RIP Mark Eaton

[Rain Man]

On a similar topic of height, I was reading about Shawn Bradley after he had his accident. Apparently one time he was on a plane and happened to sit next to a geneticist who studied height. That had to be a lottery win for the geneticist, but he convinced Shawn to let him figure out why Shawn was so tall. Most guys who are that height have some sort of genetic abnormality or disease, but it turned out that Shawn had none. There are a bunch of genetic markers that determine your height and they often cancel each other out to produce average height. Some point you toward height and some point you toward being short. But in Shawn's case it just happened that every one of these markers were on the extreme end of height.