The Correlation Between Male Adult Height and Nasal Width and Ear Size
What I wanted to propose in this post is a hypothetical correlation which is from a lifetime of observation. I personally believe that there is a positive correlation between the width of the adult male and their ear size and their overall adult height.
I would suspect that if we were a primatologist and did a measurement of the nose widths of each male gorilla’s nose in a pack in the jungles of Eastern Africa, we would find that the alpha male who would have more testosterone would have on average a slightly wider nose and/or larger ears than the beta males which traditionally have thinner noses and smaller ears.
Of course it is easy to dismiss this by some people as common sense. Alpha males in gorilla packs tend to be bigger and taller than the beta males. That is from a slightly higher level of testosterone than the average level. Just from a proportionally of body parts perspectively, it would make sense that alpha male would thus have larger noses (as well as larger jaws, crane sizes, hands, etc)
However, I wanted to take the hypothesis and use it to as a sort of heuristic trick to help people determine which pre-pubescent young males still in elementary school before the growth spurt/puberty phase is most likely to get the largest growth spurts and end up the tallest.
If you measured the widths of each boy’s nose and the width of their ears and averaged out the boys of one class, it can be used to tell which males would end up taller than their peers as adults when their schooling is over
The same can be said about the ears. I propose the hypothesis that if we looked at the width of a young male’s ears compared to their male peers before they start puberty, we would have an accurate chance in predicting which boys would end up taller than the others.
We have found from at least 3 sources, including PubMed studies that the ears and noses actually never stop growing throughout a person’s life. It is said that over a 50 year span (after the normal growth phase has ended through complete bone maturity) a person will have their ears grow 1 cm overall.
- Noses and Ears Continue to Grow as We Age – From the Dr. Oz website
- 7 Things Nobody Ever Tells You About Aging – From Oprah’s Website
- Improbable research: here’s an earful – The Guardian
In one of the references we have listed, it was claimed that because the ears and nose are cartilage, which never harden, they have the ability to expand. Unfortunately they are not hyaline cartilage, but fibrocartilage. Fibrocartilage is one of 3 different types of cartilages found in the human body. It does not have the orderly laminar layer hyaline cartilage structure so it doesn’t expand in some type of specific direction like the way the long bones growth during the normal endochondral ossification process. The fibrocartilage does grow and expand as the collagen in the extracellular matrix expands but it is very slowly.
So how does the fact that our ears and nose can still grow into old age (our 60s-70s) help us?
It shows that as long as there is some cartilage tissue, there is some chances for the cartilage to expand, even if the cartilage is fibrocartilage. Since the bones for most adults past normal growth phases (ei 20-50) still have a layer of articular cartilage, which is hyaline cartilage, then we can theoretically stimulate whatever cartilage we have left in the joints between our bones to increase slightly in size.
If our noses and ears can grow bigger, then we can make our bodies get bigger vertically if we can get the cartilage to increase in thickness in certain directions.
Again, I suspect that one can measure how tall a young boy will be relative to his male peers by comparing the width of their ears and noses before they hit puberty.
