How Men Age: What Evolution Reveals about Male Health and Mortality by Richard G Bribiescas - review

Why old men are the best thing for women. By David Sexton

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ES Lifestyle

Does anybody want to know any more about men, especially old men? After Donald Trump’s little turn, perhaps not.  Away with them!

But obligingly they’re on the way out anyway. There is this awkward fact: men die younger. Universally. More males than females die even as infants. By the time we’ve reached the ages of 15 to 24 the male death rate is nearly three times higher (the greatest causes being accidents, killings, suicides — risky behaviours, in other words). But mortal disparity continues much later in life too. A third more men die aged 65-74 than do women. In US figures from 2005, some 37.7 per cent of women died aged 85 or over, whereas only 20 per cent of men made it to that age. 

In his previous book, Men: Evolutionary and Life History from 2006, Richard Bribiescas, a professor of anthropology and evolutionary biology at Yale, tackled these facts, this apparent male dysfunctionality.

The basic evolutionary precept  behind the phenomenon, that natural selection favours the development of bodies, brains and behaviours that maximise lifetime reproductive success, rather than  longevity or prolonged health, is familiar enough. But he refined this approach by also using “life history theory”, examining changes over a lifetime as well as within a broad evolutionary framework, to show how, for example, testosterone brings advantages at certain stages of life (muscularity, aggression, enhanced metabolic rates, libido) at a later cost (obesity, baldness, prostate hyperplasia, cancer).

Now, in a slim volume, Bribiescas develops the theme, partly motivated by going grey himself, he freely admits. Like other anthropologists he does that peculiar thing of universalising his observations and deductions by verifying  them through  comparisons with the one specific group of people he has studied in the field, in this case the hunter-gatherer Aché of Eastern Paraguay, who number fewer than 2,000. So this is an unusual form of writing, much footnoted and couched as scientific and academic but actually argumentative, speculative, even personal. 

Once more, he observes: “As a population ages, men become scarce. A visit to virtually any retirement facility will reveal that there are many more women than men, and the mortality disparity between the sexes becomes even more apparent with time.” He laments, with perhaps a little personal inflection, that even if a man has survived his unruly teens, “visits his physician regularly, does not smoke, refrains from drinking alcohol, and lives a relatively healthy life, he will still pay more for health insurance compared to women since he is more likely to become ill and die before women born at the same time”.

However, he also notes that the human lifespan is altogether much longer than evolutionary factors would predict: “Lifespan is usually correlated with female reproductive lifespan; that is, when females cease reproducing it is usually a signpost that mortality is imminent.” Yet, uniquely, “in humans about a third of female life is post-reproductive”. How did this ever happen? 

The most commonly cited evolutionary explanation, eagerly adopted by feminism, is the “Grandmother Hypothesis”, originally proposed by Kristen Hawkes and also developed in the field, among the Hadza foragers of Tanzania. “Early in our evolution, prior to the emergence of extended lifespan, grandmothers who invested in the care and provisioning of their grandchildren enabled their daughters to have more children.”

But Bribiescas suggests that men may be as much — or more? — responsible for our extended human lifespan than women. There is the revolting fact that men can remain fertile past 50, and they may actually be better providers when older, even though less physically capable. (Among the Aché hunter-gatherers men’s hunting returns are highest, due to skill and experience, long after their physical strength and fitness peak, says Bribiescas, complete with a chart of “kilograms of meat acquired per unit of time” — Donald Trump  would be so cheered). 

Then again, men’s declining testosterone may actually have benefits for their offspring, if costs for themselves. Bribiescas suggests a new concept which he bravely calls “the Pudgy Dad Hypothesis: increased adiposity, including fat deposition that is facilitated by age, was leveraged during human evolution to increase parental survivorship, mitigate mate-seeking behaviours and promote a hormonal milieu that supported parental care”.

He even suggests that female longevity may be primarily a fortunate by-product of these useful extended male lifespans. Men struggle on with reproduction well past their apparent sell-by date and, thanks merely to belonging to the same species, women have accidentally copped a free ride into old age as a result. 

Could it be true? It hardly matters. This is better than science-fiction!

Bribiescas, grizzled and speccy himself, ends the book with some genial Final Thoughts. “With regard to ageing, all men face the prospect of having to adjust to the biophysics of physical deterioration… Prostates swell, muscles diminish, younger men challenge you and naps become ever more attractive. Evolutionary biology can inform us about the origin of age-associated heath issues in men… Yet despite these challenges, the humanity in older men provided other evolutionary alternatives that made the human condition a bit more tolerable and maybe even improved it, such as the emergence of fathers caring for children, pudgy bellies for cats and grandchildren to snooze on and perhaps a few more years for everyone to enjoy the wonderful absurdity of life.”

Cats! Final Dreams, perhaps. Or a novel, almost. A memoir, most certainly.

£13.67, Amazon, Buy it now