This has so great effect that it's easy to observe even in a simple computer simulations. If you don't adapt and the environment is changing, then you go extinct.
Think about this sharks and how much their environment has changed since they were born. As a spices they will have a very hard time adapting to the changes we induce in the environment. While small animals that have lifespan in weeks, months or few years will be adapting a lot faster. E.g. in one generation of this shark a mouse will go trough up to 900 generations with up to 12 offspring in each generation.
This shark probably will go extinct and mice will thrive.
Interesting consequence of this effect is that our lifespan is most likely not dictated by any fundamental limitations of biological machinery to maintain us healthy indefinitely.
A lot more likely is that we are evolutionary designed to get old and die.
The longevity of the Greenland shark, humans and other long living animals, is in spite of evolutionary pressure to reproduce, raise the next generation and die.
N.B.: I'm a layman on this topic as well.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9316546/
Animals with slower heart rates tend to be longer lived. An interesting sidenote are bats, which have heart rates about the same as similarly sized small mammals like mice, but due to their nightly torpor state where their heart rate is significantly lowered, they tend to live 20-25 years opposed to the 3-4 mice usually live.
If I am regularly running, my resting heart rate at night drops into the upper 30s. During the day sitting down, 45-50.
If I haven't been running (for a week or longer) it picks back up in to the mid 40s at night, and around 60 for normal sitting.
My heart rate when sleeping is 65bpm, and I can't focus on anuthing if my heart rate is below 90bpm during the day.
Some of the most productive people I know eat nothing but donuts and coffee, and don't exercise at all. They're smart, driven, and highly successful.
Meanwhile, I know a lot of people who put exercise and food as a priority, and don't seem nearly as sharp or as successful. Maybe this all washes out, with age.
Point is - do whatever works for you. Don't let some blog, or some person on the internet, tell you how to perform optimally!
Don't ask me how I know :-)
https://www.labroots.com/trending/cell-and-molecular-biology...
A lot of animals just don't need to live longer than 1, 2, or 20 years to reproduce. There is no evolutionary pressure to do so. From our human perceptive life is valuable on its own merit, but nature doesn't see it that way. All it really cares about is replicating those precious DNA molecules, and different species have different strategies for that. For some species, it takes a long time to produce offspring. Whales, for example, live a long time as well. They're huge and it takes a long time for them to become fully grown, find mates, produce offspring, etc. There is a lot of evolutionary pressure to live long. Humans live comparatively long because it takes a long time for individuals to acquire the skills we use as a survival strategy.
Not too much is known about the lives of Greenland sharks, but there are probably some evolutionary pressures for them to live long lives.
Species need to live until reproduce, maybe several times, and see the next generation into being able to live on their own. That is about 35-50 for humans (granted the 15-20/generation - relatively prolonged maturation period given our size - is primarily because of the brain/skills development you mentioned). Additionally, because of the complexity of societal organization, skills and other knowledge, we've got boost from having the grand generation around to help and transfer knowledge and experience. That brought us to 60-70.
Wouldn't that be more an example of the Baader Meinhof effect?
there's a lot of these sorts of in-sphere jargon; you'll start picking them up if you peruse the more esoteric threads on tech news blog aggregator sites like this.
like, if one of the original repliers in a thread is "why is this on HN", there's an increased chance imho that you'll run into this sort of techno-cultural salon effect.
I was literally asking my Google Home last night what the longest living vertebrate was and it told me the Greenland shark.
Had a whole conversation about it over dinner, arguing about how accurate we think these age-establishing methods are.
Though the more interesting part of our conversation (I would say) was wondering how ages work out in practice. For example why do the vast majority of animals not live beyond 20 years, even when we try to keep them alive as long as possible (dogs)? If the environment was different would longevity be different for all species, e.g more oxygen in the atmosphere or a longer day-night cycle? Etc.