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How tall should you be? It seems an odd question, but the answer may
help to illustrate how fundamentally unsustainable, human industrial civilization is.
In the modern, developed world, we are on average, taller than we ever have been and
average height seems to be increasing with each susequent generation.
If this continues, how big will human beings get? How big can they get? And at what point,
do people become too big? Perhaps we're already too big?
Physical constraints limit body size to a degree and tall people tend to die younger
than their shorter counterparts of an equal socio-economic status.
However, tall people are more likely to be of a high socio-economic status, so from a
Darwinian perspective, thios off-sets their innate health problems. Rich people live longer,
regardless of height. So why are human beings getting taller? The
obvious answer is improved nutriton. We eat more and are bigger as a result. This is true
in part, but there is more to it than that. The percieved wisdom is that we started out
as hunter-gatherers, eeking out an existence from the Natural world, until we discovered
farming. Then we produced more food and got taller.
As improvements in farming came along, nutrition improved and our height increased. With new
technologies, this increase of nutrition and height, continued further. However, this may
be true for a tiny minority of elites, but for the vast majority, this is not what really
happened. In the late 1800s, the tallest known people
in the world, were the Plains Indians of North America - hunter-gatherers. And it seems to
be the case that most hunter-gathers in productive natural environments, were relatively tall.
IN fact, the introduction of agriculture in Europe, resulted in poorer nutrion and shorter
people. With the introduction of mechanised industrythey got shorter still and it was
not until the mid 20th century, that Europeans out-grew their hunter-gatherer forbears. That
is, once oil energy came to the fore and massively increased productivity.
Since then, one can also add to this our seeming cultural preference for tall people - tall
people are more likely to pass job interviews, get pay rises and most importantly, tall men
have more *** partners. When and why women started sexually selecting
taller men is another question entirely, as such preferences seem to be an alien concept
to hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist today. *** dimorphism regarding height
is actually not that common in hunter-gatherers. It seems likely that this kind of *** selection,
evolved in larger, less personal and potentially more violent societies.
So, that is how we ended up being taller, on average, than we ever have been. But are
we too tall? On average, not yet, but there are plenty of people, for whom the answer
to that question is, yes. Some people are simply tpp physically large
to sustain themselves and survive, unless they live in a modern civilization, that is
awash with excess energy, from oil. But how tall is too tall? How tall should
you be? Well the answer seems to be somewhere around the six foot mark. That seems to be
the maximum height for hunter-gatherers, past or present - some individuals may have been
taller, but they were probably reliant on excess produced by others.
The bigger you are, the more energy it takes to sustain you and the more energy you must
expend, in order to survive. At some point, there is equilibrium between energy consumption
and expenditure, that is the most efficient and that point seems to be well below six
foot, in our 'natural' state. This is not to say, in the event of some kind
of apocalypse, tall people won't survive. Still having clothes, tools and weapons, would
probably save enough energy, to enable relatively easy survival.
However, it is a certainty that oil will run out and unless a renewable or inexhaustable
alternative can replace it, then modern humans must get smaller, or perish.
We are so immersed in our industrial civilization, that our very bodies reflect how unsustainable
it is. We have bred many domestic animals that could
not survive naturally and it seems we may be unwittingly doing the same to ourselves.
Have we become irreversably domesticated?