Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Today
Speaker 1: we're talking about human height. We're talking about the limits
Speaker 1: of human height. We're talking about the giant humans start humans.
Speaker 1: So it seemed like the most natural place to begin
Speaker 1: this discussion is, of course, with nineteen fifty seven's classic film.
Speaker 1: Some of you may remember it from Mystery Science Theater
Speaker 1: three thousands, some of you may have just experienced it
Speaker 1: straight up, The Amazing Colossal Man. Now, Robert, I am
Speaker 1: sitting here looking at this looping gift that you put
Speaker 1: in our outline of a gigantic dude who seems to
Speaker 1: be filmed with like rear projection to make him look
Speaker 1: bigger than he is, throwing some sort of instrument that
Speaker 1: seems hand sized for him, but he's impaling a tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny person with it. Oh yeah, this is a great
Speaker 1: scene because he's the character is is Glenn Manning, Lieutendant
Speaker 1: Colonel Glenn Manning. There's an atomic blast, he ends up
Speaker 1: growing uncontrollably. He loses all his hair and his clothes
Speaker 1: except for you know, alloying the loth that I assume
Speaker 1: is made out of sale made out of sale cloth
Speaker 1: or something. And there's a scene where they they're trying
Speaker 1: to arrest his growth by jabbing him with this giant
Speaker 1: hypodermic needle. Of course looks like a giant hypodermic needle. Um.
Speaker 1: So they come in, they jab him, and then he
Speaker 1: picks the thing up, looks at it with anger, and
Speaker 1: then just throws it down like a javelin and impales it. Dude.
Speaker 1: It's a classic scene. So this was nine seven, and
Speaker 1: this was this was part of the era of filmmaking
Speaker 1: in America where it was just giant everything all the time.
Speaker 1: Giant bugs, giant you know, leeches, giant rats, giant what else,
Speaker 1: giant giant spiders of course, any of those grasshoppers praying Mann.
Speaker 1: This is I mean, yeah, you name it. If it
Speaker 1: looked good or if it just looked passable and giant form,
Speaker 1: somebody was blowing that thing up. I think they'd figured
Speaker 1: out how to do rear projection technology that looked okay
Speaker 1: in film, uh, and so that they were like, oh god,
Speaker 1: we can make anything look you know, hugely out of proportion.
Speaker 1: Let's just exploit this to the max for fifteen years
Speaker 1: and then throw it up on a drive in the
Speaker 1: kids will come and see it. Yeah, And of course
Speaker 1: the plot was always atomic radiation, right as it was
Speaker 1: in this case. So in The Amazing Colossal Man, the
Speaker 1: guy you said he gets uh irradiated by nuclear blast.
Speaker 1: I think he actually he's like he's they're observing the
Speaker 1: blast from the safety of a trench, but he gets
Speaker 1: up out of the trench to rescue somebody or something
Speaker 1: that it's just you know, it's an heroic act. But bam,
Speaker 1: he gets blasted and it's a great scene of just
Speaker 1: standing there at the with the radiation washing over him
Speaker 1: and yeah, and he's reborn as this colossal being uh
Speaker 1: and it begins messing with his mind too. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's sort of similar to Beast of Yucca Flats. Same
Speaker 1: thing happens to Tour Johnson, and that he gets hit
Speaker 1: with an atomic blast and instead of vapor I sing
Speaker 1: him burning him up. It just kind of makes him
Speaker 1: look crazy, makes him look a little bit bigger, and
Speaker 1: he has some oat meal on his face. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: then but the thing is, I mean, I don't want
Speaker 1: to undersell Tour as an actor, but Glenn Langan, who
Speaker 1: plays Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Manning in the in the film
Speaker 1: here like he brings. He brings a certain amount of
Speaker 1: at times hammy but still legitimate humanity to this character
Speaker 1: where you end up feeling for him like he's meeting
Speaker 1: his his wife. Uh you know, he's he still has
Speaker 1: his humanity about him. He's even as the condition begins
Speaker 1: to go through his head. So you think this is
Speaker 1: actually a pretty good B movie, right, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: going into it knowing what to expect out of a
Speaker 1: B movie. I think this is a great movement B movie.
Speaker 1: I think this is just a fabulous example of a
Speaker 1: particularly of a bomb B movies directed by Oh yes,
Speaker 1: the great Burt Eye Gordon bert I Gordon. So he's
Speaker 1: actually still alive and yeah, I was looking him up
Speaker 1: and yeah he was born in two. He's still kicking
Speaker 1: at ninety two as of this recording, and IMDb claims
Speaker 1: that he directed a film in Okay. So Burt Iye Gordon.
Speaker 1: You you might have noticed his initials are b I
Speaker 1: G This Uh this. He didn't, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: he didn't change his name to be like this. It's
Speaker 1: just a happy coincidence that Bert Eye Gordon was known
Speaker 1: as Mr Big, Mr b I g because he loved
Speaker 1: to make movies about things that grow bigger than they
Speaker 1: usually can. Uh. So. Other movies of Burt Eye Gordon's
Speaker 1: include War of the Colossal Beast that's the follow up,
Speaker 1: and then there's The Spider or Earth Versus the Spider,
Speaker 1: that has a larger than normal spider and it's not
Speaker 1: just like a suitcase size spider, it's like a giant spider. Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, you gotta go go big with your giant spider.
Speaker 1: Like she lops size pretty much. And then there is
Speaker 1: Village of the Giants. There's King Dinosaur, which has a
Speaker 1: fun Mystery Science Theater episode in which astronauts travel to
Speaker 1: a planet full of giant reptiles and then they sort
Speaker 1: of flirt and romance each other. And then there's a
Speaker 1: lizard that is supposed to be a t rex I think,
Speaker 1: and then the astronauts nuke the planet to wipe out
Speaker 1: indigenous life and make it safe for human colonization. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then of course there's also the Beginning of the End,
Speaker 1: another Mystery Science Theater episode, but that movie has a
Speaker 1: Midwestern town threatened by giant grasshoppers again, atomic radiation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but since we're talking about human height primarily today, back
Speaker 1: to the Amazing Colossal Man. Yeah, so nobody's gonna gonna
Speaker 1: bring up The Amazing Colossal Man is like a perfect
Speaker 1: example of science, but it does at least flirt with
Speaker 1: some of these ideas because you have this this guy.
Speaker 1: He's gigantic, he's powerful, and yet he seems to be
Speaker 1: in a fair amount of just constant misery. Um, it's
Speaker 1: been a little while since to actually have seen it,
Speaker 1: but I I seem to recall that not only there
Speaker 1: there's there's elements of it affecting his mind, but but
Speaker 1: perhaps just being that big is at least a little
Speaker 1: bit painful as well. Um, and the mind thing is interesting.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling in the in the in the film,
Speaker 1: it's more about like radiation or something affecting his mind,
Speaker 1: making him a little crazy, a little hostile. But I
Speaker 1: can't help but wonder it has something to do with
Speaker 1: the blood flow to his head. Oh yeah, like you're
Speaker 1: just trying to scale up the human body that things
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily gonna work right. Yeah, Because as we'll discussed,
Speaker 1: that's a major issue when you start thinking about gigantic
Speaker 1: human bodies or gigantic bodies of any kind. Um. For
Speaker 1: after after all, look at the draff right tallest vertebrate
Speaker 1: on Earth. Uh And and it has to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of quite a bit of energy to pump blood
Speaker 1: up to its brain. It has like an amazing amount
Speaker 1: of hypertension. I mean, the same kind of hypertension that
Speaker 1: would cause vascular damage to a human being and eventually
Speaker 1: perhaps lead to uh, internal injury and death. Is just
Speaker 1: normal for a draft because it's got to get all
Speaker 1: the blood up the neck to the brain and then
Speaker 1: when it lowers its head to drink gravity. You can't
Speaker 1: have gravity then like sending all this blood to the
Speaker 1: head and what may in the draft's head explode. Nobody
Speaker 1: wants that, And that's why the giraffes have this system
Speaker 1: known as the rete mirabel and that's Latin for wonderful
Speaker 1: net uh. And it's just this net of arteries and
Speaker 1: veins that diverts some of the blood flow, equalizing the
Speaker 1: giraffe blood pressure when the animal lowers its head. That's beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a natural release valve to keep you from
Speaker 1: living in a world full of exploding giraffes. But it's
Speaker 1: an example how to have a creature that big, you
Speaker 1: have to have additional engineering constraints thrown in there to
Speaker 1: allow that creature to live on that scale. Yes, and
Speaker 1: though The Amazing Colossal Men didn't get into a lot
Speaker 1: of the details of the science of what it would
Speaker 1: take to scale up a human body, other other writers
Speaker 1: have sort of dealt with this, right, Um, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I have not read a lot of the you know,
Speaker 1: they guess as far as a literary trope, that the
Speaker 1: giant humanoid is not really explored all that much. But
Speaker 1: the late Heart writer Michael Shay, he explored this a
Speaker 1: little bit in his novel uh Niff. One of his
Speaker 1: niff the Lean Novel's Minds of the Bahina, which is
Speaker 1: a fine, fine work of dark fantasy that I highly
Speaker 1: recommend anyone out there looking for that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But he also wove a lot of science into his work.
Speaker 1: And at one point in this book we encounter a
Speaker 1: human who has grown to colossal size. But he's so
Speaker 1: colossal that like he basically is just in constant pain.
Speaker 1: He can't even sit up. He has to just crawl
Speaker 1: into the ocean and float away just because the body,
Speaker 1: the proportions of his body are not made to support
Speaker 1: that kind of mass. Now, wasn't there an old theory?
Speaker 1: I can't remember where I read this, but I remember
Speaker 1: hearing there was some old theory that these the largest
Speaker 1: of the dinosaurs, say like a brachiosaur or something like that,
Speaker 1: could only exist by by standing around in water all
Speaker 1: the time to partially support its weight with buoyancy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've read some of those as well. In fact, we
Speaker 1: have an article on how stuff Works dot Com that
Speaker 1: I put together, like what's the largest land animal that
Speaker 1: ever lived? And he's a part some of these issues
Speaker 1: with the sauropods. But for to whatever extent that was
Speaker 1: ever proposed as a theory, I don't think that is
Speaker 1: believed today, right. And the other co course important thing.
Speaker 1: You look at these most massive creatures, the most massive
Speaker 1: land creatures living today, uh, are definitely walking around on
Speaker 1: four legs. The Saara pods walked around on four legs.
Speaker 1: So um, it's it's very difficult to imagine a bipedal
Speaker 1: creature of that size. But then again, we have examples
Speaker 1: like the Tarrannosaurus rex, a bipedal creature that is extremely large,
Speaker 1: and they're actually there are larger bipedal dinosaurs than the
Speaker 1: sarannosaurs rex. Yeah, not quite as big as the sauropods,
Speaker 1: but certainly yeah. Okay, well, so we should look at
Speaker 1: the issue of height and size in humans because obviously
Speaker 1: you don't have to look any further than the science
Speaker 1: fiction films of the fifties to see this general obsession
Speaker 1: with the idea of things being bigger than normal humans
Speaker 1: and other animals. But while we're captivated with height and
Speaker 1: size in that kind of simple brutal part of our brains,
Speaker 1: we also have this counter narrative running right where in
Speaker 1: our literature and folklore there's always this story of the
Speaker 1: smaller person defeating the larger person David and Goliath to
Speaker 1: Jack and the bean Stalk, which you know, the folklora
Speaker 1: says a variation on this very ancient story they called
Speaker 1: the Boy who Stole the Ogre's Treasure. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of variations of the story. And then in the
Speaker 1: modern day we have, for example, Bruce Lee always beating
Speaker 1: the bigger guy. Right, have seen a film where Bruce
Speaker 1: Lee does not just beat everyone up. It's true to
Speaker 1: the point of boredom, where it's like, really, these villains
Speaker 1: don't have shot. They seem to know that the thing
Speaker 1: you want to see most is this little guy, this
Speaker 1: little Bruce Lee, just killing somebody who's much bigger than
Speaker 1: him by punching him to death. And how would we
Speaker 1: fit Master Blaster into the scenario? Ad Max taking a
Speaker 1: Master Blaster who himself is a giant with a little
Speaker 1: person on his shoulder. That seems to subvert the trope,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. So anyway, we we've obviously got this obsession.
Speaker 1: We're we're very into the idea of size as a
Speaker 1: basic indicator about how we should judge other people. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that sort of makes sense. I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense morally judging other people by their sides, but
Speaker 1: it sort of makes a biological sense why we would
Speaker 1: have these instincts. And and height is a sort of
Speaker 1: basic biometric indicator. For example, it's useful for scientists to
Speaker 1: track because it can be objectively measured, though not always
Speaker 1: with perfect act accuracy, because you know your height varies
Speaker 1: a little bit from different parts of the day, and
Speaker 1: you know it's not going to be exactly the same
Speaker 1: every time you measure it. But it's correlated with other
Speaker 1: important facts like nutrition and health. Uh, and in humans,
Speaker 1: height is, of course, on average, sexually dimorphic. We know this.
Speaker 1: Average male height is usually a few inches taller than
Speaker 1: average female height. One thing that I was really interested
Speaker 1: in was I was wondering if there's any population of
Speaker 1: humans on Earth where that's not the case, And I
Speaker 1: couldn't find evidence of it, but I wonder if there
Speaker 1: is one out there that would be kind of cool
Speaker 1: to know. Would Yeah, it's just so so so far
Speaker 1: just talking about human height, as we've discussed, you have
Speaker 1: you have of the the the the inherent sexism in
Speaker 1: the in the situation right, men on average or taller
Speaker 1: and there and therefore we're putting this focus on on
Speaker 1: height being an indicator of power. Um. Certainly, increased height
Speaker 1: can conceivably be an advantage in various combat scenarios. Of course,
Speaker 1: a lot of that depends. Most of that depends on
Speaker 1: the skill of the fighters involved, and of course just linguistically, right,
Speaker 1: even if you're in a profession where really the height
Speaker 1: of an individual has no role at all, you'll still
Speaker 1: hear people say like, oh, well he's a giant in
Speaker 1: the industry, or oh she's a she's a looming figure
Speaker 1: in her profession, or or you might hear someone put
Speaker 1: down to say, oh, well that that was very small
Speaker 1: of them to do that. Like what, what do all
Speaker 1: those words even mean? You know, we're we're still populating
Speaker 1: as if it's Game of Thrones and we're surrounded by
Speaker 1: giants and dwarves and giant blooded people. Yeah, but even
Speaker 1: if you are not, say, applying to be a pro
Speaker 1: wrestler or something like that, there are jobs, such as,
Speaker 1: for example, being a salesperson where somebody might hire you
Speaker 1: based on height because they know that the the inherent
Speaker 1: biases of the customers might favor somebody who's taller. So
Speaker 1: one of the big scientific questions about human height would
Speaker 1: obviously be what controls human height? It's a clear fact
Speaker 1: of nature that we see obvious, you know, metric differences
Speaker 1: in the height of different adult individuals. So where does
Speaker 1: this difference come from? And I found according to a
Speaker 1: two thousand six explainer I found in Scientific American by
Speaker 1: molecular biologists Chow Kwing Lae and Gene Mayor of the U.
Speaker 1: S Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging
Speaker 1: at Tufts, twenty two percent of differences in human height
Speaker 1: are controlled by environmental factors, and sixty to eighty percent
Speaker 1: are controlled by genetics. So scientists have arrived at these
Speaker 1: numbers through a number of different means, including things like
Speaker 1: twin studies, you know, studying people who Okay, so we
Speaker 1: have monozygotic twins here, they should have pretty much the
Speaker 1: same genes, but can we see any variations in height
Speaker 1: between them or between them and other siblings and sibling studies, Uh,
Speaker 1: depending on what what environmental factors they're getting, such as nutrition,
Speaker 1: especially nutrition and early childhood, early childhood health, access to healthcare,
Speaker 1: and things like that. And from this that they've discovered
Speaker 1: that the rate of influence of genes and environmental factors
Speaker 1: is variable, but it's variable around these basic ranges. But
Speaker 1: one thing that is true is that on average, humans
Speaker 1: today are significantly taller than they were a few hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. Have you ever noticed this, like if you,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's clear if you just look at environments
Speaker 1: and appliances designed for people a long time ago. There
Speaker 1: are lower ceilings, lower doorways, smaller beds, smaller pieces of
Speaker 1: clothing such of armor was one I believe you mentioned earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I though, that's an interesting one because I
Speaker 1: was looking into that and then I couldn't. I have
Speaker 1: this impression that I've seen suits of armor that appear
Speaker 1: kind of small compared to what I would think of
Speaker 1: as a you know, a large warrior today. But I
Speaker 1: was looking for evidence of this online and I couldn't
Speaker 1: really find anything as saying that suits of armor are
Speaker 1: smaller than we would expect them to be. So it
Speaker 1: made me wonder if suits of armor being made for
Speaker 1: the nobility and military classes of previous eras may actually
Speaker 1: have been larger than would have been required for the
Speaker 1: regular people, because, as we've discussed in previous episodes, we
Speaker 1: have these examples of noble individuals, ruling class individuals from
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of years ago who still were tremendously
Speaker 1: hot at tall even by today's standards. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember Old krogan Man, Old krogan Man, the bog body.
Speaker 1: What was he like six four or six six? He
Speaker 1: was incredibly tall, um, And of course history is full
Speaker 1: of these stories. Sometimes, I mean a lot of times
Speaker 1: you have to take him with a grain of salt, right,
Speaker 1: because there's a ruler and he was really tall. Do
Speaker 1: I believe you, was he really really taller? He was
Speaker 1: he just he's just always standing on something or is
Speaker 1: this just you know, the myth and the legend of
Speaker 1: the man like one that always comes to my mind.
Speaker 1: And this is I think in large part because my
Speaker 1: my dad would tell me stories like this is a
Speaker 1: kid but um uh in ten sixty six, the events
Speaker 1: of ten sixty six Battle Hastings and all that. You've
Speaker 1: got stories of ten sixty six when you were a kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my dad would tell me about all that. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Of course, you had, you know, three different forces vying
Speaker 1: for control. There. You had Harold Godwinson, uh, king of England,
Speaker 1: who had William the Conqueror coming up from from the continent.
Speaker 1: And then of course you had Harold Hadrada, the King
Speaker 1: of Norway, and he was according to many accounts here,
Speaker 1: he was taller than most men. And Harold Godwinson makes
Speaker 1: equip that he is going to uh, he's going to
Speaker 1: offer him something, and he's gonna offer him six feet
Speaker 1: of English soil or perhaps more. Sometimes it is say
Speaker 1: perhaps seven feet of English soil, since he's taller than
Speaker 1: most men. Um. The idea that he's going to you know,
Speaker 1: gift him the grave here but but yeah, here, here's
Speaker 1: a giant. Uh in history to what extend was an
Speaker 1: actual giant? I'm not sure, but but certainly we have
Speaker 1: tales like this of of and in some cases skeletal
Speaker 1: evidence of tall noble individuals. And yet we have evidence
Speaker 1: that the average person of of a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: years ago or earlier maybe you know, even going back
Speaker 1: longer than that, was just not as tall as the
Speaker 1: average person from the same ethnic groups and societies are today.
Speaker 1: And so why are people taller today? You know? One
Speaker 1: of the obvious questions is has height been selected for
Speaker 1: as a gene? Has there been evolution? Are we evolving taller?
Speaker 1: And I would postulate we can get into why in
Speaker 1: a moment. I don't think that seems to be the cause.
Speaker 1: It doesn't look like it. I think scientists think that
Speaker 1: the change in human height is more due to environmental
Speaker 1: factors that I was talking about earlier, rather than major
Speaker 1: changes in the genetic factors controlling height. And this would
Speaker 1: make sense given what we know about improved access to
Speaker 1: healthcare and nutrition around the world. Right, Yeah, A lot
Speaker 1: of the a lot of material that I was looking
Speaker 1: at for this was definitely focusing in on England and
Speaker 1: looking at industrial heights, you know, the industrial age heights
Speaker 1: and how they differed between the classes. So over the
Speaker 1: last a hundred and fifty years, um, we have seen
Speaker 1: the average height of people and in an industrialized nations
Speaker 1: increase approximately ten centimeters or about four inches. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: nothing to sniff at, no, no, Now, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of people would would pay dearly for an extra ten centimeters.
Speaker 1: It's true. Uh, certainly, you know, glued on the bottom
Speaker 1: of their shoes. But anyway, it's inner of saying that
Speaker 1: this should occur, right because you think that evolution would
Speaker 1: be selecting for shorter heights, because based on previous studies,
Speaker 1: we know that you find taller heights and fewer offspring
Speaker 1: among wealthy industrial British families of the time. Um, but
Speaker 1: also you find shorter offspring among the poor, and the
Speaker 1: poor are having more offspring. So wouldn't it mean that
Speaker 1: the short poor are going to inherit the earth because
Speaker 1: they're just gonna outnumber and outbreed the tall rich people. Huh.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't seem to play out that way. And
Speaker 1: most geneticists you have, believe that it's uh that what
Speaker 1: we've seen here, what's been the driving voice and force
Speaker 1: and increased heights has been the improvement in shildhood nutrition. Uh,
Speaker 1: And that then that has been the most important factor
Speaker 1: in allowing humans to increase so dramatically in size. So
Speaker 1: there are a few different facts that kind of support this.
Speaker 1: So height increases only begin to manifest somewhere around the
Speaker 1: middle of the nineteenth century, and we do see dips
Speaker 1: in times in places of World war related famine, so
Speaker 1: we can see that. Put it out. So here's here's
Speaker 1: an area that we saw a significant decrease in nutritional
Speaker 1: um quality, and therefore heights went down as well. The
Speaker 1: next generation you mean this order, and then the trend
Speaker 1: toward increasing height is actually largely leveled off, suggesting that
Speaker 1: there is an upper limit to height beyond which our
Speaker 1: genes are just not equipped to take us, regardless of
Speaker 1: the environmental improvement. Okay, So you're saying like, if we
Speaker 1: get improved improved diet and access to healthcare as children,
Speaker 1: we're sort of trending further toward the upper range of
Speaker 1: natural human height. We're not extending what the range is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no quantity of carrots or no quantities
Speaker 1: of multi vitamins, they're gonna get you beyond what is
Speaker 1: essentially like the normal threshold for what we are as
Speaker 1: a species. Right. Um, you know, in the same way
Speaker 1: there's not there's not a multi vitamin you can take
Speaker 1: that's gonna make you grow an extra arm um. And
Speaker 1: also we house it's one of those atomic radiation multi
Speaker 1: vitamins from the fifties and uh, and this kind of
Speaker 1: goes back to some of the data that has to
Speaker 1: do with famine. But conditions of poor nutrition are well
Speaker 1: correlated to smaller stature. So we've seen that born out
Speaker 1: time and time again. So that's not like a tenuous
Speaker 1: hypothesis of modern science. We pretty much know now that
Speaker 1: if you're a kid and you don't get good nutrition,
Speaker 1: you won't be as tall exactly. So you know, the
Speaker 1: the answer there, why why are people taller today? It's
Speaker 1: it's as exciting and unexciting as all of that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: to answer the question why are people taller than debt
Speaker 1: today than they were in the past, While it basically
Speaker 1: comes down to nutrition, well that's interesting, but then again
Speaker 1: it it makes me wonder how size does vary when
Speaker 1: it comes to genetic change over time because like you
Speaker 1: obviously do see size changes in the average size of
Speaker 1: a population of animals over time. UH, the norm does
Speaker 1: go up and down. So what happens there? What when
Speaker 1: that happens? How does it happen? Well, one of the
Speaker 1: more interesting UH scenarios that occurs it has to do
Speaker 1: with the the island rule also known as Foster's rule,
Speaker 1: named for J. Bristol Foster in nineteen sixty four. UH.
Speaker 1: And this is this has to do with what happens
Speaker 1: when you take uh, you know, an existing organism and
Speaker 1: landed on an island somewhere. UM. So generally speaking, when
Speaker 1: one species arrives on an island, it can change forms
Speaker 1: in ways. They don't necessarily generate a new species. So
Speaker 1: body size conforms to what we call the island rule.
Speaker 1: And it holds true for various vertebrates. So large specimens
Speaker 1: they become small, small species become large. And one of
Speaker 1: the more extreme examples of this is the the dwarf
Speaker 1: is um of megafauna. During the ice age. We saw
Speaker 1: dwarf elephants in ice age sicily and the small wooly
Speaker 1: mammoths of Wrangle Island in Siberia. So how big were they? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean you couldn't fit them in your in your pocket,
Speaker 1: but noticeably smaller, like I would say, small enough to
Speaker 1: be cute based on the uh, the the average size
Speaker 1: of the normal organism. So the basic idea just here
Speaker 1: is that smaller creatures get larger when predation pressure is
Speaker 1: relaxed due to the absence of some mainland predators, and
Speaker 1: larger creatures become smaller when food resources are limited due
Speaker 1: to land constraints. That's interesting. So the thing about smaller
Speaker 1: creatures becoming larger in the absence of predators, that points
Speaker 1: out one natural advantage to being smaller, which is that
Speaker 1: it's you know, you're you are not as delicious and
Speaker 1: nutritious of a treat, and it's easier for you to hide.
Speaker 1: So there there are plenty of selection pressures that would
Speaker 1: favor being not as large as one could be, uh
Speaker 1: not having the maximum size allowed by your body plan.
Speaker 1: And I think that's something that's going to be interesting
Speaker 1: to keep in mind, especially for a thing I want
Speaker 1: to talk about later on. So I know what everyone's wanting.
Speaker 1: How does the island rule affect humans? Well, most of
Speaker 1: the time you don't see humans thrown into these scenarios,
Speaker 1: and certainly some people may be thinking, oh, well, pigmies right, um.
Speaker 1: But in those situations there seem to be a lot
Speaker 1: more Um. There are a lot more factors at play there,
Speaker 1: including nutrition. So it's difficult to just apply the straight
Speaker 1: simplistic island rule to the scenario. But some have theorized
Speaker 1: that Homo floresi incests also known as flores Man or
Speaker 1: you know, hobbit man. You can probably a popular press,
Speaker 1: popular press. Yeah, So some have theorized that this is
Speaker 1: an example of of island island rule, island dwarfism at
Speaker 1: play with a humanoid creature. Uh. This was this particular
Speaker 1: specim was discovered in two thousand three at Langbau on
Speaker 1: the island of Flores in Indonesia. And it's from numbers
Speaker 1: vary on this. I've seen the number drift in both
Speaker 1: directions as additional research has been conducted, but it seems
Speaker 1: like fifty thousand years ago is a general timeline we
Speaker 1: can stick to. Um. Uh that And there's a two
Speaker 1: thousand seven paper that came out title Primates follow the
Speaker 1: Island Rule. Implications for interpreting Homo Floresien says by Lyndelle
Speaker 1: Broham and Marcel Cardillo, and they argued that that that
Speaker 1: that primates do follow the rule, and they used a
Speaker 1: comparative database of thirty nine independently derived island endemic primate
Speaker 1: species and subspecies to demonstrate that primates do conform to
Speaker 1: the island rules. Small bodied primates tend to get larger
Speaker 1: on islands, and large bodied primates get smaller. Furthermore, large species,
Speaker 1: they argued, to undergo a proportionally greater reduction in the
Speaker 1: size on islands. But again that being said, human height
Speaker 1: especially as far more complex than this. Uh. Anytime you
Speaker 1: take you know, the the human organism, you start laying
Speaker 1: over all these various cultural concerns, when you start throwing
Speaker 1: in war and UH and and are more complex relationships
Speaker 1: with nutrition. Um, it's it's very difficul well to just
Speaker 1: apply to rule to humans and in a fast and
Speaker 1: slick way. Another thing would be time scales. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that within the time scales we'd be working
Speaker 1: with observing human history, there is not nearly as much
Speaker 1: time for for significant genetic evolutionary changes to accumulate like this.
Speaker 1: So you might you might have for example, sexual selection
Speaker 1: among humans or something like that, uh, tending people toward
Speaker 1: you know, a certain end of the natural spectrum. But
Speaker 1: the time factor is going to cause significant problems for
Speaker 1: seeing a large, very noticeable changes in the human genome
Speaker 1: over you know, the short period of history we have
Speaker 1: access to. YEA. Indeed, all right, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break and when we come back, we're gonna jump
Speaker 1: right back into this topic. And hey, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about phantasm a little bit. Hey, everybody, you know, in
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Speaker 1: Build yourself a new website. Alright, we're back, Joe. You've
Speaker 1: seen Phantasm right? Oh yeah, h can you refresh the
Speaker 1: listeners out there? Um about the details in this cinematic masterpiece, Well,
Speaker 1: Phantasm is a horror movie. Don Coscarelli. Is that the
Speaker 1: guy who directed it? That's the man? Yeah? Okay, So
Speaker 1: the main characters in the oh god, could I even
Speaker 1: explain what the plot is? I don't know what the
Speaker 1: plot is. That's kind of the beauty out it right. Essentially,
Speaker 1: the main characters get chased around by this guy known
Speaker 1: as the Tall Man. Who is a grim, dour funeral director,
Speaker 1: who who shows his teeth and he squints his eyes,
Speaker 1: and he's got lanky, gross hair. And this guy runs
Speaker 1: around a cemetery stealing corpses for strange purposes we can
Speaker 1: get to in a moment. And he kills people with
Speaker 1: a flying silver ball that jams itself into your head
Speaker 1: and then drills you with some sort of extremely produce
Speaker 1: just blood funnel that just pumps all the blood out
Speaker 1: of your head out a jet in the back. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that guy was played by Angus scrim And. Uh, he's
Speaker 1: the actor who played the Tall Man. He was only
Speaker 1: about six four in real life, or so I read,
Speaker 1: but they used a bunch of movie tricks to make
Speaker 1: him seem taller. I think they gave him tall shoes,
Speaker 1: and they put him in a tight suit and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Shot him at the right angles, maybe, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But what is the tall Man when we find out
Speaker 1: what he's doing spoiler for this nineteen nine movie, when
Speaker 1: we find out his whole plot, what is it that
Speaker 1: the Tall Man is going about doing with these stolen corpses? Well,
Speaker 1: he has a whole industry um and I forget how
Speaker 1: many of these details are presented in the first film,
Speaker 1: and how many come out in the subsequent films, But
Speaker 1: essentially he seems to be from another planet or another dimension,
Speaker 1: and he is taking the corpses, crunching them down into
Speaker 1: little undead dwarfs that presumably are being sent through this
Speaker 1: stargate to serve as slave labor on another in it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the idea here, I guess is that this other
Speaker 1: planet has is a is a larger world. There's a
Speaker 1: greater gravity, and therefore you need crunched down bodies to
Speaker 1: serve as the labor. Uh. He's also I think, using
Speaker 1: brains from the corps is to make the flying silver
Speaker 1: balls of Death. And of course that this this shines
Speaker 1: potential new light on his height. Okay, so he's crunching
Speaker 1: down creatures to go to this other world. He's tall
Speaker 1: on ours, So does that mean is he is he
Speaker 1: shorter on another world? Is he a normal size like here?
Speaker 1: So when Superman comes to the Solar System with the
Speaker 1: yellow Sun, he gets special abilities. When the tall Man
Speaker 1: comes to a planet with much lower gravity in this
Speaker 1: sort of relaxed atmosphere, he almost sort of unwinds or
Speaker 1: uncoils and grows taller. Yeah, that would be a great
Speaker 1: scene for any remake they do where the tall man
Speaker 1: steps out of the little stargate here and then you
Speaker 1: just his spine elongates like by like a foot or so.
Speaker 1: Just god, well, that's funny because it actually is a
Speaker 1: fact that human beings grow taller in lower micro gravity environments.
Speaker 1: Not that much taller. I don't think you know, a
Speaker 1: normal high, average height adult male would reach the size
Speaker 1: of Anger Scrim or even uh the size of Anger
Speaker 1: Scrim and all of his tall man Kutraman. But it
Speaker 1: definitely is true that astronauts, for example, get taller while
Speaker 1: they're in the International Space Station. That's right. Uh, And
Speaker 1: NASA is known about this for a while. Uh. You
Speaker 1: going a trip into into orbit, and you can add
Speaker 1: up to three in height while you're up there. So
Speaker 1: if you're six ft tall, that's that's two inches you know,
Speaker 1: nothing to sneeze that. And that's because when the spine
Speaker 1: is free from the constraints of gravity, the vertebrae can
Speaker 1: expand and relax. Now, once you get back on Earth,
Speaker 1: everything sinks back down to normal, but for a little
Speaker 1: bit you gain, you know, maybe a couple of inches
Speaker 1: I read actually that once you come back to Earth,
Speaker 1: you you return to normal height extremely rapid. It takes
Speaker 1: like less than two days. Uh. So when astronaut Scott
Speaker 1: Kelly returned from three hundred and forty days in space,
Speaker 1: that's a long time he was on the I S S. Uh.
Speaker 1: Scott Kelly came back earlier this year in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: He'd grown about one point five inches while he was
Speaker 1: in the I S S. And when he returned his
Speaker 1: his normal height was restored within about twenty eight hours.
Speaker 1: And of course this would mean the same the same
Speaker 1: thing would hold true for low gravity worlds. Take Mars
Speaker 1: for instance, which has just one third of Earth's gravity.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, so that would conceivably be a factor
Speaker 1: there if you were to visit it for extended length
Speaker 1: of time, and certainly if you're talking about long term
Speaker 1: human habitats. Uh. Mars settlement proponent Robert Zubrin, who actually
Speaker 1: interviewed a few years back, if very very passionate dude
Speaker 1: about Mars colonization like he is, he is of the mindset,
Speaker 1: we should, we should be doing it yesterday. Uh. And
Speaker 1: here all the reasons we should and we can. Uh. Certainly,
Speaker 1: I recommend checking out any interviews with the man who's
Speaker 1: very Did he try to sign you up for the
Speaker 1: Mars death trip? No, No, that he was. He was
Speaker 1: very passionate, because I think it was. There was an
Speaker 1: article that I did for Discovery News asking the question,
Speaker 1: you know, is it morally cool to terra form another world?
Speaker 1: And there were some that are saying, well, no, you
Speaker 1: you know you don't. We don't want to just go
Speaker 1: will annaling with it with the terraforming. You want to
Speaker 1: be respectful, you want don't want to disrupt the evidence
Speaker 1: of past life or certainly get in the way of
Speaker 1: any present life that might be there or future life.
Speaker 1: But Zuber and he presented the opposite to argument that
Speaker 1: we should definitely be there. We should go there. It's
Speaker 1: a dead world, let's do it. I've actually read a
Speaker 1: lot about that. I think that's a very interesting debate,
Speaker 1: like what what should be our ethical obligations when dealing
Speaker 1: with other planets? Do we have the right to make
Speaker 1: them earth too? If we have that ability? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we could do a whole episode of essentially on
Speaker 1: the prime directive, right, yeah, um, but how does the
Speaker 1: prime directive apply to potentially dead world? Yeah, and yet
Speaker 1: and who are we to label a world dead, you know,
Speaker 1: because we have just have this one idea of what
Speaker 1: life is, right. Yeah, So anyway, Zubran has has spoken
Speaker 1: a great deal about Mars colonization issues, and one of
Speaker 1: the things that has come up is he's theorized that
Speaker 1: children born on low gravity worlds like Mars would have
Speaker 1: a few inches on everyone else. But you'd have problems
Speaker 1: adjusting to high gravity worlds like Earth if you ever
Speaker 1: try to go in a pilgrimage here, and indeed you
Speaker 1: might not be able to return home at all, or
Speaker 1: there might be problems inherently, like even with the low
Speaker 1: gravity world. I mean, we've never seen what a micro
Speaker 1: gravity or low gravity environment does to a human body
Speaker 1: over a really long term. Like the longest we've ever
Speaker 1: seen is what happens when you stay in a space
Speaker 1: station for you know, a year or whatever amount of time.
Speaker 1: The longest space station stay is now. I think Kelly
Speaker 1: was up there, if he's not the longest one of them.
Speaker 1: But anyway, astronauts report back pain. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've read about this, but you know, according to materials
Speaker 1: provided by the I S S Program Science Office, Lower
Speaker 1: back pain is sixty eight percent more prevalent in space
Speaker 1: than on Earth. And is this caused by the lack
Speaker 1: of the intervertebral discompression due to gravity. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing that makes you taller, the same thing that makes
Speaker 1: you taller. Actually, when you're lying down horizontally as you
Speaker 1: sleep at night. In the morning you get up your
Speaker 1: taller than you were when you went to bed. Uh.
Speaker 1: Does being separated from that that downward pull of Earth's gravity.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously we didn't evolve to be like that
Speaker 1: for long, long periods of time, So what does that
Speaker 1: do to you? It it might have some less than
Speaker 1: positive effects. Yeah, And certainly every human child ever born
Speaker 1: has been born on Earth. No one's ever been born
Speaker 1: in space, so we have no idea what human development
Speaker 1: might be like you a lower uh, lower gravity scenario. So,
Speaker 1: with all of those concerns in place, and the idea
Speaker 1: that being raised in a microgravity environment might really mess
Speaker 1: you up in all kinds of ways, it is possible, Bowle,
Speaker 1: that growing up in low gravity or microgravity might make
Speaker 1: you taller. Yeah. Maybe so, so if nothing else you
Speaker 1: could you could you could cling to that reassuring fact
Speaker 1: because as we've touched on already. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: there's a lot of weird human hang ups when it
Speaker 1: comes to height. And there's an entire psychology to human height.
Speaker 1: Oh man. There there are a bunch of studies looking
Speaker 1: into this. Uh and and it kind of makes sense
Speaker 1: why there would be a strong psychology of height. You know,
Speaker 1: height is a primal survival signifier, right. It advertises physical strength, reach, health,
Speaker 1: and good nutrition. And so for this reason, I think
Speaker 1: it's not surprising that humans have some natural tendencies when
Speaker 1: it comes to our psychological relationship with human height. I
Speaker 1: think there's uh there. For example, is this pervasive notion
Speaker 1: that taller people have more social and economic success, that
Speaker 1: they're more persuasive, more impressive, that they you know, they
Speaker 1: just get they're just go getters and the all good
Speaker 1: things come to them. In fact, I remember I had
Speaker 1: a teacher in high school who who told us one time.
Speaker 1: I don't know what his source was for this, Maybe
Speaker 1: it was just his own wisdom, he was making it up,
Speaker 1: but I remember he told us that that if you
Speaker 1: want to if you want to persuade people or to
Speaker 1: be a good leader, the most important thing is height,
Speaker 1: and the second most important thing is being funny. I
Speaker 1: think the emphasis being on how well, if you're not tall,
Speaker 1: you better darn well be pretty funny. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Look at Jeff Goldbluin, seems like a
Speaker 1: funny guy, very tall guy. I'd followed him anywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he could. He could tell us all to jump into
Speaker 1: a volcano, and I'd be pretty sure he had a
Speaker 1: good reason. But anyway, is there anything true to this
Speaker 1: or is it just another unsubstantiated folk myth based on
Speaker 1: our biases. So there was one huge landmark, highly cited
Speaker 1: paper from two thousand four about this in the Journal
Speaker 1: of Applied Psychology by Timothy A. Judge and Daniel M. Cable.
Speaker 1: And they did this deep investigation on the you know
Speaker 1: what could be known at the time about the correlation
Speaker 1: between height and success, and they certainly did find a
Speaker 1: strong correlation between the height of a human and for example,
Speaker 1: career success. And so it was summarized by the American
Speaker 1: Psychological Association as with this startling fact, for someone who
Speaker 1: is six feet tall, they earn on average a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty six thousand dollars more during a thirty year
Speaker 1: career than somebody who is five feet and five inches tall,
Speaker 1: even when controlling for other factors that could contribute to that,
Speaker 1: like gender, age, and wait, they found that taller men
Speaker 1: and taller women are both more successful in their careers,
Speaker 1: but that the correlation is stronger for taller men. And
Speaker 1: they're fascinating questions that come along with research like this
Speaker 1: because all, you know, what they can establish is the correlation.
Speaker 1: They can't necessarily show exactly why this is true. Uh
Speaker 1: So you could have lots of hypothesis hypotheses, Like some
Speaker 1: people would say, is it true that taller people are
Speaker 1: smarter and that's why they make more money? And that
Speaker 1: doesn't appear to be the case though that I think
Speaker 1: there have been some studies attempting to link height with
Speaker 1: intelligence that they didn't find that that that was the
Speaker 1: primary explanation. Uh So, could it be that taller people
Speaker 1: are just respected more by others and you know, the
Speaker 1: boss looks at a tall person and says, you look
Speaker 1: like you deserve a raise, or could it be that
Speaker 1: the way tall people are treated by others leads to
Speaker 1: more self actualizing behaviors and you know, makes people more
Speaker 1: confident go in and ask for the raise more often there.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of ways you could try to
Speaker 1: explain things like this, like maybe in a cubical environment,
Speaker 1: when they stand up, it's easier to see their heads,
Speaker 1: so the boss that sees them more often, or perhaps
Speaker 1: their brain is closer to Heaven just by virtue of height. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how does this all make you feel today, Robert? You're
Speaker 1: being one of the taller people in our office? Um?
Speaker 1: You know I do. I kind of like second guess
Speaker 1: the role of height a lot in my daily life,
Speaker 1: you know, like I like I find myself second guessing, um,
Speaker 1: you know, things that go right, or I'm like, oh
Speaker 1: did this didn't did my height play into this? And
Speaker 1: then I started thinking of studies like this, and it's like,
Speaker 1: is this just all a virtue of me being a
Speaker 1: little bit tall? Um? And then and then of course
Speaker 1: I curse my height when I bump into things. And
Speaker 1: then I then I wonder like, well do I I
Speaker 1: actually end up looking like like an ungainly tall person
Speaker 1: as I'm walking around the office. And therefore I'm like
Speaker 1: I don't fit in as well, like I'm more of
Speaker 1: a like a freak. You know, Yeah, you really are? Well?
Speaker 1: Thank you? Oh no, I mean being tall might be
Speaker 1: another one of those things where we discovered that there
Speaker 1: are just natural biases at play, for example, like the
Speaker 1: natural advantages or privileges some people might enjoy for being
Speaker 1: male in the workplace. You know, sometimes you're just gonna
Speaker 1: be treated differently and you might benefit from that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I guess like you just end up it's like
Speaker 1: second guessing, like how everyone around you is interpreting things,
Speaker 1: Like I've often found it weird, like I've always been
Speaker 1: taller than my bosses. And obviously being tall has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with being or being short in height has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with your ability to lead in a
Speaker 1: workplace or being effective boss. But for some reason, there's
Speaker 1: always this like weird, Like I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: like a grade school or lizard brain voice in the
Speaker 1: back of my head. It's always like like, is this
Speaker 1: weird that my boss is shorter than me? My boss
Speaker 1: gonna hold it against me because I'm taller, like as
Speaker 1: if as if like one if one gave man is
Speaker 1: going to rise against the others, like he must be
Speaker 1: punished because he was taller than me. But still like
Speaker 1: you can't help, but but here those just nutty paranoid
Speaker 1: voices from time to time. That's great, Robert. I hope
Speaker 1: you will always share what these voices are telling you
Speaker 1: with me like I had. It probably has to be
Speaker 1: the same for people with great beards, um um. And
Speaker 1: you have pretty great beard yourself. I don't know about that.
Speaker 1: I do not grow that that great of a beard.
Speaker 1: So if I had, if I were to have a
Speaker 1: great beard, and I was to have a boss with
Speaker 1: a lesser beard like that would feel a little weird,
Speaker 1: like I would. I don't want my my beard to
Speaker 1: get me in trouble because of its boldness. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well the beard and the and the height thing again
Speaker 1: this comes into I wonder if this is uh, this
Speaker 1: is natural sexism in our mindset also playing into because
Speaker 1: of the sexual dimorphism of height, the fact that on
Speaker 1: average men or taller. I wonder if sexism also plays
Speaker 1: a role, Like if height in some way manifests in
Speaker 1: our minds as some attribute of manliness, And because we
Speaker 1: have this unconscious bias favoring manliness, is that another reason
Speaker 1: that we pay tribute to the tallest? Yeah, the tallest
Speaker 1: and an accidental invader Zim reference there where the the
Speaker 1: leaders of Zim's race alien invader race um. They are
Speaker 1: called referred to as the tallest. They are the tallest
Speaker 1: of their species, though clearly they've been augmented with with
Speaker 1: outfits and machinery to make them appear. Oh they're cheating.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they're cheating, and they're lifting. Yeah, they're definitely lifting. Uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, that's the tallest. Well, this brings us to
Speaker 1: the question I think that maybe we could conclude with,
Speaker 1: which is how tall exactly could humans grow? We've talked
Speaker 1: about how humans have gotten, on average a little bit
Speaker 1: taller over time, though this doesn't seem to be from
Speaker 1: you know, serious genetic mutation or revolution, but more through
Speaker 1: nutrition and access to healthcare. But imagine we were, for example,
Speaker 1: able to genetically alter the human race. You know, we're
Speaker 1: going to go in and tinker with our genes and
Speaker 1: try to create the world's tallest human. Could we make
Speaker 1: a human that was like Glenn Manning. Could we make
Speaker 1: a fifty foot human? Could we make you know, Attack
Speaker 1: of the fifty Foot Woman. That's another b movie about
Speaker 1: the giant human. Could we make a hundred foot tall human?
Speaker 1: Or even just being more modest, could we make up
Speaker 1: fifteen foot tall human? Are are any of these things
Speaker 1: really possible or would we hit insurmountable problems. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess it's easier to shoot down the more extremes first, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then and then scale back down, because yeah, when
Speaker 1: you're talking about Glenn Manning, when you're talking about Godzilla,
Speaker 1: King Kong, any of the or any of these various
Speaker 1: giant creature movies we've discussed already, Um, there are engineering
Speaker 1: limits to the body size. Yeah, and I would totally
Speaker 1: agree with that. I think that Unfortunately, for the people
Speaker 1: who want to, you know, change their their genetic code
Speaker 1: to be twenty ft tall, it's just not gonna happen.
Speaker 1: That's just not the way humans are gonna work. And
Speaker 1: we'll try to explain why. So. The tallest man who
Speaker 1: ever lived, as far as we know, was a guy,
Speaker 1: an American guy named Robert Wadlow, who at the time
Speaker 1: of his death was eight feet and eleven point one
Speaker 1: inches tall, as almost nine ft tall two hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy two centimeters. That is so tall. If you see
Speaker 1: pictures of this guy, you're probably not imagining him tall enough. Uh,
Speaker 1: look up a picture, You've got to see it. Wadlow
Speaker 1: died at the age of twenty two though, unfortunately, and
Speaker 1: he had serious health issues that seemed to be associated
Speaker 1: with size. This might come as a surprise because our
Speaker 1: natural intuitions, as I've said earlier, sort of, I think
Speaker 1: we group height as a health indicator. We think of
Speaker 1: somebody who's very tall as somebody who's strong and healthy,
Speaker 1: and you know that they like their body is doing good.
Speaker 1: But the issue with Wadlow was that he he encountered
Speaker 1: multiple problems because of his size. His He suffered from
Speaker 1: a condition where his body produced excess growth hormone, and
Speaker 1: it was continuing to produce excess growth hormone as he
Speaker 1: kept growing, and this just kept making him larger and larger. Yes,
Speaker 1: I believe the condition here is the acronola. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. But anyway, so he had problems and
Speaker 1: for example, what led to his death was that Wadlow
Speaker 1: an infected blister on his foot from braces that he
Speaker 1: had to wear on his legs because of his size.
Speaker 1: And one of the problems that he would have is
Speaker 1: that he had very little sensation or feeling in his
Speaker 1: lower limbs. Again probably because of his size. The body
Speaker 1: is just not built to be that big and in
Speaker 1: many cases the supporting organ structures can't accommodate it. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so he got an infected blister that he wasn't
Speaker 1: really aware of because he had this lack of sensation
Speaker 1: in his lower limbs. And he died at the age
Speaker 1: of twenty two. And also I've read in several places
Speaker 1: that there was no sign when he died at the
Speaker 1: age of twenty two that his growth had stopped. He
Speaker 1: seemed to be still growing. So that's a sad story,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't introduce the idea that there are design
Speaker 1: constraints essentially on the human form. Yeah, I mean he
Speaker 1: You can also look at at other cases of acromegalay,
Speaker 1: at cases of gigantis and acromegalay in particular layer which
Speaker 1: is again this has caused when the anterior pituitary gland
Speaker 1: produces um excess growth hormone. UH. This can result in
Speaker 1: a number of different symptoms such as severe headache, arthritis,
Speaker 1: and carpal tunnel syndrome in a large heart, liver fibrosis,
Speaker 1: bile duct hyperplasia, hypertension, um diabetes, heart failure, kidney failure,
Speaker 1: as well as cancer and loss of vision. Because again
Speaker 1: it's just the design constraints. I often think about this
Speaker 1: in terms of like a business scenario. So say you
Speaker 1: have a food truck, right and you want to evolve that.
Speaker 1: You want to grow that into a you know, a
Speaker 1: brick and mortar restaurant, and for there, you want to
Speaker 1: grow that into a restaurant chain, and from there you
Speaker 1: want to grow it into a restaurant franchise. Each of
Speaker 1: those is not just a larger version of the preceding form.
Speaker 1: Each of those is a a more complex system um
Speaker 1: and and if you attempted to do to to achieve
Speaker 1: the goals of one with the with the smaller form,
Speaker 1: there would be massive problems. Yeah. I think that's a
Speaker 1: really good example. And the one I was actually going
Speaker 1: to use was the comparison of just regular buildings, like
Speaker 1: building a house versus building a skyscraper is a completely
Speaker 1: different type of project. It's not just a question of
Speaker 1: scaling up the house. You can't use the same materials
Speaker 1: and techniques that you would use in building a house
Speaker 1: to build a skyscraper because it's not gonna work. I've
Speaker 1: I've had to research skyscrapers for the other podcasts that
Speaker 1: I do here on uh how Stuff Works, on forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: where we talked about the future of skyscrapers, and one
Speaker 1: of the things that impressed itself upon me from that
Speaker 1: is that skyscrapers aren't static. They're not like a building.
Speaker 1: They're really more like a giant machine because you have
Speaker 1: to keep in mind all of these incredibly voluminous uh
Speaker 1: amounts of things that are coming in and out, all
Speaker 1: of the heating and air, all of the plumbing, plumbing,
Speaker 1: you gotta have pumps that get stuff up to the
Speaker 1: top of the skyscraper. Just the transportation of people exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: elevators managing elevators, Like so, if you're in a hundred
Speaker 1: story building, can you just have normal elevators that go
Speaker 1: up and down like normal elevators? How long are you
Speaker 1: going to be on the elevator if you're trying to
Speaker 1: get up to an upper floor. Uh So, you know
Speaker 1: they've got to have design considerations like that, express elevators
Speaker 1: and different types of elevator lobbies and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could remember correctly. This is like one of the
Speaker 1: major design problems with the highly conceptual um Illinois mile
Speaker 1: high skyscraper that Frank Lloyd right designed, because you know,
Speaker 1: tremendous mile high in the sky. But then when you
Speaker 1: start breaking down how people are going to get to
Speaker 1: the upper floors, how many elevators you're going to need,
Speaker 1: that's when you run into the real engineering problems that
Speaker 1: prevents such a structure from coming to reliship. What do
Speaker 1: you do if there's a fire drill? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's hard. It's bad enough when you just have a
Speaker 1: what you know, fifteen or those stories, yeah, much less
Speaker 1: a mile of skyscrape are up there. Yeah, So we
Speaker 1: should actually get into some of the examples of why
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense to just continue scaling up the
Speaker 1: human body from its normal size. Indeed, so there's a
Speaker 1: as an offer by the name of our McNeil Alexander,
Speaker 1: and he has a wonderful article titled engineering limits of
Speaker 1: the Body Size of land Animals. And this is actually
Speaker 1: available in a couple of different forms. I have it
Speaker 1: in a big book of scientific essays about like big
Speaker 1: questions about life on Earth. But he uses the example
Speaker 1: of King Kong. King Cong is a great example. It's
Speaker 1: a giant gorilla and uh as as you know, as
Speaker 1: as most people are aware. Yeah, but I thought it
Speaker 1: was a giant human and a gorilla costume. No, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a real gorilla now. But King Kong
Speaker 1: as a giant gorilla. If if he were to step
Speaker 1: off of the screen and exist in our real world,
Speaker 1: he would collapse under his own weight. He would be
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty five times the volume of a
Speaker 1: real ape loaded with one hundred and twenty five times
Speaker 1: the weight of a real gorilla, and his legs would
Speaker 1: just simply snap like kindling. So one way to look
Speaker 1: at this is to apply the spherical cow example. And
Speaker 1: what you've heard of us about you've heard about spherical cows, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: spherical cows in general concern. It's sometimes for any time
Speaker 1: you take an engineering problem and you like simplify something
Speaker 1: like we're talking about a cow, so will just make
Speaker 1: it a sphere so as to more easily talk about it.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's a criticism of sort of physics approaches
Speaker 1: to solving problems, but it actually works really well in
Speaker 1: this scenario. So assume the cow is a sphere, right,
Speaker 1: So as the sphere gets bigger, it's volume increases more
Speaker 1: rapidly than its surface area. Double the radius of a
Speaker 1: sphere and the surface area increases four times, and the
Speaker 1: volume increases eight times. So double something size and keep
Speaker 1: its proportions the same. Its weight doesn't double or even quadruple,
Speaker 1: it increases by a factor of eight. This gets into
Speaker 1: situations why you would to to take a small creature
Speaker 1: and make it bigger. You would have to drastically change
Speaker 1: its proportions to support the weight. So you know, Keen Kong,
Speaker 1: a giant human. The basic morphography of the creature would
Speaker 1: have to upgrade as well. Yeah, okay, so the strength
Speaker 1: of the molecules and the bonds that make up your
Speaker 1: bones is not going to get proportionally stronger. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be You're dealing with the same molecules either way, and
Speaker 1: the same issue as you'd be dealing with the same
Speaker 1: energy constraints either way, right right, Like, So a proportionally
Speaker 1: voluminous creature like this would have proportionally great energy needs
Speaker 1: and ways of dissipating excess heat energy to right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would just have to eat more bananas. You'd have
Speaker 1: to take into account. It's hair, you'd have to take
Speaker 1: into account, it's metabolism. So, as arm McNeil Alexander points
Speaker 1: out in his article, uh, a mammal one five times
Speaker 1: heavier than its original form, would need to metabolize forty
Speaker 1: times as fast, which means Coong would have to lose
Speaker 1: x has heat from his skin, which has only twenty
Speaker 1: five times the area of a real to eight skin
Speaker 1: due to proportions, and he has all that super thick
Speaker 1: fur five times as thick as a real guerrillas, which
Speaker 1: is not going to help matters either. So not only
Speaker 1: would call collapse under his own weight, he then overheat
Speaker 1: and die right there on the pavement before he could
Speaker 1: ever climb the skyscraper. So then what's going on with
Speaker 1: these incredibly large animals that we do see, like, for example,
Speaker 1: I I'm excluding water dwelling animals because once you're living
Speaker 1: in water, that seems like that's a very different kind
Speaker 1: of environment and different things are possible. But but these
Speaker 1: land dwelling animals, like the largest sauropods, big dinosaurs, what's
Speaker 1: going on with them? Well, I mean it's it's ultimately
Speaker 1: going to be more a matter of what's competitive in
Speaker 1: the struggle for existence, as as Alexander points out, because uh,
Speaker 1: I mean that's gonna be the deciding point. Can the
Speaker 1: can the market bear it? Can the can the market
Speaker 1: allow a restaurant this huge to exist. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's similar to the giant aircraft. Right, there's certainly
Speaker 1: giant aircraft that can be built, but will they be built? Well,
Speaker 1: is there actually a reason to build it? And then
Speaker 1: if built, is there going to be a reason for
Speaker 1: it to remain a part of our aeronautic um you
Speaker 1: know Kingdom? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wonder And now
Speaker 1: I've not looked this up. It just occurred to me.
Speaker 1: I wonder if there's an upper limit on the mass
Speaker 1: of a thing that we can make fly? Is there
Speaker 1: just an object so heavy that there's no way to
Speaker 1: make a vehicle this heavy fly? That's a good question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is the what is the heaviest possible air vehicle?
Speaker 1: This would be a fun one to explore, especially in
Speaker 1: light of you know, some of these Marvel films that
Speaker 1: have come out with the like the aerial aircraft carrier ships.
Speaker 1: You know, well, I mean I guess it would. It
Speaker 1: would depend on whatever is the maximum limit on the
Speaker 1: the opposing forces that we can create. I'm assuming we're
Speaker 1: not using like gigantic balloons and stuff like that. Going
Speaker 1: with with with fat s flying airplane style, Yeah, balloons
Speaker 1: tend to be the best way to get them up there.
Speaker 1: Failing that magical anti gravity. Yeah, but I think it
Speaker 1: should be clear at this point that you can't just
Speaker 1: scale up the form. And uh and and you mentioned
Speaker 1: also one thing about insects, right, this this also applies
Speaker 1: to other films of the nineteen fifties, right. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got the Giant Spider Invasion Earth versus the giant
Speaker 1: spider huge ants in them them as huge ants. They're
Speaker 1: big bugs everywhere. Yeah, I mean even things like I
Speaker 1: hesitate to drag those xenomorphant into all of this. But
Speaker 1: take say the Gartham from the Dark Crystal, you know,
Speaker 1: giant presumably exoskeletal creatures, or the giant crabs of of
Speaker 1: of various beloved works of British horror um. These largely
Speaker 1: just don't work when you start blowing them up that
Speaker 1: big because they're exoskeletons. Would have to just get increasingly
Speaker 1: and eventually impossibly thick to support them, because the exo
Speaker 1: skeleton is not just armor, it is a skeleton. It
Speaker 1: is a supportive structure. Yeah. And if you'll allow me
Speaker 1: to go on a quick tangent from human height here
Speaker 1: I do. I looked into this a little bit because
Speaker 1: I thought this was interesting. I was wondering, why don't
Speaker 1: giant spiders exists. I'm not sure exactly what the limitations
Speaker 1: on the upper on the upper end of insects and
Speaker 1: spiders are. Could we have bert I Gordon's giant grasshoppers
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And my guess was that it
Speaker 1: actually might have something to do with their open circulatory system,
Speaker 1: being you know, spiders and insects don't have full body
Speaker 1: blood vessels like we do that maintain blood pressure and
Speaker 1: keep everything going to the right place. They've got open
Speaker 1: circulatory systems, meaning they might have some main artery just
Speaker 1: like one big one or something like that, and then
Speaker 1: through a lot of the body cavity the body fluids
Speaker 1: in the blood or they don't have blood exactly like ours,
Speaker 1: but their oxygen distributing juices are just kind of loose,
Speaker 1: they go wherever. It seems like that system works less
Speaker 1: and less well the bigger you get, the more you've
Speaker 1: got gravity pulling down on those body fluids. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I decided to look into this, and what do you know,
Speaker 1: I could not find any scholarly articles on why insects
Speaker 1: and spiders can't grow to the size of tour buses. Uh.
Speaker 1: This seems like a massive oversight. Somebody needs to start
Speaker 1: a peer reviewed journal for this. But I did find
Speaker 1: some pop science articles that at least interviewed some insect
Speaker 1: physiology experts to get their informed opinions. And so there
Speaker 1: was a twenty twelve piece on Science World that spoke
Speaker 1: to a few experts about why we don't encounter giant spiders. Uh.
Speaker 1: The spider systematist Wayne Madison of the University of British
Speaker 1: Columbia just suggested the general issue of scaling like we've
Speaker 1: been talking about here. A guy named Rod Crawford at
Speaker 1: the Burke Museum in Seattle suggested that the main problem
Speaker 1: could be respiration. Actually, because the spider has to oxygenate
Speaker 1: its tissues and purge carbon dioxide through a system based
Speaker 1: on breathing tubes called trachea and book lungs and also
Speaker 1: copper based blood, and its respiratory system just would not
Speaker 1: scale up because it couldn't get enough oxygen to all
Speaker 1: the parts of its body fast enough. And the author
Speaker 1: points out that this could be the reason we see
Speaker 1: fossil evidence of much larger insects like you know, those
Speaker 1: huge hawk sized dragonflies living at a time when Earth's
Speaker 1: atmosphere was more oxygen rich than it was today. So
Speaker 1: there used to be a higher composition of oxygen in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, and so these less efficient uh, you know,
Speaker 1: bug breathing systems could could get more oxygen to more
Speaker 1: tissues that way, allowing a bigger bug. There was also
Speaker 1: a twenty twelve article in Live Science that interviewed an
Speaker 1: insect physiologist named John Harrison at Arizona State, and he
Speaker 1: had a couple of hypotheses. He mentioned the exoskeleton limitation
Speaker 1: problem that we mentioned, but he also notes that one
Speaker 1: city has shown that exoskeletons don't necessarily become thicker as
Speaker 1: insects get larger, so this may not actually be the constraint. Uh.
Speaker 1: He also he points to the open circulatory system that
Speaker 1: I mentioned as a potential problem. Uh. He also mentions
Speaker 1: the respiration issue and uh, and these these ancient dragonflies
Speaker 1: that existed three hundred million years ago that could have
Speaker 1: these giant wingspans, huge bodies run around preying on other
Speaker 1: on other animals. But finally he's he suggests something that's
Speaker 1: interesting to me, which is that it's uh, not just
Speaker 1: a physical architectural constraint, but an evolutionary constraint. This came
Speaker 1: up earlier when we were talking about pressures on the
Speaker 1: island rule. You know, why might why might uh? Sometimes
Speaker 1: animals want to be smaller and he he mentions that
Speaker 1: bigger insects prove more enticing meals to insect eating predators
Speaker 1: like birds and mammals, so they've got more nutrition in them.
Speaker 1: They're they're just better to eat, and it's harder for
Speaker 1: them to hide and go out and noticed. So there
Speaker 1: could simply be a strong selection pressure against larger insects
Speaker 1: and spiders based on the rate of predation. There's just
Speaker 1: so many predators out there air. It just doesn't it
Speaker 1: doesn't pay, evolutionarily speaking, to get bigger. And so finally,
Speaker 1: I want to conclude with the idea of I wonder
Speaker 1: if there's anything like that that applies to human beings
Speaker 1: other than just the limits on what's architecturally possible with
Speaker 1: our body plans as they are. Are there any selection
Speaker 1: pressures that would keep humans smaller? I mean, it can't
Speaker 1: tend to think of any, but that doesn't mean they're
Speaker 1: not there. Maybe I just don't have enough imagination on this,
Speaker 1: like scenarios in which a larger person would would not
Speaker 1: have a like a breathing advantage exactly. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're at the top of the food chain and have
Speaker 1: been for so very long. It's hard to imagine predation
Speaker 1: playing in you could I mean, I guess you could
Speaker 1: maybe make a case for uh, sexual compatibility between males
Speaker 1: and females in some scenarios without you know, getting too
Speaker 1: nitty gritty and the details. But I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know that could conceivably be an issue if two creatures
Speaker 1: cannot physically engage with each other, um, you know, that
Speaker 1: could become that could that could apply at some pressure
Speaker 1: on the evolution of the form. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything really, but I uh, but
Speaker 1: I wonder maybe you listeners out there have some ideas
Speaker 1: what what could be any possible evolutionary selection pressures favoring
Speaker 1: a smaller human being? Mm hmm. You know, I'm instantly reminded,
Speaker 1: of course, of of just in terms of dimorphism here
Speaker 1: of a cuttlefish, various cuttlefish where you have both the
Speaker 1: large males and the smaller males, both vying to breed
Speaker 1: with the female, and the larger male breeds by just
Speaker 1: sort of you know, fighting off competitors. Then the smaller
Speaker 1: male will use deception, will sneak in there, will pretend
Speaker 1: to be a female so as you get closer to
Speaker 1: the female, sometimes taking on the appearance of a male
Speaker 1: on one side of body while taking on the appearance
Speaker 1: of the female on the other side, and getting in
Speaker 1: there close enough and then breeding with the female while
Speaker 1: the big scary male is guarding it. So this being
Speaker 1: an example where you see both big and small bodies,
Speaker 1: both large and small forms having reproductive advantages. So that's
Speaker 1: one possibility that's fascinating. I hope that doesn't so much
Speaker 1: apply to human being. I don't think it's It applies
Speaker 1: one to one to the complexities of human human love
Speaker 1: and human reproduction. But it's worth keeping in the back
Speaker 1: of your mind. Yeah, or anything else. I think that's it.
Speaker 1: I mean, we covered everything from phantasm to the amazing
Speaker 1: colossal man, from giant spiders to giant guerrillas to people
Speaker 1: in space, so I feel like we, uh we we
Speaker 1: did it justice. In the meantime, check out stuff to
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