Loneliness is depend on, whom you call Lonely.Some people prefer live in solitude.Some have mission to fulfil for that they donot want to contact with other people.Good definition of loneliness is who have no motive in life spending life with boredom.He may suffer by heart attack or cancer. If such person may live with family or in friend circle he is till lonely.

Presumably natural selection would take care of this quite quickly.

Interesting article - it remains to be seen whether or not these results will be replicated. The two previous comments both miss the point - the definition of lonely is numeric, not psychological, from the perspective of the immune system. And a brief glance at the basic math of population genetics will indicate that natural selection cannot take care of this problem "quite quickly" in a global population of more than seven billion.

Interesting study. But jumps the gun in too many places. It seems to me what Dr. Cole purports to study is the correlation between gregariousness and viral and bacterial infections. Suddenly either the study itself or the reporter of the study takes the leap to a whlloy different subject: Mind and Body.

Doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Yes people in cities may be lonely but this is at the psychological not physiological level. For example, how many people do you encounter or see on a subway trip, or at the supermarket, the mall? One "lonely" person living in a large modern multicultural city is likely to encounter (bump into, rub up, buy off) far more people in a single month than any of not so ancient sociable, familial ancestors would have known in a lifetime.

Natural selection takes only one generation to remove loneliness: Lonely people do not reproduce. Dare I suggest that current proliferation of loneliness is an inherent population control mechanism of Homo Sapiens?

I looked up the original medical study. The conclusion in its rawest form is that the average 64 year old person who is not involved in some sort of structural social network (e.g. church, gym) is 50% more likely to be dead by the time s/he is 71. It does not adjust for obesity. So my meta-conclusion is that an obese 64 year old person who does not go to the gym is more likely to be dead by 71. That's it. It has nothing to do with loneliness.

When science proves what it was written before...its not good for men to be alone...(Genesis)

Perhaps there is a feedback loop: potential spouses and partners are more attracted to healthier individuals. This leaves this alone would produce a large correlation between loneliness and ill-health.

Completing the circle, gregarious people are under constant and greater social pressures to maintain various behavioral standards. We all occasionally do bizarre and unhealthy things when left alone (spend an entire day in bed; eat an entire packet of biscuits).

So, I remain very skeptical as to whether there is a deeper genetic explanation for our differing circumstances. Can anyone rigorously repeat these results?

The article states that, "over such a period, a gregarious person has a 50% better chance of surviving than a lonely one."

This cannot possibly be right. Suppose, for example, that a lonely person has a 90% chance of survival over some period. We would have to conclude that a gregarious person has a 135% chance of survival over the same period. That would appear to be 35% better than immortality.

On the other hand, if we postulate that gregarious people are not actually immortal we can conclude that a lonely person would have less than 2/3 chance of survival over any period of time, no matter how short. Thus every lonely person in the world would be dead in an instant.

I like how people without half a clue for the scientific method like to decide they're smarter than research teams and give counter explanations smugly off the cuff.

It's almost how people act about economics topics around here...

Lonely people almost certainly have underlying illnesses or genetic defects that other humans can sense or sniff-out at a subconscious level. They are not "lonely", they are simply "ill".