How Long Do We Live?

Bongaarts, John; Feeney, Griffith

doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2002.00013.x

Cited by 107 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This change, along with others, resulted in dramatic shifts in the environments encountered by humans during the course of the 20th century. Expansion of schooling (42), medical improvements (43), increased longevity (44), and caloric abundance are just some of the changes that may influence not only relationships between important phenotypes but the underlying salience of their associated genotypes as well. In the present paper, we demonstrate that observed changes in mating preferences or fertility associations do not always correspond to shifts in the underlying genetic architecture.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assortative mating and differential fertility by phenotype and genotype across the 20th century

Conley

Laidley

Belsky

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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This study asks two related questions about the shifting landscape of marriage and reproduction in US society over the course of the last century with respect to a range of health and behavioral phenotypes and their associated genetic architecture: (i) Has assortment on measured genetic factors influencing reproductive and social fitness traits changed over the course of the 20th century? (ii) Has the genetic covariance between fitness (as measured by total fertility) and other traits changed over time? The answers to these questions inform our understanding of how the genetic landscape of American society has changed over the past century and have implications for population trends. We show that husbands and wives carry similar loadings for genetic factors related to education and height. However, the magnitude of this similarity is modest and has been fairly consistent over the course of the 20th century. This consistency is particularly notable in the case of education, for which phenotypic similarity among spouses has increased in recent years. Likewise, changing patterns of the number of children ever born by phenotype are not matched by shifts in genotype-fertility relationships over time. Taken together, these trends provide no evidence that social sorting is becoming increasingly genetic in nature or that dysgenic dynamics have accelerated.assortative mating | fertility | polygenic scores | cohort trends T he traditional view of evolutionary dynamics in humans was that the history of modern humans was too short for the species to have experienced substantive change in its genetic makeup (1, 2). However, findings from recent population genetics studies suggest the possibility that selective fertility, nonrandom mating, drift, and other violations of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium accelerated genetic divergence between modern human populations, particularly since humans began farming and civilization developed (3-6). Extending this logic, rapid economic development and the corresponding demographic transition over the past two centuries may have led to a further shift in the dynamics of reproduction and selection. The present paper uses genetic and phenotypic data from a nationally representative sample of US older adults to test whether the societal changes in the United States during the 20th century were reflected in (i) changes in patterns of genetic assortment in marriage, and (ii) changes in genetic influences on fertility.Understanding trends with respect to specific deviations from random mating and differential fertility is critical to both social and evolutionary scientists. For example, recent research in sociology has suggested that taking a prospective view on social stratification that incorporates differential fertility yields disparate results for estimands such as levels of intergenerational educational mobility (7). Likewise, genetic research on human populations often assumes that mating in a population is random with respect to genotypes (8, 9). Recent empirical evidence suggests otherw...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assortative mating and differential fertility by phenotype and genotype across the 20th century

Conley

Laidley

Belsky

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In this article, we refer to senescent mortality as the increase over age in the force of mortality occuring after a certain age, representing aging and physiological deterioration (Bongaarts and Feeney 2002;Bongaarts 2005;Horiuchi et al 2013). The Gompertz approach allows a good approximation of adult mortality patterns over age and time for many countries.…”

Section: Decomposing Senescent Mortality: Gompertzmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decomposing changes in life expectancy: Compression versus shifting mortality

Bergeron-Boucher¹,

Ebeling²,

Canudas-Romo³

2015

DemRes

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“…The faster mortality is falling or rising, the more life expectancy is over or underestimated. This is the fundamental claim made by Bongaarts and Feeney (2002) in their article "How Long Do We Live?" (Note 1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is the fundamental claim made by Bongaarts and Feeney (2002) in their article "How Long Do We Live? ", where they base their claim on arguments about "tempo effects on mortality".…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Life Expectancy at Current Rates vs. Current Conditions

Vaupel¹

2002

DemRes

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Life expectancy is overestimated if mortality is declining and underestimated if mortality is increasing. This is the fundamental claim made by Bongaarts and Feeney (2002) in their article "How Long Do We Live?", where they base their claim on arguments about "tempo effects on mortality". This Reflexion explains why this claim is true in most heterogeneous populations. It suggests that demographers should be careful about distinguishing between life expectancy under current conditions, which is difficult and problematic to assess, and life expectancy at current rates, which can be estimated using standard methods. Finally, it speculates that there may be a deep connection between tempo and heterogeneity.

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How Long Do We Live?

Cited by 107 publications

References 6 publications

Assortative mating and differential fertility by phenotype and genotype across the 20th century

Assortative mating and differential fertility by phenotype and genotype across the 20th century

Decomposing changes in life expectancy: Compression versus shifting mortality

Life Expectancy at Current Rates vs. Current Conditions

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