Why Do Islands Induce Dwarfism?

See also Foster's Rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule

I believe the N vs S Korea example supports this theory as well.

From my observation, I notice that a lot of younger generation Chinese adults are likely to be taller than their older fellow country people as well. I have many Chinese coworkers and even the female coworkers are at least 5 feet 5 inches or taller (for young male coworkers, they are usually at least 5 feet 8-10 inches). Nutrition certainly plays a big role in determining one's height.

Actually, Foster's rule indicates that predation being the main threat leads to smaller animals, while the restriction of resources being the main threat leads to larger animals.

> The same reason why the average man was 5 inches shorter in 1750 than he is today.

This is more likely dietary changes than resource restriction—we may not have had industrial farming, but the average person wasn't starving either. But you need access to plentiful, high levels of protein to maximize your height advantage.

Probably the same reason storms on Jupiter are larger than storms on earth.

You can't be bigger than your container.

Yes, but they've been living there for only a few hundred years, or a couple thousand at most. The article was referring to populations living in island environments for much longer durations.

Polynesians and Samoans traveled between islands, often by rowing.

Doesn't low (or lack of) gravity decompress the spine or something, inducing a very slight increase in the height of current astronauts?

Many suspect spacefaring will require us to become quite small indeed. It will become ridiculously uncompetitive to drag around a meat body and pressurized environment.

Think of something like The Field Circus from Charles Stross's "Accelerando".

Just finished binge watching The Expanse. There, the first generations of offworlders grow very tall, thin and weak. Clearly, there is a strong evolutionary pressure on them to grow much smaller, and fix their spongy bones. Imagine the difference between a small child and a 7 foot tall weakling with osteoporosis, accelerating at 12 Gs in an emergency situation.

Btw, the show was fairly good, imo. Deep, and nearly hard SF.

I imagine the lack of gravity will probably be a bigger deal than the "island effect" of having an isolated population.

Just finished this novel. Great hard sci-fi space opera.

Well height variation still occasionally occurs within all populaces everywhere. "Giants" and "dwarves" as a distinct race was probably a drunken glimpse of different looking people from other villages, in a dark wood or the like.

A related thought is that if there ever was any other intelligent species on Earth, noticeably different than humans, we wiped them out long ago.

Biblical giants? They were half fallen angel, half human. Not many Christians (and maybe even Jews) believe this, but if you study the context of Genesis 6 and the rest of the Bible anytime it speaks of Noah's flood and judging of angels, they coincide (especially in the New Testament in the book of Jude) then there's the Book of Enoch, which isn't in protestant or Catholic Bibles, but the Ethiopians have it in theirs, and it speaks about how the angels took human wives to themselves. The Liger hybrid species explains scientifically the nephelim (or Giants) hybrid species to some degree, how it can be so massive is explained by the DNA. These are the views of some Christians, but again, assuming Biblical giants, there's a lot of different factors into play.