LIVING LONG: SEX AND DEATH
Fancy cars, flowers, and expensive dinners are pretty normal parts of human courting behavior that are well-known for cutting a hunk out of a man’s paycheck, if not occasionally his ego. But does all of this courting also take a slice off his life? One British geneticist thinks so.
“It’s well-established in many species that in absence of mating behavior, males live much longer,” says David Gems, Ph.D., researcher in the department of biology at University College London. “Castration increases longevity in a variety of vertebrates. Neutering tomcats has an enormous impact on their life expectancy.”
Dr. Gems himself found that male worms lived up to twice as long when kept by themselves, as opposed to living with other males or with females. That’s because they spent so much energy mating or attempting to mate that it shortened their lives, Dr. Gems says.
In humans, the problem may be part behavioral and part physiological, notes Dr. Gems, who admits that many questions remain unanswered. “One theory is that testosterone raises metabolism, so men burn energy faster and thereby lower their life spans,” he says.
The upside is that if all this is true, men probably have a stronger propensity for longevity than women, Dr. Gems says. “If males had the same genetic constitution as women and had all these odds stacked against them, they’d be genetically unfit,” he says. It’s this stronger innate constitution that also likely explains why men who live to their eighties and nineties are in better shape than women of the same age, Dr. Gems says. “The trick is getting out there,” he says.
Preferably with all appendages still attached.
*19/36/5*
