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MEDIA CENTER The Human Life Span: What Do We Know? NEW YORK (17 April 2003) — During the twentieth century the human life span increased by more than 50 percent in most industrialized countries. The continuing increase in longevity has major implications for societies and economies. Because longer life has both merits and costs, this phenomenon has provoked much discussion and thought. Individuals wonder how long they will stay healthy and policymakers worry about financing the potential growth in services for the elderly. Whether the life span will continue to edge upward is a topic of keen interest. In Life Span: Evolutionary, Ecological, and Demographic Perspectives, editors James R. Carey and Shripad Tuljapurkar explore the subject of the life span, both human and animal, by bringing together research conducted by scholars from many disciplines. (downloadable contents) Life Span is a supplement to the Population Council's Population and Development Review, a journal seeking to advance knowledge of the relationships between population and socioeconomic development and providing a forum for discussion of related policy issues. Classical evolutionary theory accounts for human survival only through the age of reproduction. A new theory is required to explain current trends in longevity and to gauge their future course. Life Span will contribute to the development of such a theory. The authors, leading demographers, evolutionary biologists, and field ecologists, skillfully draw insights from human populations as well as the comparative mortality patterns and environmental circumstances of other species to corroborate their research. Chapters examine such subjects as the factors that shape life span patterns in various species, an economic optimization model of the evolution of human life span, and analysis of the apparent slowing of the rate of increase in human mortality with age at the oldest ages. The book closes with a synthesis of the various approaches to explaining and predicting patterns of mortality. About the Editors: James R. Carey is Professor, Department of Entomology, University of California at Davis; and Senior Scholar, Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California at Berkeley. Shripad Tuljapurkar is Morrison Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford University.
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