Demographers often refer to the hazard function as the “age specific mortality rate,” or...

Demographers often refer to the hazard function as the “age specific mortality rate,” or death rate. Until recently, most researchers in the field of gerontology thought that a death rate increasing with age was a universal fact in the biological world. There has been heavy debate over whether there is a genetically programmed upper limit to lifespan. Using a facility in which sterilized medflies are bred to be released to fight medfly infestations in California, James Carey and coworkers (Carey et al. 1992) bred more than a million medflies and recorded their pattern of mortality. The data file medflies, contains the number of medflies alive from an initial population of 1,203,646 as a function of age in days. Using these data, estimate and plot the age specific mortality rate. Does it increase with age?