Sorting: too different times. Why?

[n00m]

Here "meaningful order" is:
if
elephant "a[i]" is smarter than elephant "a[j]"
then "i" must be strictly less than "j"

Of course, to the same effect we could sort them simply
by sizes, but then time of sorting would increase by ~
2 times -- due to decreasing of number of equally smart
things.

But here it does not matter -- for my initial question.
I like all above explanations. Especially that by Chris Rebert.