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Book Reviews
Validation of Exceptional Longevity
by by Bernard Jeune (Ed.)
Odense University Press, 1999
This is very interesting book about studies on human longevity conducted by 23 leading scientists from Europe and North America. The international team of authors include such renowned researchers as M. Allard (France), B. Desjardins (Canada), B. Jeune (Denmark), V. Kannisto (Portugal), P. Laslett (UK), M. Poulain (Belgium), A. R. Thatcher (UK), J. R. Wilmoth (USA)and other researchers.
The main idea of this book (consisting of fifteen chapters) is to develop rigorous scientific methods for validating claims of exceptional human longevity and to apply them systematically both to historic and contemporary data.
This is very important because millions of people are fascinated with the Guinness Book of Records that is supposed to provide verified information on longevity records, more accurate than the sensational claims in newspapers and TV shows. The authors demonstrate that public opinion on human longevity issues is misled by the Guinness Book, and that even the most "irrefutable" cases simply do not hold water.
For example, Pierre Joubert, who appeared in the Guinness Book as a 113 year old man, in reality died at 65 years, whereas his namesake - his son - died 48 years later. After careful age verification, the average lifespan of most of the alleged "centenarians" proved to be 88 years only!
The authors of the book suggest that almost all historical claims of exceptional longevity are fundamentally wrong. They present arguments that even such leading scholars and eminent skeptics of the past as Bacon, Locke, Harvey, Haller, Temple, and Quetelet were astonishingly gullible about exceptional longevity.
A new special term - "the cult of centenarians" - is coined by one of the authors of this book, Peter Laslett, in order to describe the cultural phenomenon of complete loss of critical perception because of the emotional fascination with exceptional longevity claims.
The authors conclude that the history of human longevity is a history of myths. Moreover, they make a provocative claim that genuine centenarians probably never existed in the entire human history until the end of the 19th century.
It is not surprising that this provocative hypothesis has already initiated intensive discussions among other researchers. These discussions about the book revealed two aspects of the problem:
(1) it may be true that there is no sufficient evidence for exceptional longevity in the past, but
(2) there is also no sufficient evidence to claim that centenarians never existed before the 19th century - we simply do not know that.
One of the paradoxes of this book is that the authors, being critical of the previous claims of exceptional longevity, are at the same time rather defensive for 'their cases.' An extensive documentation is published in the book intended to prove the following three cases of exceptional human longevity:
(1) Jeanne Calment, a French woman of Arles in Southern France. She was born on February 21, 1875 and died on August 4, 1997 at the age of 122 years and 5 months. A special chapter devoted to this case is written by J.-M. Robine and M. Allard.
(2) Marie Louise Meilleur (born Chassé), who was born on August 29, 1880 in Kamouraska, French Canada, and died on April 16, 1998 at the age of 117 years and 7 months. Her case is described in a special chapter by B. Desjardins.
(3) Christian Mortensen, a Danish-born American citizen of San Rafael, California. He was born on August 16, 1882 and died on April 25, 1998 at the age of 115 years and 8 months. This case is described by a team of the Danish (A. Skytthe, B. Jeune) and American (J. R. Wilmoth) scholars in a special chapter.
The case of 122 years old Jeanne Calment is particularly astonishing, because it stands so far apart from the previous validated longevity record (117 years, Marie Louise Meilleur). It is known from the long practice of the record registration that, with the extensive systematic collection of any kind of records, every new record is typically very close to the previous ones. Moreover, the increment between progressive records is continuously decreasing with increasing numbers of accumulated records. This empirical observation is supported by the mathematical theory of extreme value distributions, known as statistics of extremes (Gumbel, 1958). The outstanding case of Jeanne Calment is a clear violation both of previous experience in record registration and of the predictions of probability theory.
It is important to emphasize that the problem with Jeanne Calment case is NOT in her extreme longevity per se, since there seems to be no fixed theoretical limit to the duration of human life (Gavrilov, Gavrilova, 1991). The real problem is the absence of the previous history of validated longevity records in the range of 118-121 years that should be expected in great abundance if we accept the case of 122 years old Jeanne Calment. Further studies may hopefully help to resolve this controversy.
Overall, this book is of eminent interest not only to specialists in longevity and genealogical studies, but also to the general reader.
References
Gavrilov, Leonid A., Gavrilova, Natalia S. 1991. The Biology of Life Span: A Quantitative Approach. New York, etc.: Harwood Academic Publisher.
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/index.html#Book
Gumbel, Emil J. 1958. Statistics of Extremes. New York: Columbia University Press.
Review by Leonid Gavrilov
Review by gavrilov
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