competition is thwarted the more unstable and unsuccessful act out while the more stable feel, as woman produce more on their own, ever increasing completion for the ‘edge’, and thus more stress over this period of, time causing earlier deaths on average.
As an aside I once read that serial sexual killers were denied any access to pornography in early development. I’m sure this will cause a lighting bolt to hit me, but the operant idea here isn’t just pornography, which has always been with us but unstable personalities who I’m sure ‘did’ access same but were made to feel villainous, and aggressive (?), for their interest. If any portion of this is true than one might speculate that instead of trying to stop violence in movies… Stop me before I digress again.
It might be interesting to see where the early deaths are distributed in the male population e.g. the lower class tend to not give a damn about social norms, their competitiveness taking anti social avenues i.e. beer and dangerous activities therefore wouldn’t show the same death rate for the same reason (speculating). It might also be said that the lower class may have greater mortality because of a lesser access to health care and although that is a strong factor it is also true that when health care is free (my observations when in the army) they still did not avail themselves full use.
The upper class are, let’s say, for the sake of argument and time (I’m at work) that the upper class is as, or more competitive and more successful at recognized social norms. They also have a higher suicide rate; competiveness morphing into aggressiveness. An interesting aside is that there is a tendency for upper class children to become less successful than their fathers and that it is due to the wife “driving” the father and the children not waning to play that game. Sigh, another whole post.
Of course although It’s no small thing that school days have been made more difficult for boys, a group that never does as well as girls at any grade level, but that is a fairly recent occurrence.
And what’s to be done? Perhaps we should follow the admonition of Hannibal Lector to Clarice Starling and return to first principles. At the most basic what is a human being; I believe an answer lies there.
It’s been fun but gotta post this and run.
I can’t quite parse this report.
Do they mean that they can count mutations over the days that a fruit fly lives, and the mutation count predicts male fruit fly life span but not female fruit fly life span?
OR
Do they mean that mitochondrial DNA drift over many generations of flies, tends to find the males living shorter lives?
–
I think they mean the second, but the problem is it makes no sense, since over the last 10,000,000 years it would have killed off the flies entirely.
Science is hard, and reporting it is hard, too.
I had an argument with someone espousing feminist viewpoints about how the “patriarchy” was oppressing women and “keeping them down.” My response was to say that men–yes, almost a completely male cohort performing the research–had spent incalculable amounts of time and effort making giving birth safer for women.
In the 1700s and 1800s it was not at all uncommon for a man to have three wives in his lifetime because he lost two of them to death during childbirth. Kipling’s “The Female of the Species” refers to women “jousting with death for each life beneath their breast.” Childbirth used to be quite dangerous for both mother and child. If men had REALLY considered women disposable, throwaway inferiors, no one would have bothered with that effort. However, the medical profession succeeded in making childbirth a procedure that very seldom costs a woman’s life anymore. My thinking–and experience–is that many, probably most, men would sacrifice their lives to save a woman or a child. Cases where women do such things for men are extraordinarily rare.
You might be tempted to think that those medical advances, and the general male tendency to sacrifice for women and children ought to get men some credit from the distaff side. You would generally be wrong. That’s expected. Now it’s a matter of, “what have you done for me lately?” for women. No wonder so many men are so disenchanted with women.
I have a feeling that the situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and a lot of 21st Century women are going to bitterly regret the actions of their mid/late 20th Century female relatives.
Which leads to this simple analysis:
Women have been equal to men (in the west) since the invention of:
A) Air Conditioning
B) Power Steering
In all places where these two are rare, they are chattle.
Oh, the Lefist romance with primitave native cultures.
Moral or not, this is the truth.
You really are not talking to enough women. I’ve got kids and I’m thoroughly grateful that doctors figured out C-sections. I would have died. My best friend did bleed out, clinically died, and then was brought back. By a military flight surgeon- she was an emergency case.
Where do you get that women are blithe about this stuff?
mac, I’m sorry to say you are right so far as the credit for men’s contribution to women’s longevity is concerned, not so much from individuals as from the rotten institutions that have spread this disease. And I laugh(not in a good way) at the results that now are coming to fruition. We now have the media parroting the line, “The women won 2/3s of the gold medals in the Olympics, proud in the fact that they have all but destroyed most of men’s sports on college campuses. One of my sons was an All-State tennis star, yet couldn’t find a college where he could get a schlorship, yet 2 female members of the same team had multiple offers. I’m not complaining about my son as he received a full-ride academic schlorship, but how did US men do in tennis at the Olympics? In a few years the women can be proud that they are winning all the medals that the US is winning, although the medal count will be way down and we will be in 3rd or 4th place. I’m not trying to say that sports is that important, but it is certainly a harbinger of what is to come in academics using the same Title IX nonsense. One of the latest proposals to come from the nuts in DC is that engineering, for instance, will not be able to admit men until a certain % of women make up the class, that % being the proportion of women/men at that particular institution. Eliminate the men no matter what. Yeah, one knows why men are disenchanted with women. My two sons, one an engineer and the other an executive for a small oil company, are not interested in marriage at all. One of them lives with his girlfriend, which I don’t approve, and the other has a girlfriend as well but has no further plans. It’s a shame.