[Why Do Women Outlive Men? A Study of 1,176 Species Points to an Answer ]
Because men have to deal with women.
6 comments
@Titania On average believe most data I've seen has women living longer. It's never by a really large margin, like if the average for women is 80, men would be 75.
Always a number of factors, like men "tend" to have more physically demanding jobs that wear out the body faster/lead to more dangerous accidents, men tend to engage in riskier leisure behavior, and even with suicide, men are more likely to go with a gun or something more immediately fatal vs pills or the like.
That's for humans. Less versed on the other species. Thinking of it though, hell, with lots of colony insects imagine that would skew things towards women by a large margin if all the males do is fuck the queen and die like with bees or ants...
@Tilver #238275
I’m glad I’m not the only person who paid attention to the “1,176 Species” part of the title! It’s easy to come up with reasons why human women live longer, but if I follow the Slashdot->WaPo->science.org links:
science.org
Overall, [Average Life Expectancy] was female biased in 72% of mammal species (381 of 528 species) and male biased in 68% of bird species (438 of 648 species). Note that these numbers include species with weak or no evidence for male-female differences in ALE. We identified 208 mammal species with strong evidence for a female bias (i.e., zero overlap of ≤0.05), representing 39% of all species, and 28 species (5%) with a male bias. Among birds, 122 species (19%) showed robust evidence of a male bias, while 26 species (4%) exhibited a clear female bias (Fig. 1, B and C).
The Slashdot comments section for this article is humancentric, sexist, occasionally transphobic, and shamefully incurious.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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