The Lifetime of Mammals
MAN can live to be about seventy or eighty years, but few other mammals can live as long as that. If we base the lifetime of a mammal, not on the years of existence, but on the number of heartbeats, it is easy to calculate whether man truly lives longer than some of his mammalian cohabitants of the earth. The average mouse lives about 3.3 years, but its heartbeat rate is about 550 beats per minute. In one year there are approximately 526,000 minutes, so if we multiply the number of minutes per year by the number of heartbeats per minute and then multiply that by the life expectancy of the mouse, we have some 950,000,000 heartbeats for the average mouse.
The same type of calculation can be done for other mammals such as the dog, horse, cow, and elephant. For example, the elephant with a heartbeat of 20 per minute, over a 70-year life-span, has a total of about 736,300,000 heartbeats, much less than the mouse. It seems that mammals, in general, are allotted about 1,000,000,000 or less heartbeats in a lifetime. However, if the same calculation is done for man, assuming 72 heartbeats per minute and a life expectancy of 70 years, the number of heartbeats given to man is some 2,600,000,000—more than twice that of other mammals.
Concludes Isaac Asimov in his book The Human Body: “Considering that trees have no hearts and that tortoises (and cold-blooded creatures generally) have only very slowly beating ones, it is safe to say that the human heart outperforms all others. Certainly it outperforms other mammalian hearts by a ratio of 2 1⁄2 or even 3 1⁄2 to 1. . . . The human body, therefore, in all modesty, and from a completely objective viewpoint, is the most marvelous structure we know of.” This is because the human body was designed by its Creator to live forever.