"He'd once read that as late as 1914 sons of English members of the House of Lords were a full five inches taller at eighteen than people from the bottom of the social pyramid...though they'd attributed it to genetics back in Edwardian England, rather than nutrition." (p. 144)
Not being scientifically well informed, I had to check on whether they would have called it "genetics" back then but they would have. The term was coined in 1905.
The molecular basis of heredity was discovered in 1953. See also The Fiction/Science Fiction Interface. I remembered something relevant from Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time and was able to find it on the blog instead of having to go to the bookshelf upstairs.
That is as much as I can manage this evening. Tomorrow maybe: gym, Zen and booking a train journey to meet a Buddhist friend from Birmingham at a mid-way point next week.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I relocated my Andersonian, Tolkienian, and Stirlingian collections from a different floor of my house to a much more convenient location near my computer. Which makes it much easier for me to look up stuff.
Ad astra! Sean
It was nutrition, though -- lots of meat protein, lots of milk and milk products. At that, the situation was bettern in 1914 than it had been the mid-Victorian period, because refrigerated ships were bringing in meat and dairy products, and bread was a hell of a lot cheaper than it had been before Canadian and Australian and US wheat came in.
To be fair, the British continued free trade in agricultural products, even though landowners were very influential there. The European countries almost all levied customs duties on agricultural products. Of course, they had more peasants.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Because, after about 1850, nutrition began to really improve for all classes of people in the UK, not just for the wealthiest? And I think it was the repeal of the Corn Laws, abolishing customs duties on agricultural imports, which made it so much cheaper to import wheat and meat products.
Ad astra! Sean
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