This seems like a BS answer to me.
Tall people in all societies have always had an advantage in terms of status in society and therefore wealth and health.
But unless tall people were reproducing at an extraordinary rate relative to small people there just hasn't been enough time elapsed to explain the change on a society wide basis.
English people were small by modern standards at the time of Napoleonic wars as evidenced by e.g. the dimensions of the living areas on board the ships of the time.
OTOH Irish soldiers in the service of various European countries in the 17th and 18th centuries were noted as being tall for the time. They were mainly of rural stock and would have been relatively well nourished in childhood compared to urban reared children. Whereas today Irish people would be of just average height or maybe even lower than average height by European standards.
I suspect that the reason for the Dutch being small then was poverty and that the relative rapid growth in the meantime is due to improved nutrition which has allowed them to grow to their genetic potential.
My new theory is that, Dutch were already selecting for "tall strature" for long time (maybe 10 generations) even when they were on average much shorter than rest of the Europe because of mostly malnutrition.
But why were they aggressively selecting for tall stature? Perhaps because they were on average shorter than rest of Europeans, so they felt there is something wrong with them? Which isn't unbelievable, I've seen shortest girls demand the tallest men.
So when nutrition improved those already tall genes which were there, got time to express themselves to the fullest.
Here is some acecdote:
In my village, people mostly select average height partner. And tall people aren't considered more desirable. No one compared height or thought of it as some advantage but when men from other tribes started appearing near the village, suddenly they started thinking of how to increase their height, some are now drinking gallons of milk in effort to improve their height because they are lagging, while women want the tall men now. My grandma tells me, they never thought about "height" as a trait they select in their partner, they never thought about it. To her, any man who was average and could work on farm (not crippled), was not very ugly was a good partner.
You're conflating natural selection with sexual selection. Overall, the paper argues that taller people have more offspring who survive to reproductive age.
English people were small at the time of the Boer wars too, there were problems finding enough suitable soldiers, the food rationing in WWII actually improved diet for the average worker.
Actually the Boer war brings to mind the fact that the Afrikaaner people of South Africa are noted for being of large stature.
They are primarily of Dutch origin as well but have long been separated from Holland. So the fact that these two societies would share the attribute of being tall suggests to me that Dutch tallness compared to everyone else is genetic in origin
You can still see this phenomenon. People from disadvantaged backgrounds in European cities (for example inner city communities) tend to be smaller than average.
Interesting. But weren't the Dutch well-nourished 200 years ago? They were relatively wealthy...
If the height differences were adjusted for income etc, it would be convincing. I didn't read the OP. Did they do that?
They did compare them to other populations at the time. Unless the Dutch were especially under-nourished, then the effect seems reasonably well-founded.
They took account of differences in income for modern Dutch people but not historically I think. I don't know how poor the average Dutch person was relative to other European countries back then that might explain them being small at that time either. The change since then is so extreme relative to other societies that to account for it with an explanation that is just as applicable to all other European societies just doesn't seem plausible to me. Some sort of health or nutrition explanation peculiar to Holland and perhaps to do with childhood intervention (e.g. effectiveness of vaccination programmes, childhood or pregnant mother care, smoking rates etc) seems more likely.
Most people are fixated on nutrition to make people taller but nutrition can only do so much.
Imagine if you've a goal to increase height of people from 165 to 190cm with minimum number of generations. How will you go about it.
Easiest and fastest way is to have two tall parents breed. You'll see it happen within 2 generation.
Now, if you improve nutrition of people who are 165cm today. How many generations of better nutrition does it require to make them reach 190cm? Certainly more than 2 generations.
Point is that, if you think "sexual selection" is not fast enough to take people from 165 to 190 within few generations (as is the case with Dutch) then better nutrition certainly is not either.
Cattle breeders don't allow inferior males to breed at all and typically a single bull can have thousands of progeny via artificial insemination. That doesn't happen in human societies where most males will have a chance to breed.
Also the time-spans are far longer for humans than cattle where the next generation is ready for breeding two years after birth.
> That doesn't happen in human societies where most males will have a chance to breed.
We can get a precise idea about this since it shows up in the genetic record and over the long term it's under half. A lot more men than you think are cuckolds.
If anything what 23andme etc have demonstrated is overall how faithful women have been because the surprises are very much in the minority. i think we can agree that Danish sperm export
has played little or no role in the growth of Dutch people since 1850.
let me get this straight, so in order to make the increase from 165 to 190cm in a few generations, both parents have to already be tall? Because 165 is not tall and that already fucks up your premise
Yea, but if we've average 165, there will be some taller than 165 and some shorter than 165. We might as well have someone 190, we can use them to breed tall population.
And but how do you achieve that just using nutrition?
Effect of nutrition on height is overstated. Unless someone is malnutritioned, their height won't benefit much with better nutrition
We can even see this in cattles, if you start with a short cattle, no matter how much you feed it for generations, they'll still he shorter than one you can get from tall breed.
I suppose my main issue is that I just don't think the passage of time since the mid 19th century is long enough to give a natural selection answer for humans. Perhaps it might be more believable if Holland had suffered great loss of male life in WW1/WW2 and smaller men were disproportionately affected leaving tall men to breed widely. But Holland wasn't in WW1 and its loss of life in WW2 was relatively light.
It's been 150 years, roughly 3 generations can fit in that. Also, you are improving average height of population here, so if you simply remove a lot of people with below average height, average benefits a lot.
More like 5 generations but there was no one in charge of this breeding programme. It seems that a lot of Dutch men decided to voluntarily forego sex but to raise the children of women who were breeding with the tall men.
And this phenomenon to have been peculiar to Holland.
Just doesn't seem believable.
It's really not. Speciation is slow (on the order of 50 generations at minimum), but selection is very powerful, and can cause large phenotypic changes in the span of tens of generations instead.
I wonder if the modern genetic composition of Dutch society impacts that statistic. The massive growth in length is something that happened to the indigenous Dutch population, but the effect won't be present in the Dutch who hail from immigrant stock.
Basically, when you are the tallest people in the world, any immigration will tend to shorten the average length.
? I wonder if the modern genetic composition of Dutch society impacts that statistic. The massive growth in length is something that happened to the indigenous Dutch population, but the effect won't be present in the Dutch who hail from immigrant stock.
> Basically, when you are the tallest people in the world, any immigration will tend to shorten the average length.
I know it's popular in Holland to blame the immigration on everything, including destroying the average height, but since a significant part of the population comes from Balkans, those immigrants are actually "improving" the average.
Yes, Turks, Moroccans, and people from Surinam. They came as labourers in the second part of the twentieth century. The medical growth charts used here to chart the progress of children and detect potentially harmful deviations even come in specific variants for children with their genetic heritage.
Perhaps people were trying to make sure their children become taller despite being so short. So they tend to marry the tallest people. This works because of improving nutrition.
Perhaps this preference for height became ingrained culturally in the society. This cultural preference becomes ingrained since it can be reproduced by relative isolation (cultural and/or physical).
According to the article, tall men were favored whereas average sized women were favored. I wonder why tall women weren't favored versus average sized women? I think these preferences are in general populations but were exaggerated here?
It's hard to be malnutritioned.
Can you link why only Dutch were malnutritioned and not other Europeans?
You don't really lose much height through lacking diet. My grandmother was born in poverty and there was famine and drought at her time which killed 3 of her family members, yet she was 6'2 tall.
Lots like Ireland was hit hardest but that resulted in a lot of emigration. Looks like the Dutch were hit pretty hard at least in yield percentage drop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany - "Because of Germany's long history as a non-united region of distinct tribes and states before January 1871, there are many widely varying names of Germany in different languages, perhaps more so than for any other European nation."
I like 'Navajo: Béésh Bich’ahii Bikéyah ("Metal Cap-wearer Land"), in reference to Stahlhelm-wearing German soldiers.'
It mostly happens to "Deutschland", actually: Germany (English), Allemagne (French), Tyskland (Danish), Německo (Czech). Only in the Netherlands (and Flanders) is the name used that they chose for themselves (Duitsland).
This apparently confused the English so much that they called the inhabitants of the Netherlands "Dutch".
It's especially common when the two sides have difficulty communicating: "What do you call yourself?" "Ger man." (Spear man [1]) "... henceforth the lands east of the Rhine shall be known as Germania."
Usually, at least in Europe, if it's not due to linguistic drift or somesuch, it's because the name is just being translated. For example, the French name for the Netherlands, "Pays-Bas", is just a literal translation of "nether lands".
My guess for Germany, which certainly seems the weirdest, is that it's a result of that process happening and the name getting fixed at different times for different languages, combined with the region having a rather complicated political history.
Germany comes from Germania which is Latin. Deutschland is deutsch + land, and deutsch can be traced to proto-germanic origins (common root with Dutch, I believe). So Germany is not actually one of these cases; it's an externally assigned name.
Croatia - Hrvatska is another... BTW people in the Netherlands will say Holland as well... when the Dutch team play soccer, hup Holland (come on/let's go Holland) is a common chant (there are even songs with that name)
I find sexual selection an interesting albeit in popular science literature underrepresented subject. It seems to me that this is the phenomenon that links things like fashion, infatuation and other cultural expressions to our biological evolution, and would explain the relative rapid adaption to various climates that humans obviously have gone though over the last 50 000 years or so, which the traditional evolutionary model (survival of the fittest) will have trouble explaining.
I'm sure this is no secret among professional evolution scientists, but this side of evolution has AFAICS not filtered into the general consciousness, for some reason that I have yet to figure out.
Maybe because it would give women a more important role than we so far have been willing to accept? Maybe because it would give animals an intuition and intelligence that we traditionally have denied them?
>Maybe because it would give women a more important role than we so far have been willing to accept?
I'm not so sure this isn't broadly accepted. As far as I understand it everyone knows why the peacock has ridiculous (or beautiful, depending on your sensibilities) feathers, or why male birds are beautiful, while female birds are plain.
Reminds me of the article I read recently about Pharos of Egypt where royal males were consistently taller than average men and royal females were shorter than average female of the time.
I wonder how can tall gene flow in a way that they are only expressed in a specific gender but not other?
Even if average height is quite high. There will still be people on both sides of the bell curve much taller and much shorter than average people exists.
So basically, it will look like as it looks anywhere else. Pretty sure there are 6'3 Dutchmen who feel short in Netherlands.
What's it with the obsession with tallness? 300 years ago the Prussian kings were already fans of "the long guys". Outside of basketball, what's the point?
I think tall people get more automatic respect. In a room where people don't know each other that well and are trying to figure out status/hierarchy, tall people are automatically advantaged.
That said, shorter people can cultivate presence and earn respect through competence, people-skills and the like. There are many leaders in history and today who are shorter than average who can command a room. But they've mostly had to earn respect the hard way. They start off with negative points and have to work hard to even get to zero. Tall people start off with positive points is all.
It would make sense when battles were largely decided through melee combat -- tall swordfighters are obnoxious solo; a whole line of them is a devastating prospect. After the advent of the longbow, and then guns... not really sure what the appeal is.
OTOH... sexual selection isn't all about combat; it's really quite comforting to be the smol spoon.
Mongols had no problem going Europe and dominating much taller tribes.
Yes, it could be why Scandinavian are taller but East Europeans are not, maybe Scandinavian never faced enemies like Mongols? So in Scandinavia always solo fight (sword/axe) gave advantage to tall men while in East, archers were already able to kill taller men with ease so there was no advantage of being tall.
I think it's more of a Northern European / Anglo thing. It's not that important in Med countries and Latin America. It's well regarded, sure, but it's not an obsession like in the USA.
Thinking about it more. I think tall men are not necessarily more successful at warfare or sea faring where people of short stature might have more advantage due to needing less food.
For example, Mongol archers could definitely kill enemies no matter how tall they were. So there was no advantage of being tall once better weapons were available.
Selection for tallness could have happened because of peace time.
>Selection for tallness could have happened because of peace time.
This is an important observation and should be explored more deeply. When there is more equality for gender/class, and more economic security, people, viz. women, are freed to choose mates on other factors, such as attraction
It's just an interesting contradiction to me, and I also find it interesting how upset some people seem to get when I point it out. Yet it's unarguable: all else being equal everybody (without issues) should celebrate their friend, relative etc. being with an obviously good catch. And nobody (without issues) intentionally picks the inferior partner, beauty being in the eye of the beholder arguments notwithstanding.
> programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. [0]
Eugenics refers to an organized and systematic (top-down) approach to manipulating the genetics if a population. Obviously this is not good.
Competition and dating are good, I don't think anyone is arguing with that.
Confusing the two is like confusing capitalism and communism. Both systems affect the economy but in very different ways for very different reasons.
Eugenics was government policy of only letting people with favourable traits procreate. So essential preference is passed from the government (top) to people (bottom)
While in dating market, people select partner which ends up changing the population
But why were they aggressively selecting for tall stature? Perhaps because they were on average shorter than rest of Europeans, so they felt there is something wrong with them? Which isn't unbelievable, I've seen shortest girls demand the tallest men.
So when nutrition improved those already tall genes which were there, got time to express themselves to the fullest.
Here is some acecdote:
In my village, people mostly select average height partner. And tall people aren't considered more desirable. No one compared height or thought of it as some advantage but when men from other tribes started appearing near the village, suddenly they started thinking of how to increase their height, some are now drinking gallons of milk in effort to improve their height because they are lagging, while women want the tall men now. My grandma tells me, they never thought about "height" as a trait they select in their partner, they never thought about it. To her, any man who was average and could work on farm (not crippled), was not very ugly was a good partner.
Three sons - 6', 6'3" and 6'4"
If the height differences were adjusted for income etc, it would be convincing. I didn't read the OP. Did they do that?
They did compare them to other populations at the time. Unless the Dutch were especially under-nourished, then the effect seems reasonably well-founded.
Imagine if you've a goal to increase height of people from 165 to 190cm with minimum number of generations. How will you go about it.
Easiest and fastest way is to have two tall parents breed. You'll see it happen within 2 generation.
Now, if you improve nutrition of people who are 165cm today. How many generations of better nutrition does it require to make them reach 190cm? Certainly more than 2 generations.
Point is that, if you think "sexual selection" is not fast enough to take people from 165 to 190 within few generations (as is the case with Dutch) then better nutrition certainly is not either.
Cattle/pet breeder do it all time.
We can get a precise idea about this since it shows up in the genetic record and over the long term it's under half. A lot more men than you think are cuckolds.
How do you know most males get chance to breed in our society?
Just because a lot of men end up married and have kids to show doesn't mean they are their biological kids.
These days I see single moms are marrying guys who simply take care of the kids they already had.
Meanwhile Denmark sperm export is doing good.
These days many people are getting suprize on 23andme when they come to know about their lost connections.
And but how do you achieve that just using nutrition?
Effect of nutrition on height is overstated. Unless someone is malnutritioned, their height won't benefit much with better nutrition
We can even see this in cattles, if you start with a short cattle, no matter how much you feed it for generations, they'll still he shorter than one you can get from tall breed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0611-6
(Yes, I am aware…)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...
Basically, when you are the tallest people in the world, any immigration will tend to shorten the average length.
> Basically, when you are the tallest people in the world, any immigration will tend to shorten the average length.
I know it's popular in Holland to blame the immigration on everything, including destroying the average height, but since a significant part of the population comes from Balkans, those immigrants are actually "improving" the average.
Aren't Turks the biggest immigrant group?
> "Finally, it is important to emphasize again that our effect sizes are very small"
It doesn't provide a motivation for why this phenomenon only happened in the Netherlands, and not it's neighbors Belgium, Germany or Scandinavia.
Those would be much more similar in Social equality, and to some extent even dairy consumption.
Edit: I've corrected Holland, to read Netherlands. Apologies for the misnaming.
Dutch were really short because of malnutrition.
Perhaps people were trying to make sure their children become taller despite being so short. So they tend to marry the tallest people. This works because of improving nutrition.
Perhaps this preference for height became ingrained culturally in the society. This cultural preference becomes ingrained since it can be reproduced by relative isolation (cultural and/or physical).
According to the article, tall men were favored whereas average sized women were favored. I wonder why tall women weren't favored versus average sized women? I think these preferences are in general populations but were exaggerated here?
It's hard to be malnutritioned. Can you link why only Dutch were malnutritioned and not other Europeans?
You don't really lose much height through lacking diet. My grandmother was born in poverty and there was famine and drought at her time which killed 3 of her family members, yet she was 6'2 tall.
The dataset focuses on the north-east of the Netherlands (specifically the three provinces of Drenthe, Fryslân, and Groningen). So no, not Holland.
The Netherlands. "Holland" is the name of one Province in the Netherlands.
Edit: I stand corrected. Actually two provinces.
Example: Q: What you call your country? A: Deutschland Q: Ok, then we'll call it Germany
???
I like 'Navajo: Béésh Bich’ahii Bikéyah ("Metal Cap-wearer Land"), in reference to Stahlhelm-wearing German soldiers.'
This apparently confused the English so much that they called the inhabitants of the Netherlands "Dutch".
It's especially common when the two sides have difficulty communicating: "What do you call yourself?" "Ger man." (Spear man [1]) "... henceforth the lands east of the Rhine shall be known as Germania."
[1] This is only one possible etymology.
My guess for Germany, which certainly seems the weirdest, is that it's a result of that process happening and the name getting fixed at different times for different languages, combined with the region having a rather complicated political history.
They were already tall no? Were they ever shortest in Europe?
I'm sure this is no secret among professional evolution scientists, but this side of evolution has AFAICS not filtered into the general consciousness, for some reason that I have yet to figure out.
Maybe because it would give women a more important role than we so far have been willing to accept? Maybe because it would give animals an intuition and intelligence that we traditionally have denied them?
I'm not so sure this isn't broadly accepted. As far as I understand it everyone knows why the peacock has ridiculous (or beautiful, depending on your sensibilities) feathers, or why male birds are beautiful, while female birds are plain.
I wonder how can tall gene flow in a way that they are only expressed in a specific gender but not other?
So basically, it will look like as it looks anywhere else. Pretty sure there are 6'3 Dutchmen who feel short in Netherlands.
That said, shorter people can cultivate presence and earn respect through competence, people-skills and the like. There are many leaders in history and today who are shorter than average who can command a room. But they've mostly had to earn respect the hard way. They start off with negative points and have to work hard to even get to zero. Tall people start off with positive points is all.
Examples from ALL species of vertebrates and invertebrates can be shown where "Bigger = Better".
In nearly every case it fits one of two criteria: Sexual selection and Territory Defense.
Nearly every species will attempt to make itself appear larger to attract a mate, or scare off a threat.
OTOH... sexual selection isn't all about combat; it's really quite comforting to be the smol spoon.
Yes, it could be why Scandinavian are taller but East Europeans are not, maybe Scandinavian never faced enemies like Mongols? So in Scandinavia always solo fight (sword/axe) gave advantage to tall men while in East, archers were already able to kill taller men with ease so there was no advantage of being tall.
I wouldn't want to be taller than my current 200cm though.
And why they didn't have more kids before the time when they were shortest?
What could drive tall people having more kids in last 150 year when they went from shortest to tallest?
Did anything big happen in last 150 year?
For example, Mongol archers could definitely kill enemies no matter how tall they were. So there was no advantage of being tall once better weapons were available.
Selection for tallness could have happened because of peace time.
This is an important observation and should be explored more deeply. When there is more equality for gender/class, and more economic security, people, viz. women, are freed to choose mates on other factors, such as attraction
> programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. [0]
Eugenics refers to an organized and systematic (top-down) approach to manipulating the genetics if a population. Obviously this is not good.
Competition and dating are good, I don't think anyone is arguing with that.
Confusing the two is like confusing capitalism and communism. Both systems affect the economy but in very different ways for very different reasons.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
While in dating market, people select partner which ends up changing the population