Category: Biology

The Cell Cycle: Détente

April 7, 2015 By arne hendriks 0

The Cell Cycle is a series of articles on the mechanisms and substances that regulate cell growth. The contemporary cell climate is one of constant biological and cultural high pressure to grow, to proliferate, to expand and conquer. The Incredible Shrinking Man wants to investigate…

Desiccation Tolerance

September 15, 2014 By arne hendriks 0

Small people have more skin than tall people, in relation to body volume. With every 10% decrease in body height, body volume decreases with 27%, while skin surface decreases with only 19%. This means, among other things, that smaller humans dehydrate more rapidly. There’s more evaporation…

Catch-Up Growth

July 8, 2014 By arne hendriks 2

Catch-up growth is the accelerated growth of an organism following a period of slowed development. Such slowing down is most often the result of environmental influences such as food scarcity, sudden changes in temperature, or other environmental stress factors. After the situation is normalised, growth…

Cell Culture

March 17, 2014 By arne hendriks 1

The central problem with curbing the growth of the average human body is the deeply embedded desire of each cell to become two cells. This process of division, known as mitosis, represents the essence of our challenge. Cells don’t want to limit themselves. They want to…

Paradoxical Frog

January 14, 2014 By arne hendriks 2

Pseudis Paradoxa is a common frog living in the region between Colombia and Surinam. Its development however is far from common and serves as a reminder that growth doesn’t necessarily have to do with becoming larger. Like most frogs Pseudis Paradoxa starts out as frogspawn…

Turtle Tears

December 16, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Size strongly influences our ability to recognise and benefit from specific small scale possibilities that would be available if man was a lot smaller. The act of shrinking promotes the Feynmanian awareness that our large size keeps us from a much richer experience of reality, as well…

Japanese Miniatures: Pygmy Squid Bukkake

December 9, 2013 By arne hendriks 3

Bigger males, both human and animal, are generally more successful in attracting and being selected by females. But not in all species. The Incredible Shrinking Man seeks inspiration from those few species where females favour the small, like Idiosepius paradoxus, the Japanese Pygmy Squid. The mating rituals…

It’s Not (All) About Genes

August 2, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

There is a strong correspondance between your height and the average height of your parents. In Western societies height is up to 90% heritable. But it’s no excuse. Heritability statistics do not reflect the relative importance of genes in explaining height. They reflect what causes…

Rete Mirabile

October 1, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

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…

Brown Fat Thermogenesis

September 25, 2011 By arne hendriks 1

If we shrink to 50 centimeters controlling body temperature becomes a real challenge. Large mass bodies can much easier deal with differences in outside temperature. But perhaps a simple evolutionary adaptation, observed in small mammals and human infants, points towards a possible solution. Biologist Per-Ivar…

Monkey Lungs

September 11, 2011 By arne hendriks 2

According to the flamboyant geneticist and evolutionary biologist  J.B.S. Haldane, comparative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume. For human lungs this meant that as we grew larger, in order to bring enough oxygen to all parts…

Helium Speech

May 24, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

People with growth anomaly, like Jyoti, often have very high pitched voices. It’s a tone of voice that takes some getting used to. And we might have to if we decide to shrink ourselves. In a rather humorous clip from a German TV show we…

B-Movie Biology

December 29, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The shrinkfilm archive features many 50’s movies of debatable quality. And there’s a reason: B-movies of the 50’s are a rich source of inspiration for size-related speculation.  The premise of the 50’s B-movie is invariably to take something out of its usual context -make people…

Uppers & Downers

December 1, 2010 By arne hendriks Off

Hormones play a key role in growth as the chemical mediators with which the growth process is stimulated, or slowed down. Most hormones are controlled by a negative feedback inhibition loop. If we are to shrink the human species manipulation of this loop may represent one…

Missing Molars & Microdontia

November 19, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In a 2008 discovery of the remains of small humans (130 – 140 cm) on the Micronesian island of Palau it was observed that the teeth seemed unusually large in comparison to the jaw bone. Discoverer Lee Berger speculates that this is the result of…

The Shrinking Iguana

September 20, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

Much to his surprise, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University has found that in times of famine, marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands shrink in length and then regrow when food is plentiful again. “For vertebrates, it’s sort of a dogma that they don’t shrink,”…

Shrink Mankind, Stop Working.

June 2, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

According to this article in TIME Magazine children with unemployed fathers are shorter. This is probably the result of what auxologists call environmental insults like an unhealthy living situation and low quality food. The article also states that taller people are healthier people. Or to…

Insular Gigantism & Dwarfism

May 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

On islands, it occurs relatively frequently that large species of animals tend to get smaller and small species tend to get larger. The greater interspecies competition or pressure of carnivores on the continent may actually force them beyond the limits of their optimum size. They…

Prisoners of Size?

May 8, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In the short article Size and Shape the late paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould remembers how he once overheard a children’s conversation in a New York playground:  “Two young girls were discussing the size of dogs. One asked: “Can a dog be as…