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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Childhood nutrition can have strong affects on adult height.

In the 19th century blacks were on average about an inch shorter in height than whites. It's not a thing these days since anti-poverty programs basically closed the gap for the 1930 birth cohort.

But in the 1950s a 40 year old American grew up with smaller black people. They didn't realize that it was nutritional instead of genetic.

It was also an issue for peasants in Europe, not sure on the exact years. European aristocrats visiting the US were shocked to discover that the average man was the same height they were.

21st century American blacks are on average over an inch shorter than non-hispanic American whites

Blacks are still slightly shorter than whites.

I'm currently listening to George Patton's war memoirs on audible, so far he's gone through North Africa and Siciliy and each place he goes he judges the peasants to be even worse than the last bunch. After judging the Sicilians to be even worse and more ignorant than the Moroccans, he travels to Egypt and says:

The Egyptian peasant, who abounds in large numbers, is distinctly lower than the Sicilian, whom I had previously considered at the bottom of the human curve.

The context you're offering is very much accurate, but it goes to the general problem: we always assume that traits displayed today are genetic or inherent, but we've turned out to be wrong about which traits inhere to which groups in which quantities nearly endlessly as contexts and conditions change.

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