Credit: lardbucket.org

How long will I live? It’s more than just an existential question – think how useful the knowledge would be: we could decide whether to save, stick or blow our savings in one mad rampage. It’s only once we go into noticeable decline that can doctors help with predictions of how long we have left, and even then it’s a notoriously inexact science as they try to apply population data to an individual case.

So what do we actually know about longevity? Who will live and who will die at a given age? Is it all in the genes or do the life choices we make trump any genetic advantage? And how do we make sense of a new study that confirms that bright people live longer and that the difference in intelligence is genetic and not related to upbringing?

“We’ve known for at least 10 years that brighter people live longer,” says the study’s co-author Dr Rosalind Arden, research associate at LSE. “The current commonsense view is that […]