In 1997, a French woman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122. She was the world’s oldest verified person, according to the Gerontology Research Group. Her daily habits included drinking a glass of port wine and smoking a cigarette after meals (she also ate 2.5 pounds of chocolate every week). “Nobody else has lived past 120 since she died,” says Venki Ramakrishnan, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist and author of Why We Die. Indeed, while the number of centenarians is increasing every year, the number of people living past 110 is not. “This suggests that maybe there’s a natural limit to human lifespan.”
If such a limit exists, it’s one imposed by biological evolution. “Evolution wants to make sure that your genes have the maximum likelihood of being passed on,” Ramakrishnan says. “It doesn’t care about how long you live.” This explains, for instance, why…
