Scientist Confirms Americans in Decline

The UK Telegraph has repeated a news blurb from the highest attainments of European science, which could've been titled "Americans Suck".

Americans have lost their height advantage, reports Kate Connolly in Munich

The New World has lost its superiority over the Old - at least in terms of physical stature - and John Komlos has the evidence to prove it. His records, including files on "runaway slaves", "indentured servants" and "West Point graduates", bear testament to the American decline.

As long as a story has the phrase "American decline" the European press will jump all over it. Now if they can just explain what this decline is, exactly.

Tech Central Station has already talked about this bit of "research". His samples for American heights are from the CDC which was intentionally oversampling the Americans who were most likely to develop problems, the poor and minorities.

Earlier this month the UK Guardian had a slightly more biased article than the already extremely biased UK Telegraph article.

Researchers have made a startling discovery: Americans are shrinking. A nation once famed for its strapping, well-nourished youth is gradually diminishing in physical stature.

This is European science at its finest. They can look at a table of averages. From there, they go flying off the deep end as they vault, lemming-like, into the murky depths of Eurocentric socialist thought.

By contrast, the heights of men and women from Europe are increasing inexorably. The average Dutchman, whose country produces the Continent's loftiest men, is now more than six feet tall - almost two inches above his American counterpart.

European heights are "increasing inexorably"? I guess in another century we'll be casting Swedish girls for "Attack of the fifty-foot woman" won't we? Yet in the real world, in rich countries, heights are pretty much peaked at their genetically determined values. The American counterpart to Dutchmen would be Americans of pure Dutch descent, not Americans as a whole.

The Dutch living in Holland are finally reaching the same height that Dutch Americans have had all this time, height differences which have been long noted in the literature. The reason the Dutch Americans shot up like weeds after leaving Holland is that Dutch are naturally tall, because, get this, their families are made up of tall people. Height has a genetic component, and in rich countries is considered 90% heritable. Vikings were big people, and Icelanders are still some of the tallest in the world.

And he is still growing. Across the Netherlands hotel owners are lengthening beds and raising door mantles to stop the nation's tall youth suffering from irreparable anatomical damage.

You might think this implies that the Dutch are becoming giants, but actually it's because most of the Dutch housing is prehistoric, by American standards, often with very low ceiling and door heights. For example, in reference to the height of Dutch grandfather clocks built about 200 years ago, this passage sheds some light.

A tall city-made clock will stand at about target="_blank">7ft to 7ft 6ins which can be some 12 to 18 inches more than a cottage's or say millhouse ceiling height at little over 6 feet.

Americans don't need to raise our door heights because we've always had tall Dutchmen running around. They just always had to be careful when they visited old housing in the mother country, because they'd get concussions from bumping into their relative's ceilings.

According to a New Yorker essay on the subject last week, Dutch ambulances are even having to keep their back doors open on many occasions to allow for the prodigious dimensions of their patients' legs.

Maybe they should quit driving Renaults or something, because American ambulances can handle football players without any problem.

New research has shown some unexpected disparities between statures of Americans and Europeans, indicating that recent social changes and diet are major influences on adult height.

Diet influences adult height? Who would've imagined that? I hope they don't forget that genetics is also a major factor, as shown by that 90% heritability number from twin studies. It's avoid those things that stunt your growth, like a famine from yet another European war, that tend to stunt childhood growth.

For British men, too, are outstripping their transatlantic rivals. At the time of the American Revolution, the average US male was two inches taller than his British counterpart. Today he is almost half an inch shorter.

But is the average American of pure British ancestry shorter than his British counterpart? That is the question. And interestingly, if you look at the CDC data the average white American is a half inch taller than the average American, which would make him exactly as tall as his British counterpart, which is proof that European socialism produces, um, what exactly?

This surprising reappraisal of American and European physiques is the work of researcher John Komlos of Munich University. 'Much of the difference is due to the great social inequality that now exists in the United States,' Komlos told The Observer last week. 'In Europe, there is - in most countries - good health service provision for most members of society and plenty of protein in most people's diets. As a result, children do not suffer illnesses that would blight their growth or suffer problems of malnutrition. For that reason, we have continued to grow and grow.'

Preach the glories of socialism, my comrade! Now tell us about the one year waiting list to see a doctor, or people lined up around the block when a NHS dentist comes to town. From comparing Americans, including a high proportion of non-Europeans, to Europeans, and only coming up with a half-inch difference, he's really reaching for some startling conclusions, isn't he? Now, I wonder how he'll explain the fact that black Americans are also taller than the average American. Is it because they've always been on top of the economic pyramid? I'd say his whole moonbat premise has just exploded into a million pieces.

On the other hand, America has eight million people with no job, 40 million individuals with no health insurance, 35 million living below the poverty line, and a population that exists mainly on junk food. There, the rise in average height that marked its progress as a nation through the 19th and 20th centuries has stopped and has actually reversed - albeit very slightly - in recent years. Many Americans are rich and do well anatomically as a result, but there is a large underclass that is starting to drag the country down the stature charts.

This gets interesting, since the average unemployment rate in Western Europe in 2001 was 7.1% while the US hasn't been above 6%, and yet this is "normal" for Europe. Germany and France have been running an 9% and 10% unemployment rate for ages. Yet this doesn't seem to stunt their physical stature. And the 2003 US "poverty line" included single people making $9500 a year and families making over $40,000 a year. Big families, to be sure, but this amount does not include food stamps and housing subsidies. And if the author would take a look at the US poor, he'd notice they tend to be, well, fat.

This discovery, which has been revealed through research that Komlos has assembled over decades, amounts to an assault on the values of the free market economy espoused by Americans and provides powerful support for those who back European ideas about universal healthcare.

Didn't I say the train would leave the tracks? We have wonderous proof of the glories of socialism, which can go right into the wastebasket. American's include a wildly varying sample of people, including all sorts of Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and Africans. Yet this author argues that socialism must work because despite their historically flat Euroschlerotic growth rates, endemic high unemployement, and a one year wait to see a doctor, it must work, because Vikings are taller than Vietnamese boat people! This may be good though, because the Vietnamese could pack in more per longboat as they fled from the glories of socialism. Next up we can have a comparison of per capita GDP. Gee, by that measure it seems only three European countries can beat the US. Luxemberg, a country smaller than Rhode Island, so it might as well be a business district, Switzerland, which makes money off the gold that Europeans are always looting from each other, and Norway, which gets an advantage because of all that delicious whale meat in their diet.

Fluctuations in human stature are not new and have occurred regularly throughout history. Our early hunter-gatherer ancestors were tall and lean. Later, as farming spread across the world, dense populations learnt to live on only a few standard crops and suffered considerable nutritional neglect. The result was a decline in stature.

Most of the decline in height is from the conditions typical of a Charle's Dickens novel, or living off the meager food allowance that the European intelligentsia and nobles would deign to distribute to the masses. Maybe their poor really would've been better off eating cake. But if you look at people who weren't packed into city slums you get a slightly different picture. Analysis of the average height of Scots going back to the bronze age says they haven't grown a whole lot, being just about an inch taller than their long term height and just adding about a half inch to their 1850 stature. Oh, and the Scots, like the Americans, used to be taller than the English, but not anymore. Something about those London slums…

Similarly, climatic changes have had a profound effect on human height - a physical attribute that is now regarded by historians, scientists and economists as a key indicator of the health of any group of people living at any particular time and place. For example, during the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures plummeted across the world between 1300 and the mid-19th century, there was a noticeable decrease in human stature.

Stop the presses! A European paper just admitted that we're coming out of the Little Ice Age! Do you think that might indicate that temperatures should be slightly increasing? How did this little nugget slip past the editors? Oh, because it was part of an idiotic argument about American inferiority. They need to be more careful about slip-ups like that. Their multitude of anti-American biases is getting them so crossed up that they're blowing the story line. What the European press needs to do is to create a specialty position in the editing process to carry out "conspiracy and bias deconfliction" to prevent red-on-red fratricide.

'There are two possible mechanisms for this observation,' said Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum. 'Firstly, all mammals get shorter and rounder when climates cool. It is a physiological response to cold. Short, round bodies preserve heat better than tall cool ones.

Excuse me, but didn't Europeans have something called "clothing", or did he just miss the fact that the Dutch, where it's cold are taller than Guatamalans, where it's warm.

'However, there is an alternative explanation for shrinking stature in bad weather. It means poor crops, and that in turn means malnutrition and, of course, the consequence of that is poor stature.

He also completely forgot to mention the move into cities, where diets tended to be much poorer. Farmers used to always eat much better than city folk, because the farmer lived where the food was.

'Those tiny suits of armour that you see when you visit the Tower of London were worn by people who were badly nourished. During winter they would have only salt meat and a few vegetables to live on. That's not going to help you grow very well.'

And this diet is different from the American diet of the 1800's, when we were tall, in what way? If he'd investigate further he'd find that there are two very common sizes of surviving medieval armor, extra small and extra large. What we have left are the suits that didn't fit anybody but the oddball that wore them. Most historical studies from battlefield remains have concluded that the combatants were almost as tall as we are now.

Modern society now protects humans from such problems, though in recent years it has become clear that political factors are having some effect on nutrition levels and proper diet and therefore stature. And it is in this arena that Komlos has made his key discoveries.

Did he discover that food is good? You know, if this is the highpoint of European scientific research into nutrition maybe he should pass it along to those North Koreans.

Through painstaking investigations he has calculated the heights of men at different times over our recent historical past. This shows that, around 1850, Americans - blessed with Western technology that allowed its citizens to spread unstoppably across the United States - lived relatively fine lives that let its menfolk reach an average height of 5ft 9in. By contrast, Dutchmen were only able to reach about 5ft 7in.

Isn't it funny how he tries to credit American height with "Western" technology. But why would our advantage over Europeans be due to "Western" technology?

By the early 20th century the average American man was still about the same height as his predecessor. But the average Dutchman had nearly caught up and was only about half an inch shorter.

Oh, so the Dutch had already made up 75% of their height deficit versus Americans decades before the advent of all that social intervention. How is that possible? I thought the author was trying to credit everything to universal health care, not the canning industry.

But in the 20th century Americans were overtaken. The average US male is now about 5ft 10in. The average Dutchman is just over 6ft.

Well it's nice to see that the Dutch are back to having all the nutrition they did during the medieval period, when they could get just about as tall. Must've been all those free state provided blood-letting services back then.

More importantly, the latter is continuing his rise in average height. The Americans have long since stopped growing and, according to some measures, may actually be getting smaller. 'In relative terms, Americans are certainly shrinking in comparison with Europeans,' says Komlos.

Amazingly, we're even lagging behind the former East Germans, so maybe that communism thing worked out for them after all. Onward, comrades!

One possible explanation lies with immigration. As more Mexicans and Chinese enter the US, these individuals may lower the average height, it is argued. But statisticians dismiss this suggestion. During the 19th century the country took in millions of malnourished, and therefore small, people. Yet Americans remained the tallest people in the world at that time.

Those have to be some seriously stupid statisticians, then. Since height is 90% heritable, the idea that current immigrants, many of whom come from countries where the people are shorter than Europeans, can't have a depressing effect on average height because the older waves of taller European immigrants didn't is absolutely, breathtakingly invalid. The European immigrants may have been malnourished, which isn't surprising for people fleeing Europe, but once they had access to the American cornucopia they cooked up an abundance of fine European dishes. Some of the new Hispanic immigrants are taking a few generations to get their full genetic stature, and Hispanics as a whole in America are an inch shorter than non-Hispanic whites and blacks, so maybe the statisticians need to go over these numbers again.

In fact, the very idea that various peoples are programmed, on average, to be short or tall is thrown into doubt by Komlos's work. Apart from a few rare races, such as African pygmies who are genetically programmed to have low stature, virtually everyone in the world has the potential to reach the same average height as the Dutch, and that includes the Mexicans, Chinese, Inuit, and other peoples who are not usually noted for their stature.

With height being 90% heritable, according to twin studies, I would find that shocking. Let's use Ockham's razor and instead throw out Komlos's "research", since I read it and find it compares quite closely to mindless dreck churned out for a high-school science fair project, but without all the validity. I'll point out that his research has 15 end-notes, the first being the definition of body mass index, the second saying "There are also interaction effects among the independent variables not considered here", and so on. Let's just say I wouldn't call them endnotes. I'd call them "asides".

To achieve that status will require some arduous social engineering. The Dutch health service, with its magnificent support services for pregnant woman (quality of life in the womb is a key factor in determining future health and height) and its high-protein diets based on dairy food, will not be easy to emulate in a world whose population is now soaring towards seven billion.

It won't be easy to emulate in Rotterdam, either, where the majority of the population is Muslim. With about 10% of the population tracing from Muslim countries like Indonesia, do you think he'd include these massive numbers of Muslim immigrants in his height data? I kind of doubt it. If he did, it would be the European's who appear to be shrinking, now wouldn't it? If he can discount any effects from our Hispanic immigration while including them in our averages, then I don't see why we shouldn't do the same. And I suspect that he did it intentionally, since the CDC data he used as a source specifically seperated out Hispanics, whereas in his paper he says

Actually, average heights for the whole population are almost the same as those of whites by themselves, inasmuch as whites make up 90 percent of the population (Figures 1, 2, and 6). Hence, in subsequent analysis the heights of whites is not reported separately, only those of the whole population and of the African-Americans are.

What a dodge. Hispanics disappear into the data, and the entire population is taken to be "white", since the whole population includes African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc. I'll close with the abstract from his paper, which right away gives you an idea of the science to BS ratio in his paper.

Abstract: Within the course of the 20th century the American population went through a metamorphosis from being the tallest in the world, to being among the most overweight. The American height advantage over Western and Northern Europeans was between 3-9 cm in the middle of the 19th century. Americans were also underweight. However, today, the exact opposite is the case as the Dutch, Swedes, and Norwegians are the tallest, and the Danes, British and Germans – even the East-Germans - are also taller, towering over the Americans by as much as 3-7 cm. Americans also live shorter. The hypothesis is worth considering that this adverse development is related to the greater social inequality, an inferior health-care system, and fewer social safety nets in the United States than in Western and Northern Europe, in spite of higher per capita income. The West- and Northern European welfare states, with cradle to grave health and unemployment insurance currently provide a more propitious environment for the biological standard of living than its US counterpart.

Or maybe a simpler explaination is that European scientists are looking for a way to justify more social spending.