How We Get Tall
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
"That’s probably not the full story—immigration and fertility changes play a role too, after all."
Doors tell their own story, big cities have been redeveloped (and bombed) whereas rural areas or places that have not got much of a look in since the early days of the industrial revolution have not.
Given that there is no theory that fully holds water on why we grow tall (I personally blame the Green Revolution), you could probably blur correlation/causation in a 'door and mattress size' study to conclude that 'if we make the doors bigger then people grow to fill them'.
Am I missing something or is that a really bizarre statement?
It's saying it took until the 1930+s for European men to reach levels of height we'd consider normal for teenaged girls today.
By way of introducing the concept, I asked "if someone is very tall, are their parents probably taller or shorter than they are?" "Shorter". So far so good.
"If someone is very short, are their parents taller or shorter?" "Shorter".
Apparently, to the current generation, no matter how short you are, your parents are shorter. Long live the CCP :/
Also, shrinking isn't a linear process. You spend most of your life only shrinking a small amount; most of it happens toward the very end:
> For both sexes, height loss began at about age 30 years and accelerated with increasing age. Cumulative height loss from age 30 to 70 years averaged about 3 cm for men and 5 cm for women; by age 80 years, it increased to 5 cm for men and 8 cm for women.
First of all, and I encourage readers to follow the links for more details, today we have longer life expectancies at birth, at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages than ever before.[1] Whatever it is that we are eating these days, so far our diets aren't undermining the steady long-term trend of increasing life expectancy at ALL ages all over the developed world. An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] tells the story of the steady improvements in prevention and treatment that have reduced all-cause mortality and morbidity for Americans and for most people in the developed countries. I have been stunned to realize I now have several aunts and uncles who are past the age of 90 and still living independently and in reasonably good health. A couple years ago I was shopping for a birthday present for my own mother, now more than 80 years old, and I found multiple birthday cards for 80th and 90th birthday cards for sale at the bookstore where I was shopping. Lots of people are living a long time now.
But don't just take my anecdotes as evidence. Check what professional demographers write about the issue in peer-reviewed journal articles and say about the issue in press interviews. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[4]
There are also comments here about human brain size and human cognitive ability. First of all, it is entirely clear that human cognitive ability as gauged by "g-loaded" IQ tests has been rising for the last century.[5] That's over a time span that doesn't include any noteworthy increase in brain size and is surely a result of environmental factors. The general trend of hominin evolution over millions of years is a general increase in brain size and a general rise in signs of intelligent behavior like skillfully made tools and visual art, but there is not a completely linear relationship between brain size found in fossils (which are a very limited sample of early hominin specimens) and signs of cultural advancement.[6] Cultural innovation can now be transmitted culturally all over the world, so that a small number of innovators can change the material resources and improve the lifestyles of most of humankind. You may not need to be smart enough to invent anything, because you are already smart enough to use most new inventions, wherever they come from.
[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...
[3] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
[4] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
[5] http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond...
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_h...
[6] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-nean...
"lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".
(I.e. a lack of fiber, vitamins or something?)
Not everything that makes you taller is healthy. Eating a lot of poultry that had been stuffed in growth hormones has been proven to increase growth. We can theoretically push growth at all means, doing things that we know are unhealthy. There's no proof that a diet that will make you the tallest will necessarily be the healthiest for you.
Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that the more height you manage to get, the better. There's absolutely no scientific evidence to this. It's true that malnourishment will impede your growth, but that's just an extreme case.
Seems like current Japan - for instance - is very healthy, has the longest life expectancy, but they are on the short side compared to Europe or North America.
I'm much taller than average and I'm quite sure that this isn't an advantage at all, except for specific tasks or sports. A lot more often it's a problem and I don't feel one bit superior to shorter people. There's a lot of bias towards "taller is better" regardless of any other consideration. It stops just short of eugenics to achieve taller people.
You're right. I didn't intend to imply that. Just because someone has achieved their "potential", ie. have grown as tall as one might expect them to based on their genes, does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so. Maybe they would have been better off health-wise if they grew shorter than that; what height would be optimal (or: what percentage of their """""height potential""""") would be hard to guess, I reckon.
This just seems to be a very inaccurate model.
All accounts point to the fact that there is a whole range of heights that you can achieve while living a perfectly healthy lifestyle and nutrition, and that you can fail to reach this range, or exceed it, by excess or defect of some elements in your lifestyle and nutrition. You can even stay within this range while being unhealthy because height is by no means a perfect or even a good measure of health. It's a very loose measure only in rather extreme situations, and a decent measure for whole populations under some circumstances. It is a proven fact that you can unhealthily push someone's growth during childhood.
Completeness of nutrition is mostly a non-factor across the Western World when it comes to height. Exercise is a bigger factor as many kids slow down their metabolism by lack of exercise. Migration of Mexicans and Asians into the US is a bigger factor too. These people are healthy, they are just typically shorter. There is no problem at all with that in itself.
Albert Einstein was average Ashkenazi jewish at 5 ft 8~9. Nikola Tesla was your typical tall Balkan man (some accounts measured him at up to 6 ft 6). Does it matter? Should we be trying to push up the height of the jewish by eugenics? The whole "worry" is silly.
Malnourishment also leads to lower weight. Do we try to maximise weight? no, right? because we realise it's stupid and it's quite evident that excess of weight is not good, and it doesn't even look good in most cultures currently. In fact there's a cultural trend about being unnaturally "lean". People need to immediately stop mixing up their personal aesthetic preferences, however common, with real issues like science and health.
Oh please. I spent that entire post explaining that that is not my intention. The problem is probably my use of the word "potential", which has positive connotations, generally. I intend it to mean just possibility. Clearly, there are a lot of cases where this potential can manifest themselves as opposite extremes, and where there is no clear objective goodness of falling on either end of the extremes. In other cases, it may be totally subjective. In other cases, yet, it may not matter. I think, given extreme circumstances, people in general have the potential in them for great evil. But clearly, that is not good or desirable. I should have clarified from the beginning my use of the word desirable. But it is you who chose to cling to it (if I'm right in that being the problematic word).
Stop projecting the issues# you have with the tallness-worship of our/some cultures onto me!
#by which I mean protests, intellectual arguments against the practice, etc. I don't mean to imply that you have some emotional issue with this kind of thing. See? I ran out of accurate words so I had to resort to a word with too much semantic baggage.
You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be taller as the direct result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.
Maybe by making this post shorter you won't miss that particular point.
I meant my use of that word. I edited my post to make that clear. Or maybe you mean that you mentioning the my use of the word "potential" had no such interpretation (positive) of the "potential", in which case... my head hurts now.
> You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be taller as the direct result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.
By what criteria have I missed this fact? By not mentioning it, or by trying to contradict it? I said, and I quote myself since you don't seem to trust me: "Just because someone has achieved their "potential" [...], does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so.". In that context, "bad" meant that the tallness was due to some unhealthy habits, since we were on the topic of nutrition and health and so on. Or that them being that tall was not good for them in their adult life, or both.
I am used to people assuming dishonesty in online debates. But not when I agree with them to begin with. If what you intend to do is to find some wording that betrays a (subconscious) bias towards tall people, please give it a rest and find someone else to take it out on.
And the fact that the article says we are taller now than we have ever been in history, which is patently not true, casts a serious level of doubt on the article.
1. http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-our...
Could you elaborate please.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Another very interesting fact - brain gets smaller in volume and unlike height, this trend is still not reversed (not sure about weight, though).
Yes we do, there are a number of countries where the average height is close to 183 cm (average in your article, though there are no citations given for that fact): The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, ... In the Dinaric Alps, it even reach 186 cm, so in fact we ARE taller today[1].
But another article[2] with actual sources point to an 176.2 cm average, much smaller than today.
> but it came at a terrible price on human health
[Citation needed]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_ar...
[2] http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.h...
Here's a longer discussions (cited by 178):
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...
They where discovered in Europe, but the current theory is they did not originate in Europe note the direct link from that Wikipedia page: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Cro-Magno...
"The term "Cro-Magnon" soon came to be used in a general sense to describe the oldest modern people in Europe. ... However, analyses based on more current data[8] concerning the migrations of early humans have contributed to a refined definition of this expression. Current scientific literature prefers the term "European Early Modern Humans" (or EEMH), instead of "Cro-Magnon". The oldest definitely dated EEMH specimen is the Grotta del Cavallo tooth dated in 2011 to at least 43,000 years old."
Note: "the term 'Cro-Magnon,' which has no formal taxonomic status" current evidence suggests they where effectively genetically identical to modern humans. Their diet was simply better leading to larger growth vs any significant DNA differences.
http://www.thelazycaveman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cav...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...
Early 20th century was also 30 years. Ancient Rome was 20-30.
These expectancies were low chiefly because of high infant mortality. A life expectancy of "two days" really drags down your average.
Average life expectancy is not a good measure for everyday arguments. Paleolithic average life expectancy was actually quite high relative to the historical periods that followed.
That statement doesn't make sense.
It was because agriculture contributed so mightily to human health and well-being that we survived and flourished to cover the surface of the earth and travel into space.
Even if some of our ancestors were bigger, it doesn't mean that they were "more healthy".
The decline in human health post-agriculture is pretty well accepted within anthropology. Jared Diamond's discussion has been widely cited:
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...
Cultures didn't flourish because they were in good health. They likely flourished because agriculture supported a lot of people within that culture, which let them dominate other cultures.
I have a great deal of knowledge in the domain of the English language. "Health" can mean a lot of different things. Support of the survival and dominance of a species is a great indicator that the diet is "healthy".
flourished because agriculture supported a lot of people
All you have to do is to refer to modern organizations like the WHO to know that supporting life for a lot of people is a great deal of the meaning of "health".
[edit: clarity]
In my mind, existing is healthy than not existing.
For example, height decreased post agriculture. Did that mean that agriculture didn't allow people to grow as tall, or did agriculture decrease selective pressure on being big?
Anthropology is not as rigorous as math, physics, chemistry, or even economics. Anyone talking condescendingly about things that are "well accepted within anthropology" from 10k or 100k years ago are way overselling the discipline.