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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (186048)	4/5/2004 7:04:31 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572780

The article makes some weak arguments or at least arguments that are weak if they are supposed to be proving your point. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental And according to the article not just environmental but also based on and a sign of success and healthy living. You can look at various tribal groups in Africa and many very short tribes have similar lifestyles with tall tribes. The Germanic Barbarians had a far harder life then the Roman but the Romans where smaller, probably at least part of this was due to the fact that protein made up a higher percentage of the German's diet but the Romans had a steadier diet and by most measures where far more successful in their every day lives. Foe example their health care was of course primitive but it was better then what the Germans got. Also the fact that the Germans where taller then the people around them over 1000 years ago suggest that to the extent that they are taller then Americans or British or French that it may be due to genetic reasons. For that matter even if the Germans truly are healthier then Americans that isn't a sign that they are wealthier or more successful at achieving their goals. Americans generally have all the resources they need to eat a very healthy diet as do most Europeans. Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. Charlemagne and any number of other individual medieval Europeans may have been very tall. But the typical European of the time was noticeably shorter then today. I doubt that this is entirely due to genetics (although it probably plays a part), in this case the environment probably was a factor. Charlemagne could get as much protein as he wanted, but the typical medieval peasant was not so lucky. The typical lower class Frenchman at the time the Bastille was stormed might have had a better diet then the medieval peasant but it was probably not a steady healthy diet. Most historians, if they thought about height at all, tended to assume that it was tied to income. The more people earn, the better they eat; the better they eat, the taller they grow. “Men grow taller and faster the wealthier their country,” the French hygienist and statistician Louis-René Villermé wrote in 1829. “In other words, misery . . . produces short people.” Fogel knew it wasn’t that simple. In other words its very questionable whether the fact (if indeed it is a fact) that Germans are a bit taller then Americans on the average means that they are healthier because they have better lives. Around the time of the Civil War, Americans’ heights predictably decreased: Union soldiers dropped from sixty-eight to sixty-seven inches in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, and similar patterns held for West Point cadets, Amherst students, and free blacks in Maryland and Virginia. Not that I care much whether he is right or wrong in this specific point but at the time of the Civil War there all the sudden where many more Union soldiers. If people who would want to be soldiers before where for some reason taller then the average population then the additional draftees would bring the average height down. A similar situation would apply for free blacks in Maryland and VA. During the civil war blacks probably had a better chance to escape and after it they where all free. If the taller slaves where taller because they where healthier they might have had greater ability to escape or otherwise gain freedom. The disruption of the civil war might have made it easier for less healthy slaves to escape, and some would have been freed by the Union Army, and then after the war they where all free. You aren't comparing the same group of people from year to year. Basically the article takes some solid facts, some uncertain "facts", and some reasonable guesses and throws them together. It doesn't really hold up enough to show that Europeans are healthier then we are, much less that they ware wealthier (to be fair I don't think it is even trying to assert the 2nd idea but I think you may be trying to use the article to assert the 2nd idea). “There were twenty-five thousand of us Hungarian refugees, and not one of them I knew didn’t make it,” Komlos told me. “Not one of us didn’t aspire to and reach the middle class. This was the generation of George Soros. This was the generation of the guy who founded Intel. I had cousins and second cousins—everybody became lawyers, accountants, professors.” He’d been back to Chicago recently, he said, and the poverty and urban decay had come as a shock after Germany’s tidy inner cities. “But, if you look at the Turks in Germany or the Algerians in France, there aren’t that many who can advance up the social ladder.” He shrugged. “America is still a land of opportunity.” I agree with that. Of course their are groups in America that typically achieve less then the average American, but there is probably more opportunity here then in Europe. Tim