Super-Size Me
Big is not always better, but it can certainly make you feel like it.

Reviewed by Wray Herbert
Sunday, November 26, 2006

WHY SIZE MATTERS

From Bacteria to Blue Whales

By John Tyler Bonner

Princeton Univ. 161 pp. $16.95

SIZE MATTERS

How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys -- and the Men They Become

By Stephen S. Hall

Houghton Mifflin. 388 pp. $26

One of the most memorable passages in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels comes when the sojourner Lemuel Gulliver encounters a bevy of Brobdingnagian maidens disrobing. Far from the delightful voyeuristic experience Gulliver might have hoped for, he sees naked giantesses, 12 times human size, as if through a powerful magnifying glass: "Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and Hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads, to say nothing further concerning the rest of their persons."

I think we're all with Gulliver here. Evolutionary biologist John Tyler Bonner uses the traveler's horrifying encounter with zaftig beauty to underscore a recurring theme in his new book, Why Size Matter s: Big is not always better, and size is always comparative. From the perspective of a unicellular pond-dwelling paramecium, humans are the size of a galaxy; next to the blue whale, we are minuscule. Yet all three organisms, from the single-celled to the gazillion-celled, are perfectly adapted for their niche in our complex world.

Bonner argues that size is a driving force for all of biology. He uses the fictional Brobdingnagians (and their teensy counterparts, the Lilliputians) as an object lesson, gently critiquing Swift's wrongheaded science to demonstrate why such races are a biological impossibility. In real life, he demonstrates convincingly, size dictates everything from an animal's shape and appearance to its locomotion, speed, voice and social organization. If Swift had had the good fortune to study biology under Bonner (and the physics behind it), Brobdingnagians and Lilliputians would likely have looked -- and acted -- much, much different.

Bonner clearly loves his subject. The Princeton professor's passions are ecology and evolution, and his graceful prose is complemented by illustrations, graphs and formulas for those who want scientific rigor. He also intertwines a cultural tour of humans' preoccupation with matters of girth, strength, height, weight and shape. So, along with slime molds, geckos and fairy flies, we encounter Sinbad the Sailor, Tom Thumb and Alice shrinking and growing in Wonderland, all offered as evidence of Bonner's concluding thought: "Size rules life."

Size is certainly a preoccupation of Stephen S. Hall's, though his focus in Size Matters is much narrower than Bonner's. Indeed, aside from their unhappily sophomoric titles, these two books have surprisingly little in common. Where Bonner's monograph is sweeping in its breadth, Hall's text is obsessed with height, more specifically human height, and even more specifically his own height. If Bonner's essay is a clearheaded labor of love, Hall's is a somewhat muddled labor of angst and personal suffering.

Hall is 5 feet 5 3/4 inches tall. He tells us this on the book jacket. He also tells us that his wife is 5 feet 9 inches. And he tells us the heights of all five starting players on his high school basketball team, which he remembers all these years later; he also tells us his own height and weight when he was a high school freshman -- 4 feet 9 inches and 82 ½ pounds, according to the school records that he has bothered to research. That was around the time some bullies knocked him down in gym class and muddied his exercise clothes.

That bullying incident was a life-defining moment for Hall. In fact, high school was altogether not a good time for him, and he believes that being small had a lot to do with the emotional traumas that affect him even to this day. Indeed, he is sure that all short boys must have had equally traumatic experiences of puberty, and that they are wandering around as psychologically scarred adults today.

I'm not so sure. Hall himself marshals a huge amount of scientific evidence to undermine his own theory, summed up in the book's subtitle. Time and time again, the author cites data to demonstrate the complexity of the many relationships in play here: between growth and height, height and strength, strength and size and sexual maturity, strength and sexual maturity and aggression, aggression and bullying, victimization and self-esteem, self-esteem and mental health and achievement in life.

Hall is an excellent science writer, with a well-deserved reputation for thoroughness and accuracy. He has demonstrated in previous work his appreciation for nuances of human behavior and the difficulties of behavioral science. The science reporting in Size Matte rs is first-rate, especially the chapters on human growth and the origin of growth charts. It's a shame all this fine reporting doesn't support his overwrought narrative of life as a short man.

But Hall's cultural history of tallness as an ideal of manhood and militarism is fascinating and skillfully done. Particularly instructive is the story of Frederick William, king of Prussia, who in the 18th century collected the tallest men from all over Europe to create his elite troop of guards, the Potsdam Giants. Frederick William himself was just 5 feet 5 inches (a "hairy fireplug of a monarch"), but his foray into eugenics and the marketing of size made him infamous throughout the continent. It's arguable whether what Hall calls the "Prussian curse" was the forerunner of all modern obsession with tallness, but it's a valuable historical lesson for the age of the human genome. In fact, one of Hall's leitmotifs is that, with the advent of genetically engineered human growth hormone, we are already embarked upon a eugenics project to medicalize and treat short but normal children.

In the end, Hall concedes that the most compelling scientific evidence flies in the face of his personal experience and thesis. One wonders why he didn't rewrite the book, or at least change the title and subtitle. Instead, he pulls a "Revenge of the Nerds" switcheroo -- or tries to -- claiming superior psychic strength and higher moral ground because of his small frame. His newfound superiority is no more convincing than the victimhood he adopted at the beginning of the book -- and just as unappealing.

Wray Herbert writes the "Mind Matters" column for Newsweek.com and the "We're Only Human . . . " blog, at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.