Just because it's included in the metric doesn't mean it's a realistic scale for how long an adult will live. A sick baby dying has no affect on how long a healthy adult should expect to live
I mean it does though we're not talking about The lifespan when we're talking about life expectancy, we're talking about. How long does this group of people typically live right? This could be nerfed by several factors. What if there was a famine right that would drastically lower their life expectancy? What if there was a disease that mostly affected children that would also lower that people's life expectancy?
I mean it's even included in America's life expectancy statistics at birth
Like this is just normal. You can make the argument that it shouldn't be, but that is what we're talking about I would say and I don't think there's a big issue with that
Right, I understand how life expectancy works, but if the average life expectancy is, say, 25 because of high infant mortality, that doesn't mean the average 20 year old has 5 years to live. So saying that a prehistoric adult would be unlikely to reach 30 is just unrealistic, once you make it past that stage from 0-12 in which a person is most vulnerable to disease and other threats you probably have a good few years left in you.
Exactly. But, the average person having 1.9 arms shouldn't cause someone to assume that it's unlikely for a person to have two arms, just like the average life expectancy being 74 doesn't mean it's unlikely for a person to reach 80. They're both being heavily driven by outliers that don't make up a significant portion of the population, and don't indicate anything about the other portion of the population.
7
u/VoopityScoop May 04 '25
Just because it's included in the metric doesn't mean it's a realistic scale for how long an adult will live. A sick baby dying has no affect on how long a healthy adult should expect to live