You will note that the answer to that question is “no, not always, just usually”. And yes, there is a maximum height under this model: whatever results from having tall alleles at every relevant locus. If there are, say, 10 genes that affect height, each with two alleles, T for tall and t for not so tall, the tallest possible person would be a male with genotype TTTTTTTTTT. Can’t do better than that.
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Thanks that makes sense as well.
Thanks I was just thinking that if they had a lot of genetic potential back then plus a lot of time to observe traits this would have been an obvious result perhaps because of our sinfulness.
Sadly, reflecting we’re perhaps not that far from this with almost all Down Syndrome babies aborted, boys desired in China, a world war to defeat Nazi idea of race domination and all the ideas of racism today. 
Hmm… If you’re able to watch which genes manifest themselves to make tall people for war…you’d probably do the same to make large fearsome animals for war. And you’d probably know which animals are capable of interbreeding too…
As is so often the case, I don’t know what you’re trying to talk about. But you should know that people didn’t know about genes until the 1860s, and then it was only Mendel. The rest of us had to wait until the early 20th Century. And we only gradually learned how to locate them on chromosomes, or even that they lived on chromosomes, and find out what they do. None of this was available to the ancient folks you may be talking about.
If you lived 800 years and so had time to observe genetic change, had access to most of the animals on the earth because you lived on a super continent, you’d probably end up trying to breed certain animals to get certain genetic traits. Maybe even a dinosaur or too. 
Sorry, but the smiling emoji doesn’t save that post. If you meant it strictly as a joke, fine. If there was any least element of seriousness, that’s a problem. Is this your brain on young-earth creationism? Get some science, stat.
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Both. If you had access to dinosaurs, wouldn’t you breed the tallest, most fierce one? C’mon. You’d probably make it eat me.
I tend to ruminate on a subject, and something new pops up. i just realized what I was saying here. Of course I can’t prove it, but it would be a fun one if one had enough linguistic knowledge.
Timeline:
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Lamech is a giant involved with a young man. He falls down.
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Giants get associated with falling down because of Lamech’s story. (Nephilim (ne-fall-im) meaning - the fallen ones.)
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The story sticks around as “Jack and the Beanstalk” for another 4-5 millennia:
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The word “fall” sticks around in the lexicon through many languages because of the story. Maybe it’s even related to words like “tall” or “tell” and ideas that have to do with measuring, and “fe, fie, fo, fum” huffing and puffing.
(Strong's Hebrew: 5307. נָפַל (naphal) -- to fall, lie)
Original Word: נָפַל
Part of Speech: Verb
Transliteration: naphal
Phonetic Spelling: (naw-fal’)
Definition: to fall, lie
Hopefully I capture the correct related Hebrew word here:
https://www.wordsense.eu/נפח/#Hebrew
Pronunciation
נפח / nâphach / naw-fakh’
Verb
נפח
- to puff, in various applications (literally, to inflate, blow hard, scatter, kindle, expire; figuratively, to disesteem): - blow, breath, give up, cause to lose [life], seething, snuff.
Entries with “נפח”
space : …(masc.) Greek: χώρος (masc.), διάστημα (neut.) Hebrew: נפח, חָלָל, מֶרְחָב Hungarian: tér, hely…
volume : …(neut.) Greek: όγκος (masc.) Haitian Creole: volim Hebrew: נפח (masc.) Hungarian: térfogat Ido: volumino Interlingua:…
smith : …(fem.) Greek: σιδηρουργός (masc.), σιδεράς (masc.) Hebrew: נפח Hungarian: kovács Icelandic: smiður (masc.)…
https://www.wordsense.eu/fall/
fall (English)
Origin & history
From Middle English fallen, from Old English feallan (“to fall, fail, decay, die, attack”), from Proto-Germanic *fallaną (“to fall”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pōl-. Cognate with West Frisian falle (“to fall”), Low German fallen (“to fall”), Dutch vallen (“to fall”), German fallen (“to fall”), Norwegian Bokmål falle (“to fall”), Norwegian Nynorsk falla (“to fall”), Icelandic falla (“to fall”), Albanian fal (“forgive, pray, salute, greet”), Lithuanian pùlti (“to attack, rush”), Ancient Greek σφάλλω (“bring down, destroy, cause to stumble, deceive”).
Old English feallan (class VII strong verb; past tense feoll, past participle feallen) “to drop from a height; fail, decay, die,” from Proto-Germanic *fallanan (source also of Old Frisian falla, Old Saxon fallan, Dutch vallen, Old Norse falla, Old High German fallan, German fallen, absent in Gothic).
These are from PIE root *pol- “to fall” (source also of Armenian p’ul “downfall,” Lithuanian puolu, pulti “to fall,” Old Prussian aupallai “finds,” literally “falls upon”).
tell (n.)
“mound, hill,” 1864, from Arabic tall, related to Hebrew tel “mount, hill, heap.” Compare Hebrew talul “lofty,” Akkadian tillu “woman’s breast.”
https://www.wordsense.eu/tall/
tall (English)
Origin & history
From Middle English tall, talle, tal (“seemly, becoming, excellent, good, valiant, bold, great”), from Old English *tæl, ġetæl (“swift, ready, having mastery of”), from Proto-Germanic *talaz (“submissive, pliable”), from Proto-Indo-European *dol-, *del- (“to aim, calculate, adjust, reckon”). Cognate with Scots tal (“high, lofty, tall”), Old Frisian tel (“swift”), Old Saxon gital (“quick”), Old High German gizal (“active, agile”), Gothic 𐌿𐌽𐍄𐌰𐌻𐍃 (“indocile, disobedient”).
@deuteroKJ can tell me if I’m off my rocker. That would be nothing new. 
@swamidass You can’t have this cool story with Nephilim as others outside the garden because the Nephilim are just before the flood in this. 
I’m coming to the firm conclusion that the emphasis on this passage is that it fits with the description of the violence just before the flood, anyway.
David and Goliath seems to be God’s sense of humor and final answer of his chosen king on the subject of the giants. 1 Samuel 17 ESV
Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 46 This day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head. And I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, 47 and that all this assembly may know that the LORD saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the LORD’s, and he will give you into our hand.”
48 When the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine. 49 And David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine on his forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.
Smack on his face. Pretty funny. 
I don’t know what to make of a lot of this :). While connecting Nehpilim with the verb n-ph-l (“to fall”) is common, I think it’s more likely that it derives from the Aramaic word nephila which means “giant.” Even if the former, I see no reason to find connections back to Gen 4.
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ohhh…that’s a fun fact that proves my point. Nice.
That strikes me as too much of a tail-wags-the-dog problem, linguistically speaking. No. But a fun thought nonetheless.
The idea that Indo-European languages (e.g., English) and Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew) share a common ancestral language had some advocates in the 1800’s and perhaps a bit later but I don’t know of any historical linguists who hold to the Indo-Semitic Hypothesis today. (Perhaps there are a few out there but they certainly aren’t prominent in their field.)
Moreover, trying to connect words like tall and tell to NAPHAL doesn’t make any sense to me. (There are patterns that we see in etymological trails and these seems pretty far-fetched.) The word tall most likely comes from an Old English word which meant “swift” and even “handsome.” [Oh, I see that you did paste some material about that.] I don’t remember the origin of tell other than the fact that tale shares its etymology (and originally meant “tell in order of events”, I think it was.) Nevertheless, I always enjoy etymology of any sort so your post was actually of great interest to me. Etymology and historical linguistics can be quite fun. I always had a lot of respect for a couple of my fellow TAs down the hall [we were stuck in the basement of the building because we were the bottom of the academic heap] who labored over PIE (Proto-Indo-European) reconstructions of obscure words.
“Fa fe fi fo fum!” is especially fun. I used to think it was simply a nonsense chant based on the five vowel sounds in order. Eventually I learned otherwise. I think it was back in the 1800s that a Scottish scholar published a fascinating explanation. He said the sentence was perfectly good Ancient Gaelic for something like “Behold, food that’s good to eat and satisfies my hunger.” and that the quatrain (including “I’ll break his bones to bake my bread”) from which it comes—and which many of us remember from a Disney movie as well as a Laurel and Hardy comedy film—was directed at Anglo-Saxon invaders by the Celts.
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You are forgetting the Nostratic hypothesis? Nostratic varies by author, but I do believe that it always includes both Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.
The claim that these languages all descended from a Proto-Nostratic remains extremely controversial. My favorite professor was quite negative on it and I probably inherited a lot of his bias. I get the impression that it has enjoyed a resurgence in recent decades but I’m too far out of the loop nowadays to know much about that. I just remember it being said by advocates that all the best scholarship for the Nostratic hypothesis was written by German and Russian scholars and generally hard to come by for even the most earnest Ph.D. candidate.
I remember one scholar dismissing it as “a bit of a fad” and complaining that it lacked the expected rigor demanded for credible reconstructions of a proto-language. I do know that I lack the background to defend any sort of position on the topic in either direction.
Not a big fan of Greenberg either, I imagine?
Actually, Greenberg advocated a lot of methodology which was quite interesting and had much merit—even if not everybody agreed with his conclusions once he applied them to particular linguistic problems. Similar to Chomsky, he was pursuant of language universals. Very interesting stuff.
I always found it fascinating—with that generation of scholars—to see where they found themselves in the WWII and the Cold War that followed. (For example, I had a number of NSA and CIA type colleagues who were involved in Eastern European revolts against the Soviets and later in Uralic & Altaic studies.) Greenberg was a signal corpsman, I think it was, and eventually got involved in code-breaking.
I suppose I’m getting off-track into a sub-topic of a sub-topic but @thoughtful’s etymological excursion isn’t so surprising when discussing a truly ancient word like NEPHILIM. It always takes me into a subfield of a linguistic world that was never really my forte but always riveted my attention.