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Did Natural Selection Make the Dutch the Tallest People On the Planet?
sciencehabit writes The Dutch population has gained an impressive 20 centimeters in the past 150 years and is now officially the tallest on the planet. Scientists chalk up most of that increase to rising wealth, a rich diet, and good health care, but a new study suggests something else is going on as well: The Dutch growth spurt may be an example of human evolution in action. The study shows that tall Dutch men on average have more children than their shorter counterparts, and that more of their children survive. That suggests genes that help make people tall are becoming more frequent among the Dutch. "This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn't involved in the work. "It strikes at the core of our understanding of human nature, and how malleable it is."
I'm all for evolution, but I didn't think it functioned on 150-year timescales?
This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection
Obviously. It's surprising that some people think otherwise.
All the short Dutch are below sea level
next they should do a study about how humans are also still subject to the law of gravity, and a study after that about how the laws of thermodynamics still hold sway over us.
I mean, who woulda thought that random mutations would actually make some people more or less likely to reproduce successfully?
As a low lying country Holland is at risk due to rising sea levels. Clearly being tall enough to keep your head above water is an advantage. ;-)
Natural? That depends. If you consider "natural selection" to be solely dependent on reproductive advantage, though, you have to be willing to assume that being tall actually lends a real survival advantage which propagates appropriately.
Considering how removed we are from nature, though, I'd say it's more likely we're simply breeding ourselves taller due to a perception -- almost certainly largely culturally fabricated -- that being tall is more desirable than not being tall.
So is it true that being tall is genetically winning over being short? Obviously. But why that's happening on a basic level, I think, is not something you can so quickly call "natural selection" without carefully considering the differences between the reality of human reproduction and the principles and assumptions underlying our interpretation of the facts of previous and non-human evolution.
....the average height of people in Kansas have remained the same since God put them there 6,000 years ago.
Clearly, evolution in the Dutch population is anticipating a massive collapse of the dikes.
If natural selection is the driving factor in increasing height among the Dutch, wouldn't other races have followed the same selection/mating patterns too? Especially in nearby nations with a similar cultural? Seems like there is some other factors involved...
Tall men have more children than their short peers. But short women have more children than their taller peers. In all modern western societies (not just The Netherlands)
http://www.livescience.com/22179-evolutionary-battle-sexes-height.html
God works in mysterious ways!
But why would this preferentially affect this one country?
Unfortunately evolution is being retarded by the over-abundance of warning signs warning (stupid) people not to do (stupid) things.
Hanging yourself to death from a continuous cloth towel dispenser is evolution at work. Should the genes of such a person really be passed down through the generations? Of course not. Evolution was taking care of that. But now we have warning signs everywhere undoing that good work.
Look, I'm not saying let's kill all of the stupid people. I'm just saying let's take down all of the warning signs and let things work themselves out.
If it ain't Dutch, it ain't much! :-P
a Dutchy (who is a little of 2 meters)
I have met several Dutch people in the US, and while all of them were very nice people, most of them were around average height.
Maybe they're just exporting the ones who don't meet their unstated height requirements?
go back to bed.
Tall men are percieved as more powerful, commanding - look among military commanders and corporate executives for the short guys. No so many. It's a pattern that just exists. Tall guys tend to be strong guys, and they win physical fights even if they have to sit on the opponent. They gain a sense of control and tend to have the advantage in negotiations.
Women - godz help me here - tend to mate up with the winners. Tall men tend to be winners. Tall men tend to have families with more children, even if they have to marry and reproduce with many women serially. They tend to have that ability because they tend to make more money than shorter men. The advantage isn't noticable in everyday life, but the advantage works over centuries to produce a taller people as the short dudes tend to lose out in the carnival. People get taller.
With all the Atlantic water at your front door, the taller you are the less fear of the dyke you have. Darwin is right at least on this.
Much of the Netherlands is below sea level. Objects underwater appear to be about 20% larger.
So will they please now redesign and rebuild their doors and spiral staircases to accommodate people taller than 1.6 meters?
What about the Maasai?
natural selection
Is it natural selection when women prefer taller men? Or is it societal?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
As if height was a sensible health indicator. Actually the only meaningful indicator of "evolution" is life expectancy, and the Dutch are way beyond several other countries with shorter people (Japan and Italy, to name the two most relevant countries above them):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dutch people ale avid milk drinkers and meat eaters. The average height of Dutch people has increased significantly over the past generations since WW-II, coinciding with the increasing availability of dairy products (there's been a surplus, referred to as 'The Milk Puddle' and the 'Butter Mountain') and cheaper meat ('Kilo Crackers' and 'Poof Chickens'). In the 60s and 70s there were elaborate national media campaigns to encourage milk consumption. Milk was even distributed for free by elementary schools in the 70s and early 80s. The use of growth hormone in dairy cattle is forbidden. Yet, it leaves me wondering whether there's a relation between hormones, dairy intake and increased height of Dutch people over the generations.
There are two big drivers on the evolution of sexual species, natural selection and female choice.
The two don't always go in the same direction, and in some cases they can point into opposing paths leading the species into a dead end.
For example Elks compete on antler size, and females prefer large males with big antlers, these are good when it comes to ritual fights with competing males but are a big drawback when it comes to denser wood forests. And most of the time are a large dead weight to carry around.
Peacocks also carry around a big tail for basically the same reasons, and both are examples of adverse selection in which an overall negative trait gets perceived as a positive genetic proxy by females.
Height in humans has a big weight when it comes to female selection, it is considered by large as a positive trait. And we usually tend to defer to taller people, even if that behavior isn't justified on any other social attributes.
The problem with height is that it requires extra consumption of calories and protein to enable growth, besides extra changes in the population hormonal profile to enable accelerated growth. This is all fine on our present food production output, if that changes taller people are at a disadvantage.
Because they're below sea level!
So they can account for us Dutch folks being taller than other cultures through evolutionary forces, but can that account for Dutch Butt too?
... as it is the alleged connection between height and "evolution" or health. The Japanese are quite short, but they are also the longest living people in the world. And to stay in the "caucasian" world, the Italians, French and Spaniards all live longer than the Dutch, and I bet that none of them would ever trade their higher life expectancy for an inch of height:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe the taller ones avoid being suffocated in a dutch oven
In The Netherlands it's usually thought that diet was the most influencing factor behind this effect. Over the last centuries we have had plenty dairy products, no severe food shortages, in contrary, we had a reasonable high availability of varied food. Combined with relative welfare in the golden age. There are probably many other factors too, however, to grow tall you need more food on average, and so it must be available first.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Corollary: Since studies have also shown that people with higher intelligence tend to have fewer children, taller people therefore have lower intelligence than shorter people
There seems to be a cultural preference as well.
Stulp pointed to figures showing that, in the United States, shorter women and men of average height have the most reproductive success.
"There is much variation in what men and women want," he said.
"When it comes to choosing a mate, height tends to have (only) a small effect, which is not very surprising given the many other, more important, traits people value in their mate."
5' to 5'8"?
What I have seen that it is the type of food that had a huge impact in the growth. Especial from the 60ies on, people would eat healthier and thus were able to grow more when they were infants.
Now count back from the sicties and you get to WW2. People born just after WW2 were much, much, much healthier foodwise. They were in their 20 in the 60ies-70ies and that is when people were born became longer.
Natural selection does not happen in 2 generations.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Viking genes.
If the evolution of the Dinos is anything to go by, in 100 million years, the Dutch will be 25 meters tall and Americans will be 25 meters wide...
This isn't "evolution".
Let's put 3 Dutch girls and 4 men in the same house for a month. The guys are an Italian, a Spaniard, a Brazilian and a Dutch. Let's see who is the only one who doesn't get laid...
I assume this means a higher percentage survive. It wouldn't be very interesting to note that a higher overall number of people in a group survive when that group had more people to start with!
Anyway.. if a higher percentage really do survive then I find that much more interesting than the fact that taller men have more children.
I'm not sure I would even call taller men having more children "natural" selection. Modern society and technology means that women have a wider variety of men to chose from. They don't have to chose one of the few unrelated males in their village. They probably live in a big city and even if not travel is relatively easy today. Also.. as for preference. We have TV now to tell us all what to prefer and that it is important. Maybe tall men are what's "cool" on their TV.
I'd call that unatural selection.
However.. if a higher percentage of tall men's children survive.. What's killing the short ones? Do the short genes come with predispositions towards ilness? Does society somehow make being short more dangerous? (ex, difficult to see over obstacles before crossing the road or something) What is going on?!?
How are they gathering the averages for these heights? Are they by race? By just country? The US has a large immigrant population while the Dutch do not. If it's pure averages, then the US has a large influx of short statured immigrants that skew the results. The Hispanics (Mexicans especially) tend to be shorter. In fact in studies, the Mexican men who immigrated to the US tend to measure shorter even than the men still in Mexico. If you average a 5' 4" Mexican man with a 5' 8" to 5' 10" man of European decent, then you don't exactly show anything of value. When did this drop off start for US heights? After WWII, which is exactly when the big influx of immigrants began. Go figure.
Let's put 3 Dutch girls and 4 men in the same house for a month. The guys are an Italian, a Spaniard, a Brazilian, all about 5'10'', and finally a 6'2'' Dutch. Let's see who is the only one who doesn't get laid...
Perhaps this is why Nigel Powers Hates the Dutch. Simply short mans syndrome.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Been there. At 1,79 meters [5' 9"] I stood above most heads on the streets.
Let's put 3 Dutch girls and 4 men in the same house for a month. The guys are an Italian, a Spaniard, a Brazilian, all about 5'10'', and finally a 6'2'' Dutch. They are all "average looking" if compared with males from their respective countries. Let's see who is the only one who doesn't get laid...
Did evolution make people "x" this way because of "y"?
The article is written to engage people of trait y and the inverse of trait y, and since they got thrown to Slashdot they obviously succeeded in engaging people. But it's just that, a random popular science article that actually doesn't tell you anything about evolution or the processes with which natural selection occurs. For anyone that studied game theory (or evolution) they would know that there usually a strive towards an evolutionary stable strategy. Which, in this case, means that height is only going to be increased as long as it's a positive force in terms of survival for the specific group in an landscape of other groups (i.e. dutch people) as soon as that point is reached (people start to fall too much in the shower?) people will stop evolving towards greater heights. With the dutch people though, it's possible that there is some social context there which might explain why the dutch people still are "evolving in action" while most other developed countries are not evolving so heavily towards height.
Evolution is also meaningless without an environment to evolve in. Ascribing all environments as equal is just blatantly incorrect. Therefore any study of population "y" is pointless in the general aspect of things. I see people (men?) making comments about fighting and dominance here. Believe it or not, but the perfect height for combat and fighting is actually about 5ft10' to 6ft2'. Overly tall guys tend to be less agile on the when wrestling, and they also have worse balance when standing since their centre of gravity is usually higher (they run faster though).
But if our environment would promote being tall without any negative consequences then of course, we would still see and live inside of a growth spurt, or as the article claims "evolution in action" but is this really news?
20 cm is 8 "
A similar effect happened in Japan after WWII, taller, because of better, more nutritious food...
So the Dutch women influence their evolution - whoda thunk it?
And this generation of teens will reproduce with anyone looking like a Belieber...
Let that sink in... but not too deep.
I've noticed a fair number of very attractive short women often end up with short men.
It may be that generally speaking people prefer a mate who is similar to them in size -- perhaps there's even some evolutionary biology explanation where small women prefer a smaller mate because it reduces the risk to her of having a large baby that is difficult to birth. Maybe it's some kind of social psychology, a small woman may believe a large man will be unpleasant to mate with because of his bulk or that somehow big men have big penises and would be painful to have sex with.
But whenever I notice it, I find it strange that if male height is some kind of marker for desirability why a very attractive woman who could otherwise gain a taller mate who would come with the all the social and perhaps even physical advantages of height actively choose mates who are not just closer to them in height but below average in height.
We have sentience now. Human science will quickly eclipse any and all forms of random evolution.
It's disconcerting to see people treat evolution as if it's some sort of holy imperative decreed by Gaea.
In their warrior-ruled society they grew steadily larger on an essentially fixed island diet. The longest arms with the biggest club ruled. The recent king of Tonga was ~6'4". But also, in WW1 a doctor noticed the marked height difference in Aussies and Brits, both from the same region of Britain 50 years before. The Aussies' diet was the factor there.
Not at all surprised by this. Men who are less than 6 feet tall are barely even men, and women would never be with them unless all the tall men are taken and they can't do any better.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
maybe something about modern technology, medicine, government and religion all somehow interfere and render evolution no longer applicable?
That just changes the evolutionary pressures. It does not eliminate them altogether.
Did evolution make people "x" this way because of "y"?
The article is written to engage people of trait y and the inverse of trait y, and since they got thrown to Slashdot they obviously succeeded in engaging people. But it's just that, a random popular science article that actually doesn't tell you anything about evolution or the processes with which natural selection occurs. For anyone that studied game theory (or evolution) they would know that there usually a strive towards an evolutionary stable strategy. Which, in this case, means that height is only going to be increased as long as it's of a positive force in terms of survival for the entire group (i.e. dutch people) as soon as that point is reached (people start to fall to much in the shower?) people will stop evolving towards greater heights. With the dutch people though, it's possible that there is some social context to this which might explain why the dutch are still evolving today.
Evolution is also meaningless without an environment to evolve in, and ascribing all environments as equal is just blatantly incorrect. Therefore any study of population y is pointless in the general aspect of things. I see people (men?) making comments about fighting and dominance here. Believe it or not, but the perfect height for combat and fighting is actually about 5ft10' to 6ft2'. Overly tall guys tend to be less agile on the ground and also have worse balance when standing up since their centre of gravity is usually higher (they run faster though).
But if our environment would promote being tall without any negative consequences then of course, we would still see and live inside of a growth spurt, or as the article claims "evolution in action" but is this really news? The article itself said it has been happening the last 150 years.
Whether you believe in Adam and Eve or Mitochondrial Eve you believe that everyone on the planet is ultimately descended from a single pair of humans.
There are a few Bible believers that think God has taken a hand in human development since then (curse of Ham and the black race - a rather racist and vile view, probably others I've not heard of). But almost every religious and all Darwinists believe in variation within kind, and despite quite a bit of variation all living humans are of the same species.
There is certainly a mix of natural and non-natural evolution within the process of human evolution. For example, being selected for soldier duty based on observable characteristics. Being selected for death because you were Jewish and living in Nazi Germany are just 2 clear examples of artificial selection pressure.
Being considered a more desirable mate because you are tall, short, etc. clear falls in the natural selection category.
It is clear a mix of selection styles in the human population.
We also have environmental factors that affect height. Nutrition and health care are simply the most obvious factors. Given the short timescales for the amount of change and the fact that we also see similar changes in other countries as they have modernized we can be quite comfortable in assigning most of the modern change to environmental factor.
We also have plenty of examples of isolation populations of humans being considerably taller or shorter than average. So clearly genetics may also make a considerable difference. As populations interbreed, genetic differences become a more minor component in human variation.
Though the details may be of interest, the broad strokes of this question were already well-known and accepted by almost every person with a modern education.
> The Dutch population has gained an impressive 20 centimeters in the past 150 years and is now officially the tallest on the planet.
The watutsi giant negro easily dwarf them or at least dwarfed them, until they have been exterminated in the 1994 genocide vs. the bahutu tribe in Rwuanda.
On the other hand, being the tallest does not mean anything positive. The dutch people are infamous cowards, in both World War they fled before the germans like rabbits from a dog. In the 1990's ex-Yugoslavia civil war the dutch military UN troops sold Srebrenica city and its populace to the serbian militants to save their own rawhide. It is almost impossible to imagine that some 300 years ago the dutch war fleet were the naval superpower England was mighty afraid of...
On the other hand, the little mongoloid people of central asia are dreaded warriors, from the mongol-tartars to the mountaneous gurkha.
In the north west of Germany (Oldenburg etc.) 150 km (93 miles) away from the Netherlands. People are also taller than for example in the south of Germany. From personal experience, I would determine the difference to be around 10 cm (4 inches).
I'm a Dutchman. I've been on on-line dating sites and length is definitely high on the list of desirable features Dutch women are looking for. It is explicitly stated. I'm 4 inch/10 cm shorter than the Dutch average for young people, and may length has definitely been a disadvantage.
When I'm abroad (say southern France), I feel TALL.
Is this desire for tall men just Dutch or is it a general thing?
Bert
Apart from being tall, being able to play guitar is also looked for. At least that is something one could do something about.
Hot women want tall men. That is where the selection is coming from.
I guess for examples of natural selection I always think of the weaker, sicker, or less well adapted who are unable to survive as well, so they get removed from the gene pool before passing their genes on.
Saying tall men have more kids doesn't feel like natural selection. I think it would be more like socioeconomic selection. Tall men make more money and so can have more kids and they get better healthcare.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
If you set a goal of what you expect from the offspring and then choose the parents accordingly, you are doing selective breeding.
The goal does not have to be intentional or explicit. Artificial selection can occur simply because the environment is controlled but no attempt is made to influence the outcome beyond the environmental constraints. Humans have controlled the environment for ourselves but we (generally) have not set a specific selection outcome. It's some times called controlled natural selection because it kind of shares traits of both natural and artificial selection. Selective breeding does not require a goal to occur.
That's not natural selection, it's mate choice: women often prefer taller men, so unless there are other forces at work, tallness is selected for. Many aspects of human male bodies are likely selected for that way.
Another example of this is the size of the human penis, which is quite large compared to the human body; it's much smaller, say, in gorillas. The biological explanation is that gorilla males forcibly select their females, so mate choice doesn't have an impact, while in human populations, females generally select male mates and prefer generally more visible male sexual characteristics (up to a point).
It's sexual selection. That's different.
I felt tiny and I'm 6'2" (1.8m). I also felt claustrophobic as even in the countryside you could only see as far as the nearest hedge, it really is very flat. I guess without hills every inch counts to making your field of vision larger (find more mates) and to being found by potential mates.
As the land sinks, they have to become taller to see over the dykes - both kinds...
This is most likely sexual selection, as others have said.
The interesting part is that it's most likely a distinct LACK of natural selection that is allowing this sort of runaway sexual selection to take over. We're seeing the same thing with breast sizes.
If anything it's a bad thing. I'm 6' 3", in my late 30s despite looking more like my early 30s, but my joints, mostly my hips and knees, feel like they're in their late 40s. It's not fun.
If I were much below average height, and if I had been born in a community where the average height had increased to over six feet, I would leave.
I would leave for a number of reasons. One is lessened economic opportunity, another is the now and again intimidation factor, and lastly the reduced access to females due to the females being taller.
It is not true that women prefer the taller men in group. Other factors are much more important to women than height, and those other factors are always present. However, there is a caveat. Very few women will mate with a man that is shorter than herself, with the exception of significant wealth or power. I dare say that most young women would rather go without sex than settle for a short guy.
So I'm wondering if part of the accelerated natural selection process that seems to be happening in the NL is due to the short-genes guys having left for greener pastures.
This article, and many of the comments, demonstrate a gross misunderstanding of Natural Selection. What's being observed is a distinctly different mechanism called Cultural Selection, unique to humans. It's basic Anthropology 101, outlined by Marx and many others since - Cultural Materialism, et al.
Pot makes you high.
It doesn't hurt that Dutch chicks are the hottest on the planet.
Go check the Masai in Kenya. We can see cows coming from miles away ;-)
Do modern humans really breed fast enough for natural selection to have any effect? With most breeding pairs producing less than 2 offspring, and 20++ years between generations, and competition for resources being so much lower than the availability of resources, is natural selection really influencing the results?
I have a hard time imagining that natural selection is a driving force when hardly anyone gets selected out.
2 of which are Netherlander Males.
The other 2 non-Netherlander Females.
Im wondering HOW they convinced the other 2 females.... hmmmm....
with the 99% of women out there on dating sites that list wanting a 6" or taller man....cause that would be just crazy talk. ...seen women post it as a "requirement" when they are barely pushing 5'2. Seems to be ingrained in women like mens hip to waist ratio for women does.
Like all the other examples of evolution in action that are frequently cited (the famous finches, moths, etc), these "evolutionary changes" have not lead to a new species and they gradually reverse when appropriate. In other words: these are minor reversible adaptations (and the reversal is not just another random mutation) which reverse when the environment changes, or the individuals move to a different environment, and several generations of reproduction occur.
Human evolution may, or many not, be true (pick your side and fight it out if that tickles you) but THIS is NOT "evidence of human evolution", it's just a temporary reversible adaptation.
Just how unlikely are the myriad of teensy-tiny genetic mutations that must all occur and all line-up to get a particular change so macro that it's obvious to the naked eye? ...... and then just how insanely unlikely is it that, by pure random mutation, the right mutations would all occur to back-out the initial evolutionary step? Remember: Darwinian evolution is completely un-guided and goal-less (the genetic changes are purely random mutations, which are then re-enforced, or eliminated, by survival and reproduction - the mutations MUST be encountered by random mutation BEFORE survival and reproduction play any role in the game)
The answer always given: "yeah, but it's millions of tiny mutations accumulating over time" is exactly equivalent to the famous old cartoon with the guy in front of an black board with equations, and "then a miracle occurs" in the middle. If you have not observed or documented proof of those intermediate steps, you might as well simply say the flying spaghetti monster intervened with his noodley appendage. I'm sorry but "Lots of stuff had to happen just right over hundreds of thousands of years, and since we are all here, that's proof it happened" is absolutely as unsupportable as "invisible guy in the sky waved a wand, and since we are all here that's clearly what happened!"
Highest? Come on! 300 comments nearly, and not a single good "the Dutch are the highest" joke?
It's not the Russians? There's a very tall tribe of Africans i'd heard of too...
My degrees are in mathematics and biochemistry...
Evolution is 'a' force; it is not 'the' force.
Probably the Brazilian.