Yeah but I guess I kept hoping, expecting we have more advances in medicine now to help with that.
Are you tall? This new piece made me selfishly think about how I am 6’4 and all of the statistical evidence suggests height is bad for longevity.
Anyway, I was also sad for the man too I thought he was great on the show.
No. I am not especially tall. The women in my family are probably on the taller side but not basketball playing tall. It’s just hard to accept in a world where we can perform face, skin and hand transplants, use organ donors, even live donors… we haven’t figure out a way to keep the big ones alive longer. I realize they’re probably a tiny portion of the population, and it’s not a Hollywood style disease getting lots of money but… to accept that anyone over a certain height is very likely going to have a short life, yeah i can’t accept that that is the best we can do.
6’5" here, and my younger brother is 6’7". I worry about that too.
But, our height is “very tall” and not extremely tall. Basketball athletes live to be old right?
Well I found a study with an interesting data set, that actually has age of baseball players in the first chart.
The short version is that tall people die younger on average. That moving from my height to yours (6’1" to 6’5") roughly translates to about 3 years off of life span. I’ve always taken it, though can not find it currently, that the slope sharpens drastically once you cross the 7’ mark.
Well rest-assured that us tall-ies would probably have some pretty big advantages in caveman times. If we were still living that way.
Or… err…
Start having to live that way again.
You would be too slow…
Well we know via evolution people are taller, so taller must be better, for our species anyway. But for the super tall, there must be something we can do, if not today some day.
I think it is more cultural selection than actual evolution. I think that you could easily make the argument that smaller might be more viable from an evolutionary standpoint. Man has only gotten larger in the last few centuries.
I think North Korea tells us it’s more than just cultural though. And speaking of cultural, how is that not actual evolution? If you’re a 4’5" guy who is less likely to have children… that’s literal evolution. Not everything in evolution has to do with hunting… breeding is a big part too.
Except the context was surviving in prehistoric times where I don’t think taller was necessarily better.
Well this is about the loss of a very tall and young man so I won’t dive into it any further other than to say overtime, humans tend to average taller than we were historically.
This individual was clearly extraordinary, and I am sorry we lost him.
I don’t really have the time delving into the depths of how sexual selection and traits works, but if you really are interested you should read up on it, fascinating stuff.
But, generally, most scientists don’t see height as any sort of evolutionary trait, as it just doesn’t match up with a theoretical evolutionary growth curve. Increased height, more likely, has to do with the far greater increase in childhood nutrition and the healthiness of the available diet.
Now, you mentioned the DPRK above, and many height issues with that country actually stems back to a very large nationwide food shortage period in the 90’s where many children had seriously stunted growth.
That said, there’s a very strong genetic component to height - it’s one of the most studied complex traits in human genetics, because for every study we do on someone for any condition, we tend to gather height and weight, so it allows one to perform meta analysis on hundreds of thousands of people.
One of my old bosses (Joel Hirschhorn) has been studying this for quite a while, and there’s a cool NPR story on recent findings here
Well sure but as species if we’re doing well and eating well we tend to get taller, take a subgroup of us who don’t have those things and they get shorter… so you think if we do well we just have genes that screw us because being tall doesn’t matter and we don’t need it. Maybe if we ate really well and did well we got shorter… that would make sense. That’s not what we see though. Don’t stop at Korea either, look at Japan too. We like to look at their aging population but guess what, they’re also getting… taller.
The traits that are selected for are those that get you to procreation and make you more successful at it - and possibly allow your offspring to survive until they can take care of themselves. After that, you’re useless. Somebody in their mid 30’s, in the long view of human history, as already done their job to pass their genome down to their kids. It doesn’t matter if they die at that point, from a selective pressure point of view.
I think this discussion would best be continued in another thread, as not to bump the GOT HBO feed. But I am seeing a lot of misconceptions about how evolution works.
This is a pretty good overview about post-industrial height increases, and the current leveling off we are seeing.
I was going to ask who the heck Mag the Mighty was and then I remembered I haven’t watched the last season yet. Guess that’s where I would have seen him?
4th season. He’s the giant that goes into the Wall tunnel.
Oh that was a dude? I just figured he was CG.