Edited by author 07-18-2005 11:22 PM
-- temper, temper, temper. I was referring to late-19th and early-20th-century immigrants, Italians and Greeks and so forth. They're considerably shorter than Dutchmen, you know.

A pity for your case, then, that the BBC article shows this happening mainly in the 20th century, despite the deprivation of WWII in Europe.

And European has also received immigrants from such places as Turkey, hardly noted for their basketball teams.

Do you have any numbers, or even any vague approximations to back up your statement, or do you believe that simply tossing off something superficially plausible is enough for you to ignore unfortunate facts?

Ah, here we go. This is the original article I was looking for, and covers the study in greater detail.

Some interesting extracts:

"In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world."

"When Komlos and his parents arrived in Chicago, in the winter of 1956, America was a land of almost mythical abundance. For more than two centuries, its people had been so healthy and so prosperous that they towered above the rest of the world—about four inches above the Dutch, for example, for most of the nineteenth century."

"In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising."

"But the height statistics that Komlos cites include only native-born Americans who speak English at home, and he is careful to screen out people of Asian and Hispanic descent. In any case, according to Richard Steckel, who has also analyzed American heights, the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity with Northern Europe."

"In the nineteenth century, when Americans were the tallest people in the world, the country took in floods of immigrants. And those Europeans, too, were small compared with native-born Americans."

"Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits."