Tallness has always been viewed as a desirable physical trait — so desirable that more than a century ago, Sir Francis Galton began collecting measurements of British schoolchildren as a prelude to his dream of breeding genetically superior human beings. Although his eugenics project went nowhere, his obsession with height survives in a word that has become part of every modern parent’s vocabulary: percentile. Galton both coined the term and developed the statistics that allowed percentiles to be plotted on a growth chart. ... read the whole article
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