It is known that Northern Europeans tend to be somewhat taller than Southern Europeans. This seems intuitively obvious if you spend a bit of time around representative populations. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I’ve always been on the short side at 5 feet 8 inches, but when I was in Italy for 3 weeks one year back (between Milan and Rome, with disproportionate time spent in the Piedmont) I didn’t feel as small (I recall feeling similarly when I was in Cajun country in the early 2000s). Steve Hsu alerts me to the fact that Luke Jostins is back blogging at Genetic Inference, reporting from the Biology of Genomes meeting. Apparently Michael Turchin has found that:
1) Alleles known to be associated with greater height are found at higher frequencies in Northern Europeans
2) Alleles known to be associated with greater height also exhibit signatures of natural selection
He used the GIANT consortium data set. How big is it? 129 thousand individuals! Luke adds:
This is a textbook example of how an evolutionary study should be done; you show a phenotypic difference exists, that it is heritable, and that it is under selection. This opens the …