As it turns out, humans are only viable within a certain range of height, below or above which people don’t survive. This erodes the tails of the distribution, effectively making it more platykurtic (If I can get even one reader to use the word platykurtic in real life, I’ll consider this article a success).
Human height distribution is actually fat tailed (I remembered it and quick Googling finds that on Wikipedia).
That’s a bold statement! The wiki article has a [citation needed] and that sounds wild. Typically, if height was heavy-tailed, we would expect the tallest person to be more than twice as big as the second tallest person. But then, Jeff Bezos is not twice as rich as Elon Musk, so it doesn’t always work...
Typically, if height was heavy-tailed, we would expect the tallest person to be more than twice as big as the second tallest person.
Not necessarily. You can have fat tails without having them being that fat. In the history of the normal distribution some scientist was studying human height and his test subjects did were normal distributed.
It however happens to be the case that dwarfism happens more then the normal distribution would predict.
Height is strongly genomically driven. Currently we can predict it with +-4cm based on genetic analysis. You have a bunch of different genes that cause small changes in height and if those genes would be all that matters for height differences, height would be normally distributed the way the outcome of 1000 coin flips is normally distributed. Dwarfism however isn’t the result of a bunch of small changes of height from a bunch of different genes but can be caused through a single mutation.
Tails can alternate between fat and thin as you go further out. If heights were normally distributed with the same mean and variance then there would be fewer people above 7ft than there are now, but the tallest man would be taller than the tallest man now.
Human height distribution is actually fat tailed (I remembered it and quick Googling finds that on Wikipedia).
That’s a bold statement! The wiki article has a [citation needed] and that sounds wild. Typically, if height was heavy-tailed, we would expect the tallest person to be more than twice as big as the second tallest person. But then, Jeff Bezos is not twice as rich as Elon Musk, so it doesn’t always work...
Not necessarily. You can have fat tails without having them being that fat. In the history of the normal distribution some scientist was studying human height and his test subjects did were normal distributed.
It however happens to be the case that dwarfism happens more then the normal distribution would predict.
Height is strongly genomically driven. Currently we can predict it with +-4cm based on genetic analysis. You have a bunch of different genes that cause small changes in height and if those genes would be all that matters for height differences, height would be normally distributed the way the outcome of 1000 coin flips is normally distributed. Dwarfism however isn’t the result of a bunch of small changes of height from a bunch of different genes but can be caused through a single mutation.
Tails can alternate between fat and thin as you go further out. If heights were normally distributed with the same mean and variance then there would be fewer people above 7ft than there are now, but the tallest man would be taller than the tallest man now.