The Incredible Shrinking Man

Even within a speculative research such as The Incredible Shrinking Man it is difficult to imagine what the average human body will look like if we decide to shrink to 50 centimetres. However, based on the specific physical adaptations to environment and our various diets and different functionalities of the human body, perhaps some presumptions [...]

Cope’s rule, that species tend to increase body size over time, seems to reinforce the present day believe that bigger is better. Why else, if not for evolutionary advantages, would species evolve towards bigger size? Unfortunately it is precisely this deterministic thinking that we’ve become a victim of. In fact growth towards large size cannot [...]

Cope’s rule states that, as geologic time progresses, body size increases. Edward Drinker Cope, the dinosaur fossil hunter who postulated the rule at the end of the 19th century, based his theory on the analysis of over 1500 fossil families. The younger species in his collection were on average almost 10% larger than the older species [...]

Palaeontologists studying fossilised horses have found a direct link between the size of mammals and climate change. According to Dr. Jonathan Bloch, curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History, as temperatures go up size goes down, and vice versa. Bloch: ‘Horses started out small 56 million years ago, about the size of a small dog. What’s [...]

Lucia Zarate was a famous 19th century dwarf and, at just over 2 kg, the lightest adult person ever to be recorded. Her untimely death when she got trapped in a snowstorm acts as a warning. The smaller body is much more sensitive to external temperature change because of its greater surface area (skin) by weight. If we [...]

Research shows that missing copies of genes or other sections of DNA could be responsible for up to half of the genetic impact on our height. The genetic abnormalities – known as copy number variants (CNV) – are alterations within the chromosome  which means a cell has either too many or too few copies of [...]

Height is a classic polygenic trait which means it’s influenced by multiple genetic and environmental factors. Up to 90% of the variation in height is determined by inherited factors. Until now only a fraction of this 90% has been profiled succesfully. However, recent advances in genetics and genomics now permit comprehensive genome-wide surveys of common [...]

There’s a 40% difference in height between the shortest 5 percentile and the tallest 5 percentile of the adult human population. That puts humans amongst the Earth’s most hypervariable species. Shrinking the body will create an even greater height gap, Younger generations will be shorter than older ones until (after several generations) the entire population [...]

Humanity’s insular dwarf Homo floresiensis, a human species that lived up until 12.000 year ago on the island of Flores, was only 100 to 110 cm tall and weighed approximately 25 kg. With its small size came a equally small brain of just 380 cm3. Modern man has an average brain size of 1250 cm3.
Although H. floresiensis’ [...]

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a neurological condition affecting human visual perception, in which objects within an affected section of the visual field appear larger (macropsia) or smaller (micropsia) than normal, causing the subject to feel smaller (or larger) than they actually are. In Lewis Carroll’s famous 19th century novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the title [...]