>>>> Andrew
>>>> Don't take the figure of average life expectancy = 40 years too
>>>> seriously. If you think about it carefully you will realise that using
>>>> the mean to portray this distribution is very misleading and may well be
>>>> totally invalid. The distribution at least bimodal (see below).
etc.
>>>> 7) People lead healthy active lives, did not eat junk food and did not get
>>>> as stressed out as we do today. So provided they avoided disease, survived
>>>> childhood and giving birth/wars and got enough to eat there is no reason
>>>> why they should not live at least as long a we do today.
Rather than debate the valididity of statistical measures I would just
like to say that I agree with all the reasons Lewis listed. But if you
look at 7) you'll see that my main point is still valid.
There just aren't too many old people around as you have to be pretty fortunate to miss out on all the bad things that can happen in ancient life. Therefore being old means you're something special and probably due a lot of respect, etc.. [unless you own a black cat in which case you are a witch, of course :-). Burn the witch. Burn the witch!!]
>>>> Well as you can see the mean is pretty useless in theis case.
No more than any other statistical measure. It is all in how you interpret
these things. (Sorry, 2nd year statistics course rears its ugly head)
Cheers, Andrew
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