PhilGoetz comments on Living Forever is Hard, or, The Gompertz Curve - Less Wrong
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The literature I've seen - notably Finch, Senescence and the Genome - plot the Gompertz curve as a pure exponential that falls off at the end. It gives a really nice fit to the exponential almost up to the end. Then - sorry, this is the opposite of what is claimed in the post - it falls off! That is, if you live to be about 100, the chance of your dying stops increasing exponentially.
(As George Burns said, "The secret to living forever is to live to be 100. Very few people die after the age of 100.")
This suggests (doesn't prove, just suggests) that our mortality rate is adaptive. The Gompertz curve falls off at the high end because it doesn't get enough data points to evolve a proper fit there.
Well the wikipedia article on the topic suggests that the probability of dying also includes an age-independent component, i.e., lightning strikes, which tends to small for humans in developed countries.
A more conventional explanation:
Or... it really is just data collection problems. Via FightAging, "Mortality measurement at advanced ages: A study of the Social Security Administration Death Master File" (emphasis added):
No, since late life mortality deceleration and mortality plateaus are observed in numerous organisms - including Drosophila melanogaster - e.g. see the details in Why organisms show late-life mortality plateaus: a null model for comparing patterns of mortality.
It's the humans that matter for us...
For you maybe. Those interested in biological senescence need a general theory that accounts for late life mortality deceleration. Attributing it to "data collection problems" fails to capture the phenomenon.