Gerontology (social sciences and humanities)

Social gerontology

Social gerontology is a multi-disciplinary field of research and teaching that specializes in studying or working with older adults, and reaches across a variety of social sciences, applied social sciences, and humanities.

Social gerontologists may have degrees or training in social work, nursing, psychology, sociology, anthropology, demography, gerontology, economics, history or any of a number of other fields. Gerontologists are responsible for educating, researching, and advancing the broader causes of older people by giving informative presentations, publishing books and articles that pertain to the aging population, producing relevant films and television programs, and producing new graduates of these various disciplines in college and university settings.

Because issues of life span and life extension need numbers to quantify them, there is an overlap with demography. Those that study the demography of the human life span are different than those that study the social demographics of aging.

Life Expectancy

One of the major demographic fallacies that the recent study of human aging in gerontology has cleared up is the notion that life expectancy was dramatically shorter in the past than at present. While there is no doubt that there have been major increases in life expectancy over the past century, until quite recently these were due almost exclusively to decreases in infant mortality. The view that modern humans in general live dramatically longer than earlier humans is seemingly made more plausible by earlier, and even more dramatic, increases in life expectancy (and comparable increases in height) that have, in fact, occurred in the past several millenia. Thus, it is not at all unusual to encounter suggestions that overall human life expectancy at the dawn of the agricultural revolution 10,000 BC was 14 years old, and later, during the Roman Empire rose only to 21 years old. All of this is largely a statistical anomaly; demographers do not actually compute individual life expectancy, but rather the average life expectancy of populations, and therein lies a world of difference. In reality, the dramatic quantitative increases in average life expectancy between 1900 and 2000 have been largely due to dramatic decreases in infant and childhood mortality. It wasn't so much that people, on the whole were living dramatically longer, as it was that vastly more people were surviving the first years of life.

There is a vast difference between average life expectancy statistics and the human life span. The Old Testament speaks of people living "three score and ten" as the fullness of life, suggesting that even several thousand years ago, adults who survived childhood may have expected to lived seventy years. A human population that normally lived only 14 years would be seriously on the verge of extinction. There is no evidence to suggest rapid evolution upward in the age of puberty within the last few thousand years. Thus, since sizeble proportions of 14 year olds would not even have reached sexual maturity, and, even if sexually mature at 10, would not have lived long enough to successful raise their children. Although a life span of 21 years would be more plausible from a reproductive standpoint, documentary evidence from the Roman Empire also largely refutes this notion: "Pliny the Elder" did not die at the ripe old age of 22!

Note that some early pioneers, such as Michel-Eugene Chevreul, who himself lived to be 102 in the 1880s, believed that aging itself should be a science to be studied. The word gerontology itself was coined circa 1903.

In the 1950s to the 1970s, the field was mainly social and concerned with issues such as nursing homes and health care. However, research by Leonard Hayflick in the 1960s (showing that a cell line culture will only divide about 50 times) helped lead to a separate branch, biogerontology. It became apparent that simply 'treating' aging wasn't enough. Finding out about the aging process, and what could be done about it, became an issue.

The biogerontological field was also bolstered when research by Cynthia Kenyon and others demonstrated that life extension was possible in lower life forms such as fruit flies, worms, and yeast. So far, however, nothing more than incremental (marginal) increases in life span have been seen in any mammalian species.