Category: Height
-
Height differences across Europe could be less effected by selection than we had thought
Like an Old Testament prophet of yore Graham Coop has been prophesying that cryptic population stratification may be a major confounder in analyses for as long as I’ve known him with any degree of familiarity. So it’s no surprise he’s an author on one of two preprints which have rocked the genomics world: Reduced signal…
-
Inter-population difference in European height
A quick mea culpa. Yesterday I put up a post on the difference in height between northern and southern Europe, following the lead of the heading of the paper which I blogged. But, in the text they do note that their sample is skewed toward northern Eur…
-
Why northern Europeans are taller than southern Europeans?
In part, genes. Luke Jostins reported this from a conference last year, so not too surprising. Evidence of widespread selection on standing variation in Europe at height-associated SNPs. Let me jump to the summary: In summary, we have provided an empir…
-
Why aren’t we all tall?
There’s a fair amount of social science and anecdata that tall males are more reproductively fit. More precisely, males one to two standard deviations above the norm in height seem to be at the “sweet spot” as an idealized partner (e….
-
Inbred shorter people
Evidence of Inbreeding Depression on Human Height, a paper with over 1,000 authors! (I exaggerate) It’s interesting because it seems to establish that inbreeding does have a deleterious effect on traits whose genetic architecture is presumably po…
-
How do relatives correlate in traits?
The Pith: Even traits where most of the variation you see around you is controlled by genes still exhibit a lot of variation within families. That’s why there are siblings of very different heights or intellectual aptitudes. In a post below I played fast and loose with the term correlation and caused some confusion. Correlation…
-
How much do siblings differ in height?
In the comments below a reader asks about the empirical difference in heights between siblings. I went looking…and I have to say that the data isn’t that easy to find, people are more interested in the deeper inferences on can make from the resemblances than the descriptive first-order data itself. But here’s one source I…
-
A mediocre man’s great son, a great man’s mediocre son
Kobe Bryant is an exceptional professional basketball player. His father was a “journeyman”. Similarly, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. both surpassed their fathers as baseball players. Both of Archie Manning’s sons are superior quarterbacks in relation to their father. This is not entirely surprising. Though there is a correlation between parent and offspring in…
-
Marry far and breed tall strong sons
The Pith: When it comes to the final outcome of a largely biologically specified trait like human height it looks as if it isn’t just the genes your parents give you that matters. Rather, the relationship of their genes also counts. The more diss…
-
Natural selection for height in Europeans
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…
-
Pygmies are short because nature made them so
Aka Pygmies The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy …
-
Patterns of human height & lifestyle
Steve Hsu, The mystery of height: I was looking at The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society, A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources. The Dutch came to Taiwan (then called Formosa) in the early 17th century and these translated documents record their impressions of the Austronesian natives. (Both the Dutch and Chinese…
-
The future Indian Yao Ming
In a nation of ~1 billion, even one where a large minority are positively malnourished, you’d expect some really tall people. So not that surprising: NBA Awaits Satnam From India, So Big and Athletic at 14: In a country of 1.3 billion people, 7-foot, 250-pound Satnam Singh Bhamar has become a beacon for basketball hope. At…
-
Every variant with an author!
I recall projections in the early 2000s that 25% of the American population would be employed as systems administrators circa 2020 if rates of employment growth at that time were extrapolated. Obviously the projections weren’t taken too seriously, and the pieces were generally making fun of the idea that IT would reduce labor inputs and…