Eli5. What decides an animals longevity as for as mortality? A horse, way stronger and healthier than most humans, live only to around 20 to 30 years, yet the steady rate when humans expire is around 70 to 80 years. How does this work?
In: Biology
Longevity might be partly decided by natural selection… A creature with a certain combination of anatomical/physiological features and behaviors living in a certain habitat will die eventually from causes not related to aging, such as predation, accidents, diseases, even if it could otherwise theoretically never die of old age. And so the genetic code of that species simply isn’t “built” to function very long past the average amount of time that the creature would normally live. This is also related to the span of the creature’s reproductive life.
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