I’m wondering about coverage. How much was it talked about in the public? How much was it covered by media? What’s your experience from France and other countries that reached the threshold and from countries that remained far from it? People can’t sign something they never heard about.

For the record, this is almost certainly a genetic defect of the father, some kind of dominant mutation. Nutrition and other environmental factors most likely didn’t play any role in a height difference this big.

There are two copies of each gene. Here, one of the copies got mutated in such a way that it caused the stunted growth of the father. Each sperm contains one randomly selected copy of each gene. Therefore half of the father’s sperms contained the mutated gene and the other half the normal version. There was 50% chance the son would be normal height and 50% chance he would be small like his father.

I actually know a family like this. Nothing fishy going on there, the mutation is well described and now new kids with the mutation get growth hormones during their growth to reach normal size.

In a large part, a distraction. Or more generally, a way to stay in power. How do you stay in power when your country is doing very poorly economically while you and your friends keep siphoning public money into their pockets? You create a strong narrative, ideally an external enemy (“NATO wants to destroy our way of life!” “Ukraine is full of fascists killing Russians!”). Support it by propaganda from your state-controlled media and you are a hero saving the country, if not the world. You can do pretty much anything and still retain considerable support.

That’s also why Putin can’t really afford peace, he would lose a strong narrative in his favour. He pretends to agree, but doesn’t actually follow conditions of any agreement while constantly increasing his demands. He might agree with an agreement that would basically be Ukraine’s capitulation, but nothing less.