

Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage - kazuya
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/science/natural-selection-may-help-account-for-dutch-height-advantage.html

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ocschwar
See these bollards?

[http://www.road-care.co.uk/images/bollard1.jpg](http://www.road-
care.co.uk/images/bollard1.jpg)

They're all over Amsterdam. Strong selection pressure establishing a minimum
height for men wanting to father children there.

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plorg
I was born in a community of mostly second- and third-generation-removed
descendents of Dutch immigrants in the United States. As with most of my
friends and classmates, my parents can trace all or almost all of their
ancestors back to the Netherlands immediately before coming to the U.S.

Anecdotally, most of the men in my generation are nearly 6' or taller. I have
heard the same said of men from several similar small, Dutch-immigrant
communities, and those in surrounding towns and counties often remark about
how tall the Dutch descendants in the community are (for example, in the
context of high school sports). The women are taller, as well, than those in
surrounding, mostly German-immigrant, communities.

I have paid a small amount of attention to studies like these. Because of the
demographics of my community I've been somewhat skeptical of some of the
suggested explanations. Particularly the diet reasoning struck me as odd since
despite how closely the community identifies with the Netherlands, it is very
much culturally American, with the attendant American diet.

I suspect that genetics really are a big part of the reason that Dutch people
grow as tall as they do. The selection reasoning, though, makes some sense as
well, though I don't know enough about bloodlines in my community (or the
statistical height comparison to current Dutch people) to make much comment
about it.

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mcv
I've always wondered if the amount of milk and cheese we consume might be a
factor. But I expect there's more countries where those things are popular in
large amounts.

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rambambam
I'm a Dutch young man of 6 feet and 3 inches tall. First of all, I don't
believe the claim in the beginning of the article stating that the average
height of Dutch men is above 6 feet. I remember reading an article a couple of
years back saying the average height for Dutch men is about 5 feet and 11
inches. To me, that looks more like it, but my opinion and experience are not
based on proper research, so who knows.

The comment with a reference to the famine in 1944 got my attention though.
Can it be that the famine, as an extreme condition, quickly followed by a lot
of prosperity (in contrast to Eastern European), caused this remarkable
quality?

I once read a book saying that children whose mother didn't eat enough during
pregnancy had the tendency to eat way more than children whose mother ate
enough. Starting with scarcity of nutrition leads to buffering way too much
later on.

\- Added FYI: My parents were born in 1949 and 1950. Their parents experienced
the famine. Last but not least, I tend to be attracted to the taller women
overhere.

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mcv
I think the 6 feet is the average height of young Dutch men. Older generations
are shorter, but the last generation to reach adulthood is really well over
180 cm in height.

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fragsworth
Great, this article's title suggests that they've discovered a selective
pressure on the Dutch to be taller, but then says they have no idea what that
selective pressure might be. At the very end of the article, even:

> Dr. Govindaraju said it was too early to speculate on why some populations
> are evolving in different ways.

Wtf?

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radicalbyte
It could simply be an outlier.

Given a group of populations of various size, small populations tend to fill
the outlier positions. You see this with schools - almost all of the top
ranking schools are tiny. As are the bottom. They all pretty much return to
the mean over time.

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jules
Yea...no. The population of the Netherlands is 17 million. There is absolutely
no way this is a statistical outlier.

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hey1969
I happen to be 2 m (6'6) tall and French-Irish. When I used to go out with a
Scandinavian social club in California, we were always far taller than
everyone else. More than 0.25 m difference in height makes for difficult
conversation, so there's a tendency to only talk to other sized people. I also
know a British guy that is 2.3 m tall and a Stanford chick whos 2.5 m (how
does one get a date if you're ungainly tall?). Perhaps in a millennia, humans
will be 4 m tall on average?

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bshimmin
Let me get this straight - the "Stanford chick" you know is the tallest woman
in history? (qv.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people#Women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people#Women))

~~~
sanoli
He probably meant 2.05m (2 meters and 5 centimeters).

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Almaviva
As a shorter than average man often disillusioned reading hundreds of honest
female online personals, what about sexual selection and cultural expectations
of women in choosing a mate?

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throwaway9789
As a fellow short guy this definitely an issue I face too. In a way you have
to appreciate the honesty of these women who make completely categorical
statements that they will not consider anyone below their own height, or even
anyone below the average male height (so roughly 50% of males) or sometimes
even setting their minimum heights well above the male average. Height is
simply a major factor of male attractiveness, the problem is that unlike other
factors it's not communicated well beforehand and comes as a shock to some men
when they realise just how important it is in the dating market.

The other issue is that sometimes the exlusion statement is phrased in a nasty
or blunt way that wouldn't be socially acceptable at all if it were a man
talking about a factor of female attractiveness. I am sure there are males out
there who make nasty and blunt comments in their profiles, but I am also sure
there are fewer of them and they get ruled out for saying such things even by
women to whom the statement doesn't apply.

Finally it's even worse that on many sites the statement ruling men under X
height out comes at the end of the profile! So you might see how much you have
in common with someone and start thinking about a cool date to go on and then
get to the end of the profile to find out you never had a chance to begin
with.

I would suspect this factor plays a part, but is almost certainly behind
better nutrition, in the general increases in heights across the board through
the baby boom and sexual revolution in Western countries. But you'd need to
explain why it was particularly strong in the Netherlands for it to explain
their above average height increases.

~~~
jules
For what it's worth I think the importance put on height is primarily a US
phenomenon. That's not to say that it's unimportant elsewhere, but not as
exceptionally important as in the US. It's one of the factors among many.

~~~
kazuya
It's not only in US. We've had the phrase 'three highs' (三高) in Japan, about
height, income, and education, though people openly express this are getting
downplayed these days. Not sure how it matters in the dating market.

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curtis
I have wondered if epigenetic effects
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_epigenetic_observations))
from the 1944 Dutch famine
([https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dutch_famine_of_1944](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dutch_famine_of_1944))
could have resulted in a substantial positive impact on Dutch height for
several generations following the famine.

It seems likely that eastern Europeans suffered much more extreme privations
than the Dutch did in this time period, but maybe they also saw a similar
effect, it's just less noticeable because those populations were a couple of
inches shorter on average anyway. The notable thing about the Dutch is not
that recent generations are taller than their forebears -- that's probably
true for most all European populations. The really notable thing is that
they're also taller than other northwestern populations like the Danes.

The natural selection argument is probably a better and certainly a simpler
explanation, though.

~~~
Someone
What makes this such a popular area of research is not that they are taller,
but that they overtook everybody else in no time:

 _" In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of European descent in
North America were far taller than those in Europe and were the tallest in the
world. [...] In the late nineteenth century, the Netherlands was a land
renowned for its short population"_
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_huma...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_height))

150-ish years, 6-7 generations.

~~~
curtis
So one question is, if you normalize nutrition, what's the intrinsic height
difference between populations? You are correct that the speed at which the
Dutch have overtaken other nearby populations is kind of surprising. A
nutrition differential could make that much difference, but it seems like
general nutrition shouldn't differ much at all between the Dutch, the
Belgians, the French, etc. Another possibility is just the the Dutch are
genetically a little bit taller on average if you normalize nutrition. But it
doesn't seem like Dutch genetics should differ that much from the surrounding
populations either. Could natural selection have made that much difference in
Dutch genetics in just a few generations, and recent (post Industrial
Revolution) generations at that?

~~~
narag
I don't think it's a matter of natural selection:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics)

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chrismealy
A Dutch friend tells me it's all the hormones Dutch farmers use. Anybody know
if that's the case?

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thisjepisje
Sounds like a monkey sandwich story to me.

~~~
pimlottc
I have never heard of a monkey sandwich story but I would really like to hear
one.

~~~
Someone
[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=nl&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnl.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBroodjeaapverhaal)
(Google hasn't figured out yet when to translate an idiomatic term literally
yet. That makes for a funny translation. See for example the subscript of the
first photo)

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pbreit
Is there any other possible reason for such a thing?

~~~
phpnode
Possibly diet. Obviously it's anecdotal but all of the Dutch people I know
consume far more dairy products than those from the UK.

Edit: Turns out the Dutch are the third biggest consumers of milk per capita
in the world[0], looking at the list of "tallest" countries on wikipedia[1],
there seems to be a great deal of overlap at the top of the two lists. I
wonder if a secondary factor could also be related to vitamin D exposure, but
I couldn't find a data source for that.

0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_consumption_per_capita)

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Average_height_around...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Average_height_around_the_world)

~~~
staunch
Over 2,000 years ago Julius Caesar described the people that lived where The
Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany are today.

> _They do not live much on corn, but subsist for the most part on milk and
> flesh, and are much [engaged] in hunting; which circumstance must, by the
> nature of their food, and by their daily exercise and the freedom of their
> life (for having from boyhood been accustomed to no employment, or
> discipline, they do nothing at all contrary to their inclination), both
> promote their strength and render them men of vast stature of body._

[http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.4.4.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.4.4.html)

~~~
DonQuixote1000
Call me stupid but I thought corn was native to the Americas. I guess
something is getting lost in translation.

~~~
staunch
Also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize)

