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100mstoday at 9:49 AM2 repliesview on HN

Probably throwing quite the grenade here, but around 29% of pregnancies end in termination globally. Absent cultural considerations, it's questionable whether life expectancy has improved in absolute terms in modern times


Replies

cassepipetoday at 12:36 PM

I don't think it's a grenade unless you are implicitly trying to mean it that life begins before birth, which ultimately is a definition game since it's actually quite hard to define life, hard enough that calling it "life" is a matter of personal worldview. I personally think it's quite reasonable to exclude pre-birth "deaths" from life expectancy, or event infant deaths sometimes, depending on what you are trying to measure.

In any case I didn't know this number and it's quite relevant to the discussion of how much we got rid of natural selection.