The Gompertz mortality law

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Benjamin Gompertz's 1825 observation that, after early adulthood, the human age-specific death rate rises approximately exponentially with age — in modern populations doubling roughly every eight years. It is the closest thing demography has to a law of ageing, and it makes the central question of this Journey testable. Public health interventions have overwhelmingly reduced the constant term, the background hazard that is not age-related: they shift the whole curve down without changing its slope. An intervention that genuinely slowed ageing would reduce the slope — the mortality-rate doubling time would lengthen — and no human intervention has ever been shown to do that. The law is descriptive rather than mechanistic, it fits badly below about age thirty, and it appears to break down at extreme ages, where mortality flattens instead of continuing to double.

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