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."

Comments

still ?

[itzly]

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.

Re:still ?

[gstoddart]

Evolution is always applicable.

So if you have a population of short, fat, uneducated people breeding like rabbits ... your population is going to skew to that.

If you have a population of tall, thin, athletic, smart and healthy people breeding, that's what you're going to be getting as well.

Any time a population selects based on a set of criteria, evolution happens and the traits selected become prominent.

Honestly, walk around a mall and look at who is pushing baby carriages. That is who is providing the inputs for evolution.

Evolution is pretty much a constant process. Whether or not it's choosing the "best" of the species or not depends on the population ... and birth rates by demographic for the last few decades suggests that it isn't the educated or wealthy who are producing offspring.

Saying that evolution might no longer be applicable is failing to understand what it is in the big picture in terms of evolution. It skews towards survival of the fittest. But modern society could be skewing it to "survival of the ones who fail to avoid having children".

Many many people simply self select out of the next iteration of evolution and choose not to have kids.

Re:still ?

[itzly]

What has changed is the fitness function. Some time ago, resistance to diseases would have been a very good trait. Now, we can treat most diseases with antibiotics, so it's not longer a big deal to have natural resistance. On the other hand, qualities like "forgetting to take the pill and get pregnant", or "I don't give a fuck what my parents think, I want his babies" are more successful now. A lot of people only look at the old fitness, and ignore the new one.

Re: Selection, yes.

[iamhassi]

Doesn't natural selection also include perception? Aren't there some species that choose mates based on colorful feathers or sounds, and those with the most colorful feathers or most desirable sounds tend to produce offspring more? So how is choosing a mate based on height any different?

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the US. It took less time to bread out intelligence.

The irony in this is absolutely priceless :-D

Re:Evolution

[some old guy]

+5 Insightful

Re:Taller men get more girls the world over

[Dr. Spork]

I doubt that this is right. It's just a misconception to say that in a first-world society, fertility is pretty much the same thing as attractiveness. It's not. In fact, the people who are broadly judged to be most desirable - the people with Ph.D's, sixpack abs and fancy jobs - have fewer children that the average. A much stronger driver of first-world fertility in a place like NL is: Who's sloppy with their birth control, who's impulsive enough to think things like "Yeah, I should just have the baby!", who's someone that thinks that having a child is going to fix the problems in their relationship, etc.

For these fertility increasers to be correlated with height is just weird and hard to explain, but it's obviously real, so there much be some mechanism. But that mechanism is not as simple as "Taller men get more girls".

Re:Evolution

[Half-pint HAL]

Notice that Netherlanders from outside Holland and North Holland aren't as tall as Hollanders... and these other states are above sea level. QED.