Category: Shrink Activism

Kleiber’s Law

September 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Larger animals have relatively slower metabolisms than small ones. A mouse must eat about a third of its body mass every day not to starve whereas a human can survive on only 2%. The relationship follows a power law: basal metabolic rate (R) is proportional…

Hyperthermal Shrinking

August 28, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Global warming has the potential to shrink the human species. As we’ve discussed before mammals, and many species of birds and fish, shrink when the climate heats up. During the last two hyperthermals, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago) and the Eocene Thermal…

Darwin’s Finches

March 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

If the human species embraces a desire to become smaller, as it embraced the desire to become taller in the past and present, then it is of some interest to know how fast this desire could influence human size and if desire alone is enough.…

Top 5 Shrinking Superheroes

February 9, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

#5 Shrinking Violet (Salu Digby):  Violet is from the planet Imsk. Originally, she could only shrink down to subatomic sizes, if necessary. Later she is able to grow to giant sizes as well. #4 The Atom (Ray Palmer): Dr. Raymond Palmer is a physicist and professor specializing in matter compression as a…

Degrowth: Down to the Kohr

January 31, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Leopold Kohr was an economist and political scientist known for his opposition to the “cult of bigness” in social organisation and the inspiration for Fritz Schumacher’s iconic publication Small is beautiful and the Degrowth movement. Here are two quotes from his 1951 book The Breakdown of Nations. On…

Wadlow’s Curve

January 20, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Measuring 272 cm the American citizen Robert Wadlow was the tallest person in recent history. Wadlow was so tall and heavy he needed braces to walk. Also his limbs had became slightly insensitive at the extremities. When one of the metal straps of his braces…

Bigger Before Better

December 22, 2016 By arne hendriks Off

A common leadership philosophy in business is to get better before you get bigger.  With evolution it doesn’t work that way. Evolution doesn’t plan ahead. If it would, the human body would certainly not be getting taller in a world of dwindling resources. Evolution is…

The Namazu

January 1, 2014 By arne hendriks 0

In 19th century Japan earthquakes were often represented by and even attributed to an enormously oversized catfish, the namazu. According to popular folklore under normal circumstances this large fish was kept under control by a deity. If the god however, was not managing his worldly affairs,…

Growth Antagonists: The Estrogenic Gadfly

October 25, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Estrogens are the primary female sex hormones. They play a pivotal role in growth, especially during puberty when estrogen modulates growth in coordinance with growth hormones and IGF-1. But estrogen plays an equally important role in ending the growth cycle. It stimulates the closure of…

Celebrate Lactose Intolerance

October 5, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Milk consumption is one of the engines of the global increase in human height. Therefore we should be grateful for lactose intolerance (the inability to digest milk). It’s what’s keeping people from all over the world from an even more devastating and pointless growth in…

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,”…

An Act of Rebellion

September 14, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

In The Tin Drum, one of the great postwar literary classics, the protagonist Oskar Matzerath decides to stop growing at age 3. He explains to the reader that since he was born with a fully developed consciousness he could observe adults, and their ways. Since he…