Age - a question for my all-knowing friends-list

[andrewducker]

Ed was asking on Facebook what it would be like if we didn't age visibly so much - after all, other animals don't tend to.

Is this actually true?  Thinking about it, most other animals don't seem to get wrinkled in the same way, nor does their fur turn completely white or all fall out.  But is this just some animals?  Do other animals age visibly the same way we do?  Or is there something odd about people?

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Not all humans age all that visibly. There is a huge difference in the way people look at age 60 in terms of their ethnicity. As one (very pissed off) friend shared with me, when people tell us 'oh, you don't look your age" what they are inadvertantly saying is "you aren't Anglo Saxon/Celt".

I won't have wrinkles at 60.
I won't be grey at 60.
I will probably be fit and active at 60.


Also: animals don't seem to age because their life span is not artificially extended. As henriksdal notes above, when it is, then their aging patterns are more like that of us age-fighing humans.

[andrewducker]

My parents are both Jewish, and my mother is white-haired, while my father's hair is doing well at vanishing. My hair is going grey around the edges, which will presumably continue.

I know it's not true of everyone - but I've seen wrinkled, bald older people from a variety of cultures. Not that it's universal as a pattern, but it does seem quite pervasive.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

How many 60 year old Africans do you know with grey hair? Tends to take a *lot* longer.

And how did your parents look at 50 compared to non-Jews?

I will go grey, but no where near as early as my "english" contemporaries.

[andrewducker]

My mum went grey at age 25. One of my cousins decided to be stereotypical in one way by becoming a banker, but clearly not in another by losing 90% of his hair before hitting 30.

My family do look pretty good - but not signicantly better than other middle class people of similar ages I share an office with. Mind you, one of them is of Jamacain origin, and while bald, not wrinkled, which gives you a data point!

The couple of members of the family that _do_ look more aged are the ones that smoke(d). In my experience it's things like smoking/drinking that seem to cause people to age faster - and seems to be more a class thing than an ethnic thing (it's fascinating that certain areas of Edinburgh have groups that look decidedly older, based almost entirely on income/clas).

But I'd be delighted to know that my status as God Chosen is going to keep me looking younger longer :->

Any research into this that you know of?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Smoking definitely throws things off kilter, and my mum started to look a lot younger within three years of giving up.

Prematurely grey hair in women is often to do with a hormone imbalance and is connected to fertility. It's a bad sign as is often linked to osteoporosis.

I don't know of any research, just a general awareness: I teach at a very multi-ethnic university and one learns to be very, very wary about judging age.

[andrewducker]

I'm going to be a lot more conscious about that one now - I'll keep an eye out!