Why Women Live Longer: It’s the Genes

Sydney Sweeney really does have good genes and not just because she’s an attractive blonde. More importantly, women in general appear to have a genetic advantage that gives them a longer lifespan than men. The fact that women live longer has been well known for a long time. But a recent study across the animal kingdom suggest and explanation for why this happens.

“From a human standpoint, it’s really remarkable that women live longer across almost every country in the world,” said Johanna Staerk, an evolutionary demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “So we were interested at looking at this from a broader taxonomic perspective.”

A quick biology lesson on the birds and the bees … well, birds and other animals:

In mammals, including humans, sex is generally determined by the X and Y chromosomes. If a baby has a pair of X chromosomes, she’s a girl. If the baby inherits an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, he’s a boy.

Just a brief interruption. It shouldn’t be remarkable that the paragraph above appeared in the Washington Post but I think it is. Even more surprising, I don’t see anyone in the comments stating that trans women are women or that sex is “assigned” at birth. Maybe the lunatics missed this because it was in the science section.

In any case, it turns out birds have the opposite system.

Female birds have a pair of unlike sex chromosomes while males have the like pair. (In this sort of sex-determination system, scientists use the letters W and Z, and talk about a ZW pair for female birds and a ZZ pair for males.)

So the theory proposed to explain longer life among women is called the “heterogametic sex hypothesis.” It’s pretty simple. Creatures that have two copies of the same gene, XX genes for female mammals or ZZ genes for male birds, will tend to live longer because they have a backup copy in case something gets corrupted.

If for instance, a male human has a corrupted X or Y gene as a result of a mutation caused by some environmental factor, there won’t be a 2nd copy available in a given cell. Some protein isn’t getting built and maybe something isn’t functioning at all or at least not as intended. Female humans on the other hand, have a ready backup if there’s a mutation.

This new study which looked at hundreds of species of birds and mammals seems to back up that hypothesis. The sex with two copies of the same gene usually lives longer.

For their study, Colchero, Staerk and their colleagues collected data on the lifespans of 528 mammal species and 648 bird species kept in zoos. The team found that most other mammals are like humans, with the females of nearly three-fourths of mammal species outliving their male counterparts.

But in birds, 68 percent of species studied showed a bias toward male longevity, as expected from their chromosomal makeup.

Pretty interesting idea. There are some people arguing in the comments that the longer life for women might also have a social factor. 

Women have tended to outlive men because they worked fewer hours at crummy, soul-sucking jobs. Now they work just like men at the same jobs. The internet has created no barriers between work and home; you’re always on the clock. Women’s life expectancy advantage has narrowed as a result. Multiple studies show this.

Lots to consider for why women live longer. It’s rarely just nature but in this case the genetic explanation does make some sense.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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