The team studied 2238 women who had passed menopause and so completed their reproductive lives. For this group, Stearns’s team tested whether a woman’s height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other traits correlated with the number of children she had borne. They controlled for changes due to social and cultural factors to calculate how strongly natural selection is shaping these traits.
Our culture respects taller thinner women who wait longer before having kids, but in fact we are evolving short heavy women who have kids earlier. Shades of Idiocracy – in many ways we are evolving to become less of what we now respect.
Isn't this what one might expect - do we not value rarity in most cases. The edges of the curve are always more attractive than the middle - hence the preference for blondes and blue eyes (since these traits are relatively scarce, they represent a premium). So the fact that we respect/value women who delay childbirth and are thinner, may actually be a reflection that they are scarce and becoming scarcer?
These guys are making predictions for a time frame which is more than 3 times longer than the entire duration of their study...? Friends don't let friends extrapolate wildly!
People could also be getting shorter because IQ correlates with height and a relatively higher reproductive rate on the left side of the bell curve correlates with a decrease in height.
Did the researchers take into account the fathers’ side of the equation? On average, taller men have more children than their shorter counterparts. This pattern among men may well be more robust than the reverse pattern among women. If so, then future generations may actually become genetically taller. However, insofar as inheritance of height is somewhat sex-specific, due to the fact that the Y chromosome contains height-influencing genes, future generations may become more sex-dimorphic with respect to height.
Jonas, that does not explain why people are now becoming genetically shorter than they were before. There is no reason why a male preference for shorer women would have suddenly arisen in the last two centuries. It is possible that the preference was always there but that men were unable to select for it overall. It is also possible that the decline in size has been occuring for many centuries, but that would also require an explanation for why they got tall in the first place and why they keep getting shorter.
In addition, the physical attributes of men could also play an important role why smaller women are generally prefered. There is definitely a reason, why female porn-stars are usually quite short..it makes the man seem more masculine. Men are not always confident about their own physical attributes (recently, there was an article in a grand German newspaper about it..the percentage of man suffering from this is quite high..),this could have macroscopic consequences in consideration of assortative mating.
or it might be short heavy women compete for status in different ways than tall thin women. play games where you have an advantage or less of a disadvantage.
What's the ethnicity effect on this study? Some women could have married Asian, south asian and latin american men and ended up with more children and shorter children.But since the study has been going on since 1848, I would suppose that it does give an indication that shorter women are preferred. Perhaps as society became more industrialized, the advantages of physical size decreased, which made taller women, daughters of taller men on average, lose social prestige because their larger fathers no longer were the most productive members of a society.
I personally think short girls look like they have a more pronounced waist to hip ratio. .7 WHR on 5 ft looks curvier than .7 WHR on 6 ft.
I'm not sure that "respect" is the right word for how we view tall, thin women -- think of the reaction most people have toward "walking coathanger" models. "Respect" suggests that most people would like to live in a world full of such people -- or at least with a lot more than now -- in the way that we respect good Samaritans.
But if you look at who guys actually go ga-ga over, they tend to be average or short, not tall. So unlike fashion models (who guys do not masturbate to), there are very few 5'9" strippers, porn stars, Hollywood actresses, pop singers, etc. Tall women inherently have less feminine charm than petites.
You may be right that elite culture producers respect taller women -- as they also try to play up the butt-kicking, careerist Amazon -- but the masses respect the smaller, more maternal type instead. So, there's no disconnect between what people respect and who succeeds genetically (w.r.t. female height anyway), but rather a disconnect between who gets respect among the masses and the elite culture producers.
In addition to sexual selection effects, we now have better cosmetics, hair dyes, and even plastic surgery to make women look better than they would through genes alone.
The men and women who are most dedicated to status are going to aim for a degree of female thinness which makes fertility less likely.
It's not obvious what's being selected for. Default fatness? A preference for children over status? A generally lower willingness to sacrifice to get status? Difficulty with losing weight?
That humans have continued to evolve is that main point of Greg Cochran & Henry Harpending's "The 10,000 Year Explosion". I highly recommend it.
I hypothesized future sexual dimorphism here.
Our culture respects taller thinner women who wait longer before having kids, but in fact we are evolving short heavy women who have kids earlier. Shades of Idiocracy – in many ways we are evolving to become less of what we now respect.
Isn't this what one might expect - do we not value rarity in most cases. The edges of the curve are always more attractive than the middle - hence the preference for blondes and blue eyes (since these traits are relatively scarce, they represent a premium). So the fact that we respect/value women who delay childbirth and are thinner, may actually be a reflection that they are scarce and becoming scarcer?
That's1948 – "spanning three generations in some families."
These guys are making predictions for a time frame which is more than 3 times longer than the entire duration of their study...? Friends don't let friends extrapolate wildly!
People could also be getting shorter because IQ correlates with height and a relatively higher reproductive rate on the left side of the bell curve correlates with a decrease in height.
Did the researchers take into account the fathers’ side of the equation? On average, taller men have more children than their shorter counterparts. This pattern among men may well be more robust than the reverse pattern among women. If so, then future generations may actually become genetically taller. However, insofar as inheritance of height is somewhat sex-specific, due to the fact that the Y chromosome contains height-influencing genes, future generations may become more sex-dimorphic with respect to height.
Uh yeah, hello.
Women raised on indigenous diets and removed from group television-induced idiocy tended to be more fertile and healthy.
Doesn't that apply to everyone??<del>
Any guy who thinks the runway model 3% body fat look is hot deserves to spill his seed into a barren desert.
Jonas, that does not explain why people are now becoming genetically shorter than they were before. There is no reason why a male preference for shorer women would have suddenly arisen in the last two centuries. It is possible that the preference was always there but that men were unable to select for it overall. It is also possible that the decline in size has been occuring for many centuries, but that would also require an explanation for why they got tall in the first place and why they keep getting shorter.
Wild speculation:
In addition, the physical attributes of men could also play an important role why smaller women are generally prefered. There is definitely a reason, why female porn-stars are usually quite short..it makes the man seem more masculine. Men are not always confident about their own physical attributes (recently, there was an article in a grand German newspaper about it..the percentage of man suffering from this is quite high..),this could have macroscopic consequences in consideration of assortative mating.
or it might be short heavy women compete for status in different ways than tall thin women. play games where you have an advantage or less of a disadvantage.
What's the ethnicity effect on this study? Some women could have married Asian, south asian and latin american men and ended up with more children and shorter children.But since the study has been going on since 1848, I would suppose that it does give an indication that shorter women are preferred. Perhaps as society became more industrialized, the advantages of physical size decreased, which made taller women, daughters of taller men on average, lose social prestige because their larger fathers no longer were the most productive members of a society.
I personally think short girls look like they have a more pronounced waist to hip ratio. .7 WHR on 5 ft looks curvier than .7 WHR on 6 ft.
I'm not sure that "respect" is the right word for how we view tall, thin women -- think of the reaction most people have toward "walking coathanger" models. "Respect" suggests that most people would like to live in a world full of such people -- or at least with a lot more than now -- in the way that we respect good Samaritans.
But if you look at who guys actually go ga-ga over, they tend to be average or short, not tall. So unlike fashion models (who guys do not masturbate to), there are very few 5'9" strippers, porn stars, Hollywood actresses, pop singers, etc. Tall women inherently have less feminine charm than petites.
You may be right that elite culture producers respect taller women -- as they also try to play up the butt-kicking, careerist Amazon -- but the masses respect the smaller, more maternal type instead. So, there's no disconnect between what people respect and who succeeds genetically (w.r.t. female height anyway), but rather a disconnect between who gets respect among the masses and the elite culture producers.
In addition to sexual selection effects, we now have better cosmetics, hair dyes, and even plastic surgery to make women look better than they would through genes alone.
Reading recommendation:
"Natural selection and Social Theory" by the author Robert Trivers
Interesting article from timesonline:
Link - Women are getting more beautiful.
The men and women who are most dedicated to status are going to aim for a degree of female thinness which makes fertility less likely.
It's not obvious what's being selected for. Default fatness? A preference for children over status? A generally lower willingness to sacrifice to get status? Difficulty with losing weight?