A human growth spurt as technology advances

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a group of colleagues have assiduously researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history. Their research has spawned not only a new branch of historical study but also a provocative theory that technology has sped human evolution in an unprecedented way during the past century.

This month, Cambridge University Press will publish the capstone of this inquiry, "The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700," just a few weeks shy of Mr. Fogel's 85th birthday. The book sums up the work of dozens of researchers on one of the most ambitious projects undertaken in economic history.

Mr. Fogel and his co-authors, Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, maintain that "in most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia." What's more, they write, this alteration has come about within a time frame that is "minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution."