It is linked to racial prejudice and discriminatory behaviors, which can be an expression of implicit and explicit bias. Institutionalized racism is a system of assigning value and allocating opportunity based on skin color. It unfairly privileges some individuals and groups over others and influences social institutions in our legal, educational, and governmental systems.
It is reflected in disparities in, but not limited to, wealth, income, justice, employment, housing, medicine, education, and voting. It can be expressed implicitly or explicitly and occurs when a certain group is targeted and discriminated against based on race. I do not believe in the superiority of my race over another. Like Kirk and the Enterprise crew in The Undiscovered Country , however, I have had to face uncomfortable truths about my privilege and ignorance.
I believed that idea well into adulthood. I now disagree. I was born into a systemically racist society. I grew up in a world of privilege.
I got immediate access to cancer treatments when I needed them. Finding housing and employment has never been difficult. In the latter half of , my response to these questions and my perspective has evolved. Like millions of others, I posted a black image on Instagram. But such performative allyship is pointless if it stops there, which, for me, for a time, it did. By nature, I am not one to take to the streets in protest. My conversations around race with my children have grown in frequency and shifted to teaching them about their privilege and finding ways to use it for the benefit of others.
Together, we are learning to recognize and root out racism in the small ways we can. We still live in a systemically racist society. My growth in this process is a continuing mission. We can even learn some lessons from space. Feldman specializes in satellite technologies that record the color of the ocean as a means of measuring the distribution and abundance of phytoplankton, which can change rapidly and even double in a day. With that said, some things are better measured in the water — however difficult it may be to get there.
Ocean exploration technologies have come a long way. Floats and drifters, devices that rely on ocean currents to carry them while they collect data, have been complemented in recent years by an ever-sophisticated fleet of underwater vehicles.
Plus, you can come back and tell the story, and that engages an audience. The most important aspect of exploration, in my mind, is coming back and telling the tale. Oceana uses a combination of technologies on its expeditions, which have charted previously unexplored waters, including areas off of Southern California , several seamounts in the Canary Islands , and a deep trench south of Malta.
Another seamount near Morocco , which was also previously unexplored, led to the discovery of a deep-sea coral reef — the only one of its kind that is still growing in the Mediterranean Sea. Mortality shown on a logarithmic scale during the first two years of life is high but declines through childhood.
The curve begins its inexorable rise in the early teen years but remains relatively low until age 50, when mortality rates exceed those of early infancy. Note that women experience lower mortality throughout the human lifespan, particularly from the teen years onward. Much of our understanding of the force of mortality is rooted in the work of a brilliant 19th-century English mathematician, Benjamin Gompertz.
Unable to enter the English university system because he was Jewish, Gompertz taught himself mathematics and was eventually elected into the Royal Society in In preparing the paper, Gompertz had examined death records from several English towns and noticed a clear pattern for age-specific death rates.
This pattern, now known as the Gompertz curve, shows a well-behaved, exponential increase in the force of mortality with age. He argued that death, seemingly shaped by so many chance events, nonetheless follows a simple and predictable path. And so simple a path could only arise from an equally simple, age-dependent, underlying force that operates throughout our lifetimes. It took almost years for Gompertz's curve to be seriously questioned.
In part because of increased life expectancy in certain parts of the world, more individuals were living longer, providing sufficient data to examine the force of mortality in later years—data that Gompertz didn't have. The result of adding the long-lived to the analysis was startling: The force of mortality, which grows exponentially throughout most of one's lifetime, actually moderates after age Equally unexpected was the discovery that the dramatic differences in age-specific mortality around the world virtually disappear after age In effect, if you are born in Bolivia, your chance of seeing 75 is significantly lower than if you had been born in Canada.
But if you make it to 75 in either place, your chance of seeing 90 is virtually the same. Past a certain age, the imprints of birth and circumstance seem to give way to universal forces and constraints. Keep in mind that we have been speaking of age-specific rates of death, and not the cumulative probability of death, which, like it or not, always sums to percent. In the end, we all die. But in the meantime, we seem to be succeeding in delaying the inevitable. For optimists and narcissists, the trend of increasing lifespan extends over the horizon.
Conversely, demographers, biologists and politicians have asserted over the past century that human beings cannot possibly live beyond 70, or 80, or 85, or the nice round number of Yet as they speak, the maximum age at death continues to climb in many parts of the world. For what it's worth, Jeanne Calment lived to be years old, died in , and remembered meeting the abrasive and ill-smelling Vincent Van Gogh when he came to live in her hometown of Arles, France.
Although this trend of ever-lengthening lifespans cannot continue indefinitely even for optimists and narcissists , the actual limit—and even the demonstrable existence of a limit—is a subject of continuing controversy among demographers and gerontologists. This controversy arises in part because convincing statistics about centenarians remain hard to come by, increasing the temptation to extrapolate from isolated cases.
Until recently, the number of people aged was so small that reliable age-specific mortality rates for that age bracket were hard to estimate. People living past , moreover, might represent a small, but unique, subsample of the human population. Their age-specific mortality rates, buried for the first 80 or so years in the mass of data from the shorter-lived, may well have been different throughout their entire lives, only coming to dominate the statistics as the rest of the population drops off.
But for now let's leave aside the question of how long humans can live and concentrate instead on why most of us will not live to see the century mark. In , the illustrious Russian biologist Zhores Medvedev sought to classify the more than theories that had been put forth to account for this ineluctable reality.
Many of these theories, compelling in their own right, likely capture some of the underpinnings of our mortality. Their sheer number, however, suggests as much about the complexity of the question as it does about the difficulty of thinking dispassionately about death. Scientists, after all, are people who are going to die too. Graphing the probability of death on an linear scale as a function of age in the developed world a reveals that the force of mortality is relatively small for the first five decades but increases rapidly thereafter.
Without data for ages 90 and above, Benjamin Gompertz argued that the force of mortality increases exponentially as we age. The growing gap between the lines reflects a slowing down of the force of mortality in later years. Plotted this way, the mortality curve for human beings is similar to those of automobiles c. Newer cars have lower rates of failure than do older ones, and different brands have different rates in the early years.
But like the death rates of humans from different populations, the failure rates of cars from different manufacturers become less distinct with age.
Figures adapted by Stephanie Freese from T. Theories of death are also deeply embedded in their culture of origin. Let's consider, for instance, the class of mechanical explanations of death.
These hypotheses invite us to accept the metaphor of the human body as a machine with many parts that must work in concert. In this metaphor, we die either because a key component gives way the catastrophic failure model or because several interacting parts begin to wear out and no longer work properly the systems failure model. These metaphors of failing machinery compel, but data supporting them are harder to obtain.
Catastrophic failures, like heart attack and stroke, are major killers in the developed world, particularly in the United States. Many of these deaths, however, are preventable and linked to a sedentary lifestyle, and not to an inherent age-dependent failure of a particular organ system. The systems-based explanation argues that complex machinery fails because many things go wrong. According to this model, as with your Toyota, so too with your body: The force-of-mortality curves for automobiles called failure-rate curves complied by demographers James W.
Vaupel and Cynthia R. Owens at Duke University bear an uncanny resemblance to their human counterparts. Both human and automobile curves show an exponential increase in the force of mortality that tapers off in later years—the same violation of the Gompertz Law we spoke of earlier. Surprisingly, mortality in the early years is eerily similar in people and automobiles: Defects in manufacture machines or development organisms reveal themselves early on. But if you or your car make it past the first year, you're likely to motor along for a good period thereafter.
The patterns are tantalizing in their similarity and may reveal some fundamental features of failure in complex systems. Such systems, whether we speak of Toyotas or biologists, are characterized by redundancy brought about by engineering in the first case or evolution in the second. But, as University of Chicago gerontologists Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova have argued in their influential book The Biology of Life Span: A Quantitative Approach , the very redundancy that permits complex systems to endure a constant rain of light damage also allows such damage to accumulate, resulting in aging and eventual failure.
Surprisingly, the higher the level of redundancy, the faster the force of mortality accelerates with age. The irony is that the redundant mechanisms that ensure survival during our early years are the same ones that speed our twilight exit. For two centuries, biology has profited from Rene Descartes's conception of the human body as a machine, subject to, and more importantly, explainable by, material laws. Compelling as the Cartesian metaphor of the body-as-machine might be, it may, however, conceal some important differences between my automobile and me.
Repair, for instance, is a process central to survival. I depend on my excellent mechanic, an agent external to my automobile, to keep my car on the road. In contrast, bodies, for the most part, repair themselves: More than genes in our genome are devoted to detecting and repairing DNA damage.
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