The Incredible Shrinking Man

We eat 2500% more sugar then we did about a century ago. In his book Pure, White and Deadly John Yudkin associates this increased intake with a number of serious health risks.  He also points out a relationship between the increased sugar consumption and increased height. Yet no one seems to bother to ask if these health risks may be the result of the greater height. If anything it is treated as the one good thing that came out of this increase.

It is generally believed that greater height is the result of better quality proteins in our food, yet  in this paper on the sugar consumption of Canadian Eskimos it is found that if a diet holds less protein but at the same time increases sugar intake, birth size still increases. This puts being tall in another perspective: more as a sign of over-consumption of low quality nutrients, and not the sign of our greater overall physical health.

This study by Jessica Ash and Gordon G. Gallup Jr. suggests that human cranial capacity as an indicator of brain size grew dramatically during our evolution, and that variations in global temperature as well as progressive shifts toward global cooling account for as much as 50 percent of the variation in cranial capacity. The research utilized several measures of paleotemperatures and a sample of 109 fossilized hominid skulls collected over the past 2 million years.

The authors suggest that a key environmental trigger to the evolution of larger brains was the need to devise ways to keep warm and manage the fluctuations in food availability that resulted from cold weather. In species other than humans, problems posed by cooler climates were solved by adaptations such as hibernation and migration, and by metabolic adaptations including fur and the development of fat deposits. During human evolution, however, the authors surmise that solutions to the problems of cold weather and a scarce food supply featured detailed and progressively more refined cognitive and intellectual strategies, such as the development of cooperative hunting techniques and more sophisticated tools and weapons. Increased brain capacity also brought with it the use of fire as a means to keep warm and cook, adaptations in clothing and shelter, and the development of more refined social skills.

Gallup and Ash suggest that while our understanding of brain evolution remains incomplete, the study provides evidence of the role of climate and migration away from the equator as selective forces in promoting human intelligence, and that the recent trend toward global warming may be reversing a trend that led to brain expansion in humans.

Global warming also seems to be a key element in shrinking animals like sheep, fish, plankton, bacteria and birds and Drosophila flies.

One of the goals of The Incredible Shrinking Man project is to archive existing forms of the desire to shrink. It’s difficult to know how many people have this  desire. But maybe online behaviour and the public games we play shed some light on this. For example the online  multiplayer game World of Warcraft allows various  ‘magical’  shrinking spells to be cast by its users. Here is a wide array of shrink clips and pictures in World of Warcraft from the SW website The Minimizer.

Richard Feynman’s groundbreaking lecture at Caltech in 1959, There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom,  introduced the idea of nanotechnology. Since then we are as obsessed with miniaturizing our tools, as we are with growing tall. It seems strange that our tools keep getting smaller as we get bigger. Or do they ‘know’ something we cannot see (yet)?

The second law of thermodynamics, also called the entropy law,  says that the disorder of a spontaneous system is a function of its mass and energy. Entropy is a measure of disorder, decay, or chaos witin a system. More mass and energy mean more possible states a system can be in. Thus, since larger people have more mass and energy, their bodies have a greater potential for increased disorder of their cells, tissues and organs. Unfortunately, repair is imperfect and disorder accumulates.

Thomas T. Samaras makes the point that a smaller person has up to 40 trillion cells less that are subjected to harmfull processes and substances  and thus have a greater chance at longevity. If we shrink our bodies to an average of 50 centimeters that will be hundreds of trillion cells.

The Baseball Encyclopedia provides statistical data on thousands of professional baseball players.  Apart from stating batting averages and field positions etcetera, it gives information on height and weight. If a players dies during his professional career this is also mentioned.  In a study conducted by Thomas Samaras it was found that tall players live 1,2 years less for every extra inch of height. A similar study by Dennis D. Miller, of basketball players of 200 cm and taller, found they only averaged around 50 years of age when deceased.

Airlines have tried to compensate the increase in passenger size and weight by adding extra taxes and designing larger and more fuel efficient airplanes but surely there are limits to how big our vehicles can become. Shrinking on the other hand would open up a world of opportunities for retrofitters. Redesigning and repurposing our systems and vehicles of transport could turn out to be one of the most rewarding aspects of becoming small. A 50 centimeter person weighs about 2 kilograms.

How many half meter people fit in a 747?

Dwarfs, throughout the ages, have aroused curiosity. Some, like the American circus artist General Tom Thumb, even achieved great wealth by cleverly turning smallness into a spectacle. Certainly one of the most remarkable stories in this category is that of the Italian dwarf Sebastiano Biavati. Biavati was both curiosity and curator of Ferdinando Cospi’s famous curiosity cabinet Museo Cospiano, in Bologna in the 17th century. It was his duty to take care of Cospi’s fabulous (in both meanings of the word) collection as well as display himself to its curious visitors.

Dr. Julian O’Dea proposes an interesting theory as to why ethnic groups living in the rainforest are often very small. Adult Pygmy males, for example, are less then 150cm on average. According to Dr. O’Dea this could be because of the near absense of ultraviolet light in the gloomy atmosphere of the rainforest. O’Dea: “I used an ultraviolet light meter to take readings in rainforest at Kuranda and nearby regions in North Queensland in August 1994. The readings in the open – outside the rainforest – during fine weather ranged from 70 to 245 units. The readings inside the rainforest ranged from 0 to 5.”  Ultraviolet light of the B type (UVB) helps the body make vitamin D, an important building block in the growth of bones and cells.  It would explain why children always seem to grow so quick during the summer holidays and it’s yet another reason to stay out of the sun.

Tuning down the amount of growth hormone secreted by the pituitary gland in order to decrease human size is easier said then done. Growth hormones are responsible for a number of important processes in the body including the increase of calcium retention and the strengthening and increase of mineralization of bone. It’s also an important factor in increased muscle mass, protein synthesis and the stimulation of the growth of all organs with the exception of the brain. It reduces the ability of the liver to take up glucose and it stimulates the immune system. For this and many other reasons, reducing the production of growth hormone is much too simplistic a solution to shrink the human species. Growth, an therefor reversing growth, is a very complex process.