The lifespan of many long-lived animals is difficult to determine due to a lack of reliable measurement methods. Most species do not have growth rings, and aside from tagging, there are few other means to track their age. Notable examples include albatrosses, which can live for decades, and bowhead whales known to exceed 100 years based on archaeological evidence. Saul Newman, a geneticist, challenges the assumption of a human lifespan limit posited in previously published studies, asserting that the data yield radically different conclusions when analyzed independently.
"In 2016, Saul Newman was a clean-shaven 31-year-old working in a sterile glass box in Canberra, Australia, part of a lab where geneticists probed the internal mysteries of wheat."
"What interested Newman about this paper was how extraordinarily bad it was. 'A horror show,' he called it, astonished that such work could appear in a journal as prestigious as Nature."
"When he ran the data independently, he got a wildly different result."
"It is exceptionally hard to know how long long-lived animals endure, as the way scientists assess the longevity of wild animals is to tag them and hope to see them again."
Collection
[
|
...
]