How to live a long time: be a parent.

I am aware that the title above might surprise people. Parents are an exhausted breed, always running around after little ones so much more energetic than themselves. Surely, this takes a toll on one's health? Surely, parents live shorter lives than lifelong singletons?

Well, the surprising answer, for some, is no. Being a parent is good for you. In a paper, Fertility and Life Span - Late Children Enhance Female Longevity, authors, Hans-Georg Müller (a), Jeng-Min Chiou (c), James R. Carey (b) and Jane-Ling Wang (a) discussed their findings as to the correlations between fertility and life span.

(a Departments of Statistics, University of California, Davis
b Departments of Entomology, University of California, Davis
c Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, National Health Research Institutes, Taipei, Taiwan)

They studied the life records of 1,635 French-Canadian women of the 17th and 18th centuries, paying particular heed to survival past the age of 50. Unexpectedly, they discovered that greater fertility meant greater postreproductive survival. In other words, the more kids you had, the older you got. This goes against the age old wisdom of women being worn out by incessant child birth - if anything it seems to show that women are sustained by the reproductive act.

They derived a mathematical relationship to determine the lifespan advantage. For every ten fold decrease in the age of your youngest child, at the age of 50, there is a 3.93 year longevity advantage. This is quite substantial. For instance, a 50 year old woman with a 2 year old child, is going to live 3.93 years longer than a similar 50 year old with a 20 year old child, typically.

Another paper further enlightens us as to what is happening. Does Having Children Extend Life Span? A Genealogical Study of Parity and Longevity in the Amish by Patrick F. McArdle, Toni I. Pollin, Jeffrey R. O'Connell, John D. Sorkin, Richa Agarwala, Alejandro A. Schäffer, Elizabeth A. Streeten, Terri M. King, Alan R. Shuldiner and Braxton D. Mitchell.

This paper studied 2015 Amish parents from 1749 to 1912 who survived to 50 years or more.

The correlation between number of children and longevity is striking - and it applies to both men and women. For men, each child fathered resulted in an average increase of 0.23 years of life, this was linear and applied to every child fathered. For mothers, there was an increase of 0.32 years per child up to 14. Beyond 14, there were health issues which negatively affected the life expectancy of the mother. Further analysis concluded that, for mothers, the key factor was the age of last child birth - this accounting for all the apparent benefit.

So, what are we to make of this? Many a bachelor or spinster, that I have encountered, has seemed quite pleased with themselves not to be "burdened" with children. They account themselves wise to have no such worries. They tend to believe that they will also live longer without the "stress" of parenthood. Yet, all is not as it seems. Parents live longer than those who never become so. The difference rises linearly with the number of children. Thus the more fertile you are, the longer you tend to live. (Or another way of putting it, the older you are, the more fertile you tend to have been.)

Having children gives you many joys that life does not otherwise offer. It also teaches you much more about life than being a bachelor or spinster ever could. To see a child grow up is the best education there is. It delights me to be able to write that being a parent is also a longevity indicator of sorts. So, not only do children fill your hours with unexpected joys - they give you more hours to fill, too.

It sounds like quite a bargain.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and four months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and nine months, and Tiarnan, twenty-six months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind, niño, gênio criança, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Leonardo Da Vinci on Medicine and Doctors

What did Leonardo Da Vinci think of medicine? Recently, I found out. His words make interesting reading.

In his Notebooks, the following remark is to be found: "Strive to preserve your health, and in this you will better succeed in proportion as you keep clear of the physicians, for their drugs are a kind of alchemy concerning which there are no fewer books than there are medicines."

Now, medicine in his time was a different affair to what it is now. It was only just beginning to turn away from the Ancient writings and start to learn from the world, for itself. Yet, I feel his view is still relevant. His advice that health is to be found far from the reach of Doctors and that the implication that contact with them is harmful, holds more truth, even today, than perhaps we are willing to admit.

Leonardo Da Vinci seems to have kept to his own advice and lived a long life, for his time, dying at the age of 67. Average life expectancy at birth in the 16th century was only 35 years, so Leonardo did rather well.

I just thought you might find this particular wise man's thoughts on medicine, of interest. I did.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and no months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and five months, and Tiarnan, twenty-two months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

A life of achievement

I live far across the world from where I used to. A couple of days ago, I spoke to my mother in England of our recent doings, here in Singapore.

I mentioned that we had met Singapore's oldest living person, Teresa Hsu, who is reportedly 110 years old - a supercentenarian (according to Channel News Asia and herself).

My mother didn't seem very impressed. "Oh, we had one of those here, too, recently: 108, she was."

"They are very rare." I pointed out, to her, perhaps hoping to elicit an enthusiastic response. "We brought Ainan.", I went on, exposing my wish to let her know that I was trying to provide interesting experiences for him, as a father. She appeared not to notice my intent.

"Yeh, but a lot of them are very ordinary people...they don't do much."

Now, I understood. My mother did not think that the length of a life conferred any merit on the person - only what they had done with their life, had the power to do that. My mother measures the value of a life by what is achieved, not by how long it is lived. For her, the life of achievement signifies that you have striven, overcome and excelled: that you have, in fact, "done something".

This called to mind, my childhood, in a parental home that only measured results. By this I mean, the only thing that mattered was how well you did. This attitude is one that has advantages and disadvantages, which I am not going to go into. Yet, it was revealing for me, to see the same attitude applied to the life of a centenarian. To my mother, if the centenarian had not ALSO achieved something remarkable in her long life, then the long life, itself, is not to be considered remarkable. Simply living long has no value for her.

Is she right? Is it more important to achieve much, than exist long? I suppose, in one sense, for sure, she is correct. The lives of many geniuses of the past, were not long - but their reach through time, by their influence on mankind, is long indeed. They changed things. They "made a difference". Such people did not become remarkable by their tally of years, but were remarkable by what they achieved in the, often short, time allotted to them.

My mother, though she has probably not thought the thoughts of the paragraph above, being, as I believe, not interested in geniuses, she has thought the global one that what matters is what gets done - how "successful" you are - in whatever way success is measured.

Very few of us will ever be able to look back on a 110 years of life. As I have noted before, there are only 78 verified such people alive today. So, in that sense, supercentenarian status is rarer than genius (at least, I hope it is, otherwise there is not much hope for us on the genius front.)

Even though a genius may not live as long, their actions will have much more effect upon the world, than a supercentenarian - unless that Methuselah is also a genius - or gifted in some way. The ideal, of course, would be for a genius to also be long-lived - for then their body of work would be all the greater and the benefit to mankind, so much enlarged.

My mother wasn't talking about geniuses though. She was talking about the everyday efforts of people who strive and become, achieve and do. She was talking about professionals and businessmen - about the doers of the world. Those are her ideal. Yet, her remark applies to all kinds of achievement.

The long-lived person contributes in many ways that a shorter-lived one cannot. They may educate the generations that come after them - if they were foresighted enough to have children - or the young of others, if they were not. They provide perspective on the modern world, which no history book can do so vividly (for they are often surprisingly clear of mind and early memory). If they had a life-long purpose, or project, or organization that they were involved in, they can contribute so much the longer and so much the better for their experience and wisdom. There are certain things that it takes a long lifetime, with its global perspective, to truly understand.

As my mother pointed out, however, many long-lived people have lived quiet lives. Their contributions seem of a modest kind. It is these that she does not respect. Perhaps she feels that they have wasted their privilege and opportunity in having thirty or forty - or more years - than other people generally have.

I would agree with her, that it is a pity to have lived so long and not made the greatest contribution that one can. Yet, this might be assuming too much. People vary in their gifts. Perhaps that modest looking contribution IS the greatest contribution they could have made. We should not, therefore, take a stance of censure.

The lesson here, is that one should strive for a life of achievement, no matter how long one is fated to live. If one aims for such a state, then the life that results will be of merit and worth - no matter how long and short it turns out to be. That would be a life lived well.

None of us know how much time we have - whether it be long or short - so make the most of it and do something worthwhile, with every year of it. Be, as my mother would wish, "an achiever".

Best wishes all.

(If you would like to read of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and eight months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and one month, or Tiarnan, eighteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted children and gifted adults in general. Thanks.)

High IQ promotes longevity

A high IQ confers many advantages on the possessor but perhaps the most valuable, in the long run, is that of a long life.

A UK study on 2,200 participants from Aberdeen, Scotland who took the 11-plus IQ examination in 1932, has thrown up some interesting correlations between IQ and ultimate longevity. The correlation is very strong indeed, compared to other factors which influence longevity.

The basic finding is that the better the child did in an IQ test in 1932, the more likely they were to survive until 76. The difference was marked between those of low IQ and those of higher IQ. A woman who scored one standard deviation above the norm, at IQ 115 in 1932, was TWICE as likely to survive to 76 as a woman who scored one standard deviation below the norm, at an IQ of 85. The correlation with men was not so strong, however, the difference in likelihood of survival in the same instance being 32% in favour of the IQ 115 male.

Now, the researchers were well aware of the known correlation between social status and health - and so this was accounted for in their analysis. Even accounting for the different occupations of the father and the attendant wealth differentials and differences in overcrowding in the households, the correlation remained intact: high IQ, as an independent variable, confers longevity on its possessor.

It is impossible with this information alone to isolate the reason for this correlation. It is likely to involve both genetics and lifestyle factors. Quite simply the high IQ person may have better genes in general and this could be responsible for promoting their health and longevity. There is also the likelihood that the higher IQ person is more likely to avoid such unhealthful habits as smoking, drinking to excess and the like - as well as adopting better dietary and lifestyle practices in general.

Whatever the ultimate cause of the correlation, the fact remains that the brighter your child (or you, are), the longer they are likely to live, INDEPENDENT OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS. A factor two difference in likelihood of survival for women, with only a one standard deviation IQ advantage above the norm is an advantage of huge dimensions. Most health practices produce relatively small increases in chances of survival: that is the biggest advantage I have ever noted, in my reading, for a single influence. Remarkable.

(If you would like to read of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and six months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, three, and Tiarnan, sixteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)